Last week my wife and daughter flew down to California to spend a week looking at colleges. She’s a junior, so this is about an event that’s more than a year away. Yet, despite all that’s happening in our world, we’re still trying to plan as if life then will be the same as life now, so all that matters is: does she like the campus, can she get in, and can we afford it.

In the ten days that they were away, four airlines went out of business (Aloha Airlines, ATA, Skybus, and Champion Air), two of the remaining large airlines (Delta and Northwest) announced a desperation merger, and two others (Southwest and American) were embroiled in money-losing maintenance scandals. As this was happening, the lifeblood of the industry — oil — got ever more expensive, while the major providers of that lifeblood, for a variety of “shoulda seen it coming” reasons, showed increasing reluctance to deal with America as a priority trading partner.

So, though my daughter does not want to hear it, my firm and fixed contribution to the “where should I go?” question is, “Any place that doesn’t involve air travel.”

Americans are playing one huge game of musical chairs — everybody flying and driving from this place to that, travel-nation, America-on-the-move — all fueled by ever-more-tenuous and no longer cheap oil. It seems inevitable that a tipping point will occur and most all the travel (except for the very rich) will STOP.

When that happens, wherever you happen to be is your new home. Chances are the locals in your new home will be woefully unprepared for global economic collapse and not at all happy adding the care of strangers to their mounting problems.

My daughter’s not listening — she’s always seen herself going to an East Coast school, and is especially taken with the prospect of living in New York City (that sound you heard was her mother’s head exploding). So we’re all in “wait and see” mode — I would love nothing more than to be utterly wrong about all of this and smiling wide as I put her on a plane to embark on her exciting new life.

Doesn’t hurt to dream. Until the music stops….

Since world-wide economic collapses are rare events and since the world has somewhat changed since the last one, we can all be forgiven for not knowing the best ways to prepare. And, since we still don’t know if such a collapse is certain or not, we could also be forgiven for not preparing at all. Especially if, as I’ve written before, one has prepared unnecessarily for past “imminent” collapses that never happened.

However, with images of Katrina and other unplanned-for disasters in mind, the consequences of not planning for a disaster that actually occurs are grave, in every sense of the word.

So, the neighbors and I have been pondering this conundrum and what we’ve come up with is Rule #1: make sure that you are able to feed yourself, family and neighbors, without resorting to food that requires any oil-inputs (for fertilizers, factory farming, packaging, processing, or transportation) and  without engaging in any survivalist hoarding.

I should mention here that I live on an island, population around 4500, an hour ferry’s ride from America. The Washington State ferry system has been suffering from anti-government, anti-tax attacks since the early ’90s and was already showing alarming signs of breakdown before the price of oil started rising. Now we consider it a given that ferry service will continue to seriously decline, and a high probability that at some point it will stop altogether, or be reserved to the very few who can pay super-sized ticket prices.

So, even if the world manages to avoid world-wide economic collapse, our little world will change and either food shipped from the mainland will become way too expensive or will just stop coming altogether, or, the best case scenario, we will be limited to buying one or two staples that we just can’t give up but can’t produce on our own (such as rice).

We’re rejecting hoarding for several reasons. Practically-speaking, we have neither the money nor the storage space for setting aside large stocks of provisions. Yet even if we did, you can only store so much for so long — sooner or later, if you can’t produce your own food, you’re dead. Lastly, if you’re all stocked up, but you’re surrounded by people who aren’t, you’re going to need weapons also, and you’ll need to be able to let children starve to death without intervening.

Yuck on that.

So, A lot of soil being turned over this spring, seeds going in the ground, more chickens being added to roosts, a lot of thinking about the water supply. Back to basics.

The best thing about this approach is that even if the collapse never happens, everything we’ve done was really worth doing.

Way back in the 20th century, long before this internet thing, I used to publish a quarterly newsletter. In one of the first issues, twenty-two years ago, I wrote:

A good friend asked the other day if I was still into “the doom thing.” I both cringed and chuckled at the sound of her words, paused for a few moments, inwardly sighing, and then answered, “Yes, I guess I am.” 

She was alluding to my belief that we are living at a time of vast planetary change — our entire world shifting toward a long-awaited age of peace and honest relationship — and that necessary to the shift is a certain degree of personal and global upheaval; a time when social and political uprisings, economic dislocations, and extreme environmental difficulties all were fairly unavoidable; and a time when pain would surely follow every old refusal to let go and change.

Though I prefer terms like “planetary transformation” and “quantum leap in consciousness” and “global evolution,” I recognize and accept that there is a dark side of human suffering to all such possibilities, hence my association with “the doom thing.”

My tendency toward apocalyptic thinking goes all the way back to the early ’70s when it seemed there was no way to undo the problems of American culture short of a total breakdown. Yet somehow we sailed through Viet Nam and Nixon’s impeachment and the gas crisis of the Carter years with barely a hitch.

The Reagan years saw similar seemingly intractable problems — Star Wars and the rest of the Cold War money drain; trading arms with the enemy and other political fiascos; and such economic troubles as the Savings and Loans swindle — so again I looked toward massive breakdown as inevitable and again was wrong.

At that point I pretty much shelved the “doom thing.” I would soon become both a parent and a homeowner and, frankly, the status quo no longer seemed all that terrible.

As Y2K approached, I was fairly persuaded by the doom argument, but practically speaking, there was little my family could do about it. We had no extra income to spend on stocking up food and such, and even if we’d had the money, we had no place to put it all. So we just hunkered down, and were relieved when yet another doom train failed to arrive.

But here we go again. This time we face a number of doom-bringers, each of which looks to have the power to bring down civilization all by itself. Peak oil, global warming, global warring, the collapse of free-market capitalism, super viruses and other modern plagues — and through it all the feeling that we have seen the end of America’s amazing resiliency.

So, grimace and sigh, yes, I still believe in the doom thing, more than ever.

I just wish I  knew what to do about it.