Most of what you are describing as the future, not the present, sounds anything but negative to me. I catch myself feeling a little bit hopeful about what ridiculous fuel prices encourage people to do...you know, live somewhere close to where you work and so have a connection with your home, or walking and biking to work, which makes you feel good physically and provides such a long period for *thought* that you don't get driving in the city. Things that are all about that crutch you're talking about.
It kind of does seem like an increasingly dangerous and dark world, but when you think you have the mental and emotional energy to do so, the potential to deal with it feels more than a little exhilirating, doesn't it?

i know just what you mean!! let's shake things up. because they've settled into a rusted, corrosive, stagnant tangle.

Survival skills will vary. Tools and options are constricted by social and economic factors. As usual, those with the least will have fewer choices and alternatives. While survival becomes more and more important to a larger segment of society, I am afraid that those with the least will be ignored, overlooked, and more easily forgotten. Food banks are already beginning to implode due to the vacuum of their larders. Stocks are rising in the credit card companies. Food costs are skyrocketing and our government reports only minor cost adjustments. "Good news citizen, there is a surplus of steak in your local market at only $9.00 per lb." "Don't forget to fill up your RV when you get the gas for the barbecue!"

These are the topics that interest me the most, Nez. There was an announcement of a new cold fusion demonstration in Japan yesterday, it's on video, and the skeptics are lining up behind it. On the parallel track, the future is not that the developing nations will look like the advanced nations but that the advanced nations will look more like the developing nations. I think the most salient line in your series of queries is the part where you question if it's economically intelligent to grow one's own food. I've been sending that question off to a lot of the green blogs, but getting silence. I can offer that on a purely dollar basis I make a lot more as an electrician, but there is a certain happiness that the growing creates, and also, the garden food is very high quality and tasty. For others, there is all the ideology of local growing and a whole bunch of other theoretical encumbrance, but that path irritates me. My kids just decided last week to get the hell out of the states {Ohio} and move here to Vieques. My daughter in France is moving here too. So I guess I have to say the food crisis and the fuel and heating and economic and mortgage crises have been good to me. I get to spend every day with the granddaughter now. She's Nita's age.
I'm prepared, but not for general civil unrest. If that happens I will repair to the deep jungle. I gave that an 18 month dry run in 1990. Seriously.

i guess rust and stagnation are sort of opposites. one is active. then again, even a stagnant swamp is active. hmm. stagnation can be crawling with activity. this bears further ponderance.anyway, thinking to myself.

RC, the deep jungle sounds good. ever watched "mosquito coast" by the way? love that movie.

peasant, your dim interpretation feels very accurate to me. i can see the news copters now, descending upon all those deemed "looters" when people begin going hungry en masse. shortly after that, copters n looters will be a feature in a larger video game. it will sell really well. to those living in dry and stable and economically viable climes...

Living off the grid and growing your own food within a community of like minded people is what I have been striving for for over a decade. It is getting close to the time when that will be possible for me and hopefully more of a reality for others. It is so important to teach children where food comes from the beauty of the harvest and what it means to kill an animal so that you can eat it, not just going to a store and buying meat in a package, how disgusting. In the US, people do not enjoy the whole cow, I remember when I did eat meat we ate everything from brains to intestines and I know my other paisas and people all over the world do the same but in coming to the US the thought of brains or anything out of the ordinary was looked down upon with disgust. It is important to use every bit of the animal. I look forward to a future where people appreciate our Mother Earth and come back to a sense of honoring her instead of destroying her. I look forward to people working together and working with the land instead of thinking we can dominate her and the animals. We need to become a world of honorable people, it is our responsibility to our children if we are to survive. Besides no matter how much harm humans do to Mother Earth she will have the last laugh and be around several more years than us.

Well you know how I am Nez, never saw the movie {they are all so disappointing} but did read Mosquito Coast. I wouldn't say it was exactly an example I would follow {the ice thing recalls the first scene in 100 years of Solitude}and in fact in my various mania in the tropics when I find myself acting like that protagonist I back off. Of course, I'm playing the game now for 30 years and we are now into the third generation. The picture of deep jungle you should keep in mind was that series of photos from Brazil published this week with the indigenous brandishing what appeared to be fernwood and vine bows and {it appears} growing casaba and papaya and other foods in a clearing. Take a good look at that scene. No ice machines there. The people looked healthy. Lovely to the max trees. It really doesn't get any better than that. In a way, agriculture and homesteading are a step away from that, but that forest clearing culture is already halfway to settling down and half gone from hunting and gathering. They are obviously fixed in place {for long periods} and they are farming on a small scale. It's all visible in the photo. I didn't read much commentary at all on the photos, but that's my observations. I've made those bows, used them, I grow that food right now, grow the body dye too.

jeje, no no...it is exactly not the movie to picture, i guess. i brought it up because of course he seeks to go find something beautiful and untouched by man, but brings himself and all of man's failings and also destruction to the new world. but you probably knew that.

i will look for those pics!

when i was young and would read national geographic and such (we had boxes) and saw the indigenous with their lean arms and sun-browned bodies and happy faces and decorations and rugged natural life, i always felt i belonged there. isn't that funny?

My kids used to run around covered in annato {achiote} dust inside the tree canopy until the rain came and washed it off. They were pretending to be Tainos or Arawak. But, although it isn't actually that challenging to do the physical deeds related to that life, I often wonder what it would be like to inhabit that mind.
I have a great deal more to say about that, but not today.

yo tambien. o tampoco.

I agree about feeling more lonely even though I'm more connected technologically... even though Portland is a nice place to be, I still feel like some kind of weirdo because I ride my bike and try to eat locally to not be a hypocrite. (Plus I effing love to ride.) But some days I don't think it's worth it to get out of bed because a driver will want to run into me, or people my own age will drive me nuts with their insincerity, or my meaningless job will leave me unsatisfied.

It's funny, I saw the movie Persepolis (I read part of the comic in the airport) and when I saw the history of Iran in the words of Ms Satrapi, I realized how far back the Western desire to "conquer" the Middle East has gone. Do we never learn?

very little, meep. in very small pieces. but we do, i think. or maybe that's just hope.

But Meep, now there are elements of the Middle east that want to conquer the West!
I think we should set off a little space out in the Sahara where they can all {eastern and western contestants} meet halfway and let them have at each other with scimitar and chariots and balls of flame or whatever. Leave the rest of us out of it.