If you’ve always wanted the Saleen version of your favourite muscle car tuned to produce 700 horse then go get it if you can afford it. In the not so distant future the problem isn’t going to be alternative energy, it’s going to be standing in front of your home somewhere in the wilderness – if you were smart enough to buy property on which you can grow food – worried that you have enough ammunition so that you can shoot people attempting to raid your garden or steal your livestock. By then your car will be useless, but at least you’ll have enjoyed it before selling it to help afford property in the middle of nowhere on which to grow your own food to sustain you and your family – that is, if you know enough about agriculture to successfully do it. Hopefully, that property will be far enough away from a major population centre so that you won’t be faced with the utterly terrible decision of having to protect your family’s survival by having to take the life of a stranger for quite some time. Because, unfortunately, that’s what it’s going to come down to. Believe what you will, but when faced with such a reality the human race will display nature’s most fundamental trait – survival.

I can sit here, day in and day out, and wax intellectual about foreign affairs and a whole host of other topics, but the truth is that we have surpassed the point of being able to recover from the loss of everything that we’ve grown accustomed to. Were we serious about finding solutions to those problems that seriously threaten our collective future we would have done so in earnest by now. But we haven’t. Everyone talks a big game – myself included – but the reality is that there is nowhere to go now but down. It’s a subject that no one wants to address – the inevitable collapse of our entire way of life. Put in simpler terms, the fruition of more than a century of suicidal behaviour.

In the not so distant future mass transit will become too costly, economies will ultimately fail as the global economy is based on fiat currency, resources required to fuel the machinery that manufactures everything from food to clothing to basic necessities and maintains every source of power that we rely on will grind to a halt, militaries will be rendered useless given the unavailability of the fuel required to maintain them, governments will lose the ability to properly function, and in the end a handful of seeds will be worth more than a state-of-the-art fighter jet for the simple reason that you can’t eat a fighter jet. Prior to the finality of it all there will be gross acts committed in an attempt to grab what can be grabbed in the name of a flag or religion, but in the end such grand propensities won’t matter.

So the question has to be asked – what do you know about the earth? If you had to plant a vegetable garden right now could you do it? Moreover, what do you know about the composition of soil and those nutrients that certain plants and natural compost provide that help maintain it? Do you know how to can or pickle vegetables? What do you know about root cellars? Do you know what can and can’t be eaten in local forests, what is edible in local rivers and in the ocean? Can you ride a horse? Can you care for horses? Can you grow feed required to maintain livestock? What do chickens eat when feed can’t be purchased at a store? Do you know how to purify water and ensure that it’s drinkable without the aid of modern devices? Do you know fundamental first aid? Do you know how to produce candles? Do you know how to start a fire without matches or a lighter? Do you know how to clean a chicken, a pig, a cow, a rabbit, or a deer without contaminating the meat?

The questions are many and they’re all valid. One hundred and thirty years ago most people knew the answers. In a little over a century of existence, a great deal of the human race now has absolutely no idea how to do any of it.

The irony, of course, is that those that live in Third World countries that have to deal with the sort of basic hardships that we currently view as ‘backwards’ have a better chance of survival. Many of them know that to make basic soap you require ash and animal fat. We just buy it at the grocery store – or from fancy boutiques.

There’s no question that, after a while, society will restructure itself. That there will be individuals who will provide true fundamental services – such as blacksmiths, farriers, masons, carpenters, shipwrights, etc – but maybe not for a generation. It’s the in-between that poses the problem. It’s strange to think that in such a world major cities will be rendered useless – but they will be. Even those that still act as fishing hubs will become targets for those seeking food, most of which will be remnants of the local population – those that haven’t abandoned major centres in search of food. Put into context, greater Los Angeles has roughly four days worth of food given its population. Now imagine the chaos that would ensue were inhabitants faced with the reality that food supplies had run out.

Everything in comparison to this issue is secondary. Global oil production peaked in the late 70′s, so given that almost everything on the planet requires fossil fuels to operate or to produce goods, the fact that we’re living in the twilight of the oil age is something that more people need to come to terms with.

Coming from me all of this might seem a bit shocking, but it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and something that my wife and I have had numerous conversations about. Thankfully, she’s a true ‘trophy wife’ in that she knows how to do a myriad of the things that I’ve mentioned in this entry. Me, I’m basically useless.

So there you are, rifle in hand, confronted by a group of strangers bent on stealing food grown to sustain your family. The thought of pulling the trigger might seem completely unconscionable to you right now, but that’s only because we live in a society in which we’ve long had the luxury of never having to make such a decision. In the end, whether you like it or not, you’ll pull the trigger because the life of your family is on the line. In the end, no matter how evolved we believe ourselves to be, two absolutes hold true: that we were collectively responsible for it all, and that even we cannot escape the fundamental realities of nature.

If you know anything about the importance of the ocean, and how the study of it reveals a great deal with regards to all life on earth, then you know how important phytoplankton is. For those of you that don’t know what phytoplankton does, it’s the basis of the marine food chain. Phytoplankton is consumed by zooplankton which is, in turn, consumed by small fish and other aquatic life. Thus, phytoplankton in the Epipelagic and Mesopelagic zones is vital. But phytoplankton also does something else of considerable importance. Through photosynthesis it removes carbon dioxide from the air and produces oxygen. That said, what if you were to learn that the amount of phytoplankton has decreased by 1% a year over the last century? Like deforestation, the loss of phytoplankton with regards to photosynthesis could result in a significant drop in the global production of oxygen.

The root of the problem? Ongoing stratification, which can be directly linked to the boom in fossil fuel driven industrialization since the turn of the century, as can the immense increase in the global population. It’s not just about cars, either. Everything that we do requires fossil fuels. Sure, you can go out and buy a hybrid, but the fact remains that there are seven barrels of oil in each of your tires, that the interior and exterior are all comprised of materials that contain oil – from the paint to the plastics. Without fossil fuels global agriculture would catastrophically fail, as would hydro-electric power, along with literally thousands of other things. In fact, without enough reserve oil, the oil industry would collapse because you can’t extract oil from the earth without using it to power the equipment required to do it.

Like it or not, all of this leads us back to you standing somewhere in the wilderness with a rifle, or some other weapon, in your hands wondering how it came to you having to choose between the life of a fellow human being or the survival of your family. Because we’ve passed the point of a miracle.