Driving toward disaster -- or self-sufficiency

Julie tells me she filled up the minivan yesterday, and for the first time the cost topped $75. Happy Memorial Day motoring, brethren and sistren.

James Howard Kunstler writes in today's WaPo that most people misunderstand peak oil theory:

It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:

The way we produce food

The way we conduct commerce and trade

The way we travel

The way we occupy the land

The way we acquire and spend capital

And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.

As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.

Kunstler goes on to say that given what we're facing, we don't have the luxury of being helpless crybabies ... nor do we have the luxury of wishfully thinking that the problem is going to go away because our way of life is non-negotiable.

Here's an Associated Press story about people who are not sitting around waiting to be peak oil victims, but who are actively preparing for what Kunstler calls the Long Emergency:

A few years ago, Kathleen Breault was just another suburban grandma, driving countless hours every week, stopping for lunch at McDonald's, buying clothes at the mall, watching TV in the evenings.

That was before Breault heard an author talk about the bleak future of the world's oil supply. Now, she's preparing for the world as we know it to disappear.

Breault cut her driving time in half. She switched to a diet of locally grown foods near her upstate New York home and lost 70 pounds. She sliced up her credit cards, banished her television and swore off plane travel. She began relying on a wood-burning stove.

"I was panic-stricken," the 50-year-old recalled, her voice shaking. "Devastated. Depressed. Afraid. Vulnerable. Weak. Alone. Just terrible."

But then she and her husband took action:

Some [peak oil believers] argue there will be no financial crash, but a slow slide into harder times. Some believe the federal government will respond to the loss of energy security with a clampdown on personal freedoms. Others simply don't trust that the government can maintain basic services in the face of an energy crisis. The powers that be, they've determined, will be largely powerless to stop what is to come.

Determined to guard themselves from potentially harsh times ahead, Lynn-Marie and her husband have already planted an orchard of about 40 trees and built a greenhouse on their 7 1/2 acres. They have built their own irrigation system. They've begun to raise chickens and pigs, and they've learned to slaughter them.

The couple have gotten rid of their TV and instead have been reading dusty old books published in their grandparents' era, books that explain the simpler lifestyle they are trying to revive. Lynn-Marie has been teaching herself how to make soap. Her husband, concerned about one day being unable to get medications, has been training to become an herbalist.

By 2012, they expect to power their property with solar panels, and produce their own meat, milk and vegetables.

Hmm. My wife is reading John Seymour's "New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency," which is, I must say, a rather handsome volume. She asked me the other night, "Do you ever think we're going to get to the point where we stop talking about this kind of stuff, and actually do it?"

Hmm.

John Seymour's followers run a School of Self-Sufficiency in Ireland. There's a religious community here in north central Texas that runs a similar program, Homestead Heritage, open to the public. Here's a link to its School of Homesteading. In fact, though I haven't visited (yet), what the Homestead Heritage folks are doing seems a lot like what I envision as the Benedict Option.

What would it take to make you and your family commit to a self-sufficient lifestyle to a serious degree? I ask you readers because I ask myself that more and more these days.