In the summertime people fish rivers and streams that are less polluted now that industrial society had collapsed. But no longer is fishing a partially recreational pursuit but rather an absolute necessity. Nor can individuals obtain new books with which to distract themselves; old ones have to do. Likewise, "diversions like television or recreational shopping" are no longer available. As is often the case when societies collapse, Robert is now freer to pursue his hobbies, and he has created a woodworking workshop on his front porch and has greatly improved his musical skills with daily practice of the fiddle. Moreover, Union Grove survivors are forced to live physically active lives which involved intense gardening and walking. Theirs is not a world of couch potatoes and the sedentarily obese.

Early on in the novel Kunstler sets up a dichotomy between a large group of newcomers of a religious sect, the New Faith group, and the mostly non-religious residents of Union Grove. Eccentric, austere, and proselytizing, the New Faithers at first appear to be adversarial newcomers but over time prove to be invaluable allies of the community. In the absence of an official justice system, the values and survival skills of the group are useful to Robert, who eventually becomes mayor, in containing the barbaric lawlessness and sadistic violence of a local pot dealer who could only be described as a quasi-Hells Angels, trailer trash outlaw.

At one point Robert and a half-dozen other Union Grove residents journey by horseback to Albany to retrieve a boat and crew who had disappeared after sailing down the Hudson from their village. There, they discover incomprehensible corruption and violence so egregious that shots are exchanged, and Robert is forced defend his life by shooting someone who had fired at him. Hardly the utopia hailed by some proponents of ecovillage living, Kunstler's post-petroleum world is volatile and often savage. It clearly behooves anyone who wishes to protect herself and loved ones to own and sometimes carry a weapon.

While Union Grove is a village in which people still know how to party, make music, and dance long after the world around them has collapsed, and although they are incredibly resourceful in distilling mood-altering beverages and cooking up scrumptious, festive dishes, one cannot read Kunstler's exquisite description of them without feeling the gray pallor of sorrow that pervades their community. More than once while riveted to the saga I could not put down, my throat constricted, and my eyes moistened.

Not infrequently in and around Union Grove, insanity and suicide prevail. "Depression" was a word the residents of Union Grove had dropped, according to Robert, because "despair was a spiritual condition that was as real to us as the practical difficulties we struggled with in everyday life." (17) And on another occasion he states, "I tried to avoid nostalgia because it could destroy you. I was alone now."

In terms of an immediate family, Robert was alone, but in ways that were both poignant and lovely, he was held in a community of survivors and friends who assisted each other with dogged loyalty and a quality of compassion that neither cynicism nor despondency could erode. The spirit of cooperation demonstrated by the Union Grove survivors was stunning-so much so that the reader must acknowledge it as one of the most desirable byproducts of collapse.

I didn't need to begin the first chapter of World Made By Hand to be moved to tears. That began when I opened the book to a quote by my favorite poet, Rilke, immediately following the dedication:

        Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,

        Your path struggles on through incomprehensible

        Mankind. All the more futile perhaps

        For keeping its own direction,

        Keeping on toward the future,

        Toward what has been lost.

Every time that I have allowed myself to deeply and graphically imagine, without restraint or rationalization, a post-collapse world, I experience a bone-marrow sorrow and a palpable sense of loss that defy words. Jim Kunstler has captured those emotions masterfully in World Made By Hand. In fact, this novel provides extraordinary reinforcement for an ongoing theme to which I've devoted a great deal of writing in the past year, namely, how can we possibly expect to prepare ourselves to live in a post-petroleum, post-collapse world by attending only to the stockpiling of food, water, land, and skills without emotional and spiritual preparation? How can we not acquire the tools necessary for navigating the emotions of sorrow, despair, overwhelm, grief, rage, terror, and yes, clinical as it may sound, depression? What will give us meaning? What will console us? What will allow us to keep going when any sense of purpose has eluded us? And perhaps most importantly, how will we communicate with each other? How will we skillfully and compassionately speak our truth and listen deeply to each other? What specific skills in these areas do we need to learn and practice right now? Personally, I find it difficult to believe that the residents of Union Grove, or any other post-collapse community, could function as harmoniously as they do in the novel without transforming the interpersonal land mines all of us have incorporated from living in the soul-murdering milieu of industrial civilization.

These questions are not addressed in World Made By Hand or any of the few fiction and non-fiction works so far published on collapse, each one of them underscoring the urgency of my own forthcoming book The Spirituality Of Collapse: Restoring Life On A Dying Planet. So I thank Jim Kunstler for his extraordinary novel, not only because he is bolstering my commitment to my own work, but because he has provided us with an incredibly well-written depiction of the demise of civilization and what that has already begun to mean and will mean for all of us and for future generations. At the same time, World Made By Hand offers a desperately needed dose of reality and an exhilarating reverence for the kind of world that human beings were meant to create and cherish. After all, light follows darkness.

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