Ending and Beginning

There comes a time when you have to stop looking at the web sites and stop reading the books and blogs. Once you’ve decided that some combination of climate change, peak oil, and financial catastrophe is going to end the world as we know it, all that stuff becomes nothing more than pornography. If you believe it all, what you doing? You’re not going to get some early warning — by the time anything shows up on the net, it’s going to be too late. You’re just getting some cheap doomer thrill.

Once you believe it, it’s time to prepare. Spend your time and energy and creativity preparing, not fantasizing about apocalypse. If you keep your focus on the decline of civilization instead of preparing for the decline of civilization, you won’t be as ready as you could have been.

Your focus needs to be on getting your home and family as self-sufficient as possible, on strengthening your tribe and your tribal connections, on using only your fair share of the world’s resources (which, for us Americans, means cutting consumption by something like 90%), on keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by shutting out lights, living with less or no air conditioning, and driving as little as possible. It’s a huge task that demands all our attention.