JIM KUNSTLER MIGHT BE the loudest and grouchiest person to talk about peak oil and social chaos, but he certainly isn't the first. Today, end-of-oil mania is a cottage industry, including the 2005 book by Matthew Simmons and another, The Empty Tank, by Jeremy Leggett, plus two 2004 books—The End of Oil, by environmental writer Paul Roberts, and Powerdown, by Richard Heinberg. There's also the influential 2003 opus Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage, by Princeton geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, who examines the peak-oil theories first floated by visionary Shell geologist M. King Hubbert in 1956.

There are Web sites and blogs devoted to the topic (EnergyBulletin.net, TheOilDrum.com, LifeAfterTheOilCrash.net, DieOff.org) and full-page oil-company ads in the nation's dailies touting a bountiful future filled with their post-oil alternatives. There are concerns raised by President Bush himself, who touched on the nation's oil addiction in his 2006 State of the Union address and traveled the nation this winter to promote fossil-fuel alternatives.

Against all that background noise, Kunstler has emerged as a leading voice—and a very unlikely one at that. He's not an oilman or a geology expert. He's not an economist, sociologist, architect, or even an urban planner.

America's love of magical fixes makes Kunstler's skin crawl. "I call it the Jiminy Cricket syndrome," he says. "It's the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams can come true. It's delusional."

He's a New York City–born former Rolling Stone writer, longtime journalist, and thrice-divorced autodidact who graduated from the State University of New York at Brockport with a major in theater. After an early career spent largely as a newspaper reporter, he became a full-time writer in 1975 and has since produced nine novels and four works of nonfiction.

He's also been harping on his doom theme, in one way or another, since 1994, when he published The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. It was his first assault on suburban living, and while it wasn't a bestseller, it became something of a cult hit in college architecture and urban-planning departments. It also made him a guru of the burgeoning New Urbanism movement, with its emphasis on well-planned "walkable" communities where jobs, stores, schools, and other basic necessities are a bike ride or short jaunt away. Kunstler followed up with two other similarly themed takes—Home from Nowhere and The City in Mind.

By 2001 he also had his own Web site, Kunstler.com, where you can read everything from his movie and book reviews to a hysterically funny section called Clusterfuck Nation (clusterfuck being his word for the ugly amalgamations of modern life, chief among them the "chain stores, franchise fry-pits, muffler shops," and other "nauseating furnishings" of the suburban landscape).

Through it all, Kunstler has been an equal-opportunity assailer of the left and right. He's a registered Democrat but a highly aggrieved one. He received a flurry of hate mail after he took a jab last summer at lefty comic actor Harry Shearer (of This Is Spinal Tap and NPR's Le Show) for his anti–Iraq war positions. "Has Harry Shearer seen any of his children join the army and go to Iraq to preserve his entitlement to drive all over Los Angeles in a spiffy car?" he asked on his Web site.

Last May, in the online magazine Salon.com, Kunstler also lit into green-energy sage Amory Lovins, of the Snowmass, Colorado–based Rocky Mountain Institute, after Lovins published a study about how practical alternatives can help us win "the oil endgame." Among other things, Kunstler trashed one of Lovins's projects—a 100-mile-per-gallon alternative-fuel car—as a "stupid distraction" from our problems. ("Serious students of this subject," Lovins countered on Salon, "may be forgiven for preferring our well-documented analysis to his qualitative contentions.")

The upside of Kunstler's anger is that he's getting people to sit up and take notice. "You could write about this in a very academic way, but then nobody would listen," says David Ehrenfeld, the founding editor of Conservation Biology and a professor in the Rutgers University Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources. "If there's a problem with Kunstler," Ehrenfeld adds, "it's that his breezy style belies the fact that there's a very solid underpinning to his book and his ideas. But it's a successful style."

It's an odd style, too. Kunstler doesn't offer many solutions or think that anything will ultimately save us. He believes his mission is to sound the alarm bells, period: America's love of magical fixes makes his skin crawl. "I call it the Jiminy Cricket syndrome," he says. "It's the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams can come true. It's delusional."

And yet the buzz about him and the speaking offers just won't quit. Since the Lovins spat and the publication of The Long Emergency, there have been interviews on the BBC and NPR, appearances at tech-investor conferences and peak-oil gatherings, and speaking offers from universities nationwide.

In the December 2005 issue of Fortune, billionaire investor Richard Rainwater professed to being a fan and said he handed out copies of The Long Emergency in bulk to friends and colleagues. Rainwater told Fortune that Kunstler's predictions probably weren't totally right, but he was worried they weren't totally wrong, either.

Even Google execs invited Kunstler to lecture last year at their Silicon Valley company headquarters, which Kunstler likens to a giant kindergarten. "They have these great snack stations deployed at 30-foot intervals so you can never be without a pineapple or malted milk ball," he says. Worse, no one wanted to believe his prophecies. "One Googler after another," he adds, "said, 'Dude, but we've got technology!' "

Techno-wizards aside, Kunstler appears to have tapped into something of a national anxiety complex about the American way of life. Drive-through-window living and endless commutes from the 'burbs aren't exactly what a lot of us aim for. The country is at war with an elusive enemy in a faraway part of the globe. A hurricane practically wiped New Orleans off the map and sent oil and gas prices skyrocketing. Recent rebel attacks on oil facilities in Nigeria and a thwarted terrorist assault on a Saudi oil plant had the same effect—for a time, at least. For those and lots of other reasons, some people aren't in the mood to insist that the future looks bright. And if there's any doubt, Kunstler is there to reassure you: Your way of life is kaput.