A few days ago I was listening to a conversation between Nate Hagens and Tim Watkins on The Great Simplification podcast, which I recommend to everyone. Tim said something about how all the best soil is now under suburbia, and can you image knocking down all the fences and getting together and farming all the yards, once it becomes an urgent issue.
The comment triggered a daydream. It made me imagine a world where the volume of container ships, trucks, and fertilizers falls off a cliff over a span of a few years, quick enough that people see it coming but not so fast that there isn't anything to be done about it. Never mind the exact reasons why energy and distribution fails so quickly - it's a given of this exercise of the imagination.
A consequence of the failure of fertilizer availability is that large monoculture agriculture fails, because the soil is so depleted nothing can be grown without artificial fertilizers. And even if those fields could grow, the trucks and ships aren't moving anymore.
Imagine mandates or incentives so bold that basically everyone becomes involved in the effort to secure enough food for each region. All the backyards go to food production, and every street gets evaluated for whether it's a good target to rip up and plan, or at least narrow. Lots of road narrowing going on, because traffic loads are way down so there's a huge surplus of unnecessary road surface.
The last diesel gets used for the bulldozers to rip up the road beds down to the soil, the dozers get parked and turned into sculptures, and people farm the roads leaving just a narrow track down the middle mostly for small trucks (some now horsedrawn) to get food to market. All the big box store parking lots get dozed and planted.
Everyone doing permaculture and organic farming before this point all of a sudden get the interest and full support of the state. Masses of people are getting fastracked through PDCs (which of course is problematic but people are scared and desperate) and appropriate technology workshops.
People with practical experience are drafted to train apprentices and help with design and guidance. Anyone who can put together aquaculture and intensive gardening facilities are given the projects and resources to do so. Anyone who can start building out decentralized water capture and filtration, and wastewater management systems, is incentivized to do so, and overnight training centers to teach ecoengineering and ecotechnics pop up all over the place.
Use of energy drops through the floor because most of what energy was being spent on wasn't essential, and in most places the glut of cheap solar panels lying around are adequate to meet need-based demand. This is supplemented with wind and some small hydro. The grid only stays up in the largest metropolitan areas, the ones that don't go through major collapse and depopulation, and energy goes completely local everywhere else. Which, by now, there's enough people knowledgeable about it that no one stays without a little electricity for long.
Most people not involved in food, water, or energy, will be involved in salvage and repair. Teams going through abandoned building and other infrastructure and stewarding the material resources: useable wood, metal, wiring, motors, pumps, fans, computers, glass, etc. The hazardous materials are collected and buried as best we can so they don't spread through the environment any more than they already have.
The final act of large nation-states is to kick off this organization towards the decentralized regional self-sufficiency, a directed shove away from consumer-capitalism, and pouring the last resources of global power into the development of people as competent citizens charged with the mandate of acting with responsibility, competence, and wisdom.
In many ways the rushed mandates and directives fail in their initial goals and much dysfunction has to be sorted out, but the overall effect is the final load of state hoarded resources being dumped at the disposal and discretion of local communities rather than in myopic megaprojects, foreign conflict, or blind business as usual. It primarily acts as a clear signal to everyone that there is no They who are going to see to our needs. The burden of responsibility shifts dramatically and openly from the state to the people and everyone sees it.
Libraries get a huge boost as access to, and faith in, the internet, drops. Many workshops and trainings are organized through the libraries, who expand their buildings to include classrooms, workshops, demonstration gardens, and the like. Libraries become community hubs that happen to have several rooms full of books.
Archivists and specialists begin the effort of relocalizing information from off the internet, first just storing as much relevant stuff locally as possible in digital formats, and then beginning the work of de-digitizing the priority information. Over a long time period this work evolves into monastic institutions that carry on the social mandate of knowledge preservation.
Mental health issues spike in places that don't do well but drop significantly everywhere else. In populations that meet the minimum threshold of material needs (food, water, shelter, security...), people's subjective well being improves remarkably, as people learn that as long as a minimum threshold of basic needs are met, the best things in life are free. Entertainment and the arts go local again. Everyone knows their neighbors. Social webs grow, strengthen, and become the substrate of the new society.
Like I said, this is aggressively optimistic. It handwaves away a truckload of reasons things could go very badly. It's not rigorously thought through. It doesn't even touch most of the aspects of society (medicine? education? justice?) The notion of the state giving power to the people is almost funny. I doubt it will turn out to be an accurate sketch of the future we're going to live through. It mostly was just fun to think about. A short daydream.
But the world feels like it's off balance and could tip in any direction. It'd be unwise to attempt to make one prediction about the next few decades and act on that prediction. It's better to imagine a diversity of futures and choose actions now that are appropriate for as many of those potential futures as possible.
At any rate, the point of imagining possible futures is to inform decisions about what to do now, so as not to be caught flat-footed. I think there are fundamental things we can be doing that will be valuable regardless of which future we actually get.
One fundamental is to begin the difficult process of extracting one's mind from the programming of consumer-capitalism and the attention economy. If you've gotten this far on my site you're likely well on your way down this path (and it is a path, not a destination, not for us, not for the next few generations). Unlearning things you already know is much more difficult than learning new things you don't. Be careful what you learn.
Another fundamental is to skill up and social network up. I don't think these two things should be thought of as two things. I think we should weave practical skill acquisition into the process of developing strong social ties as much as we can. The best way to learn is to do, and it's best to do with others, so find others who want to do and do with them.
Our social ties might turn out to be the most precious assets we have, and an exchange of business cards is not a social tie. Cook food with your neighbor in a solar over their kids built. Plant a garden with your friend in the lawn in front of the high school. Raise rabbits with your coworker. Fix the bicycles you use to take your coffee roasting business to the farmers market with your cousin.
There's no way to fix, prevent, avoid, or solve what's coming. But there are lots of things we can do to prepare and respond in advance to whatever world we're going to get. Almost none of the appropriate things to do require an advanced degree or, hell, even a high school diploma, bestowed and accredited by the institutions that have gotten us into this mess in the first place. It's not rocket science. It's things humans have been doing since forever, and almost but not quite yet forgotten.
And the best news of all is that these things we ought to do to get ready for the end of the world...
They're the things that make us happy. They're the things that make us smile and feel content, and look forward to the next day when we get to do the same things all over again.