How do you prepare for Peak Oil?

Cathy at Snippets&Bits asked me for my opinion on how to make sense of all the information out there on preparing for Peak Oil. This was my response to her question:

While I'm still a relative newcomer to Peak Oil, I've been researching challenges and solutions feverishly since I stumbled upon the topic. The strategy I'm starting to develop is this: First, focus on yourself. This isn't selfishness -- if you don't tend to your own needs before worrying about the rest of the world, all the knowledge you're trying to share and build could be lost.

Even looking at bare survival is overwhelming. I would suggest first focusing on addictions & dependencies -- cut out alcohol, caffeine, cigarettes -- as you'll have enough to worry about later on without the added burden of caffeine headaches and smoke cravings when these things become scarce. Next, look at pure survival as a hunter-gatherer. Find out what wild edibles grow around your area, learn to recognize and process them. Learn how to construct basic traps and how to prepare & cook animals. Learn how to collect water, filter it, and make fire.

Moving up the next rung of civilization, learn to grow your own food. Focus on labor-saving techniques like square-foot gardening, heavy mulching (e.g. Ruth Stout), and companion planting. While time is growing short to develop these skills, it's best to start small and build from season to season until you have enough to feed yourself for at least a year. Hand-in-hand with growing your own food is securing a water source, which (more often than not) probably involves collecting rainwater in large containers.

Okay, now you can at least survive a total societal collapse (if it indeed plays out that way) and you are free to start learning how to thrive. That's the idea behind the example Homestead Project on PeakOilDesign -- you're considering every aspect of your future, how they interplay, and you're looking at every likely threat to the homestead's function. This extends to raising animals and intensive gardening, making clothing, building (or modifying) a house, and producing energy.

At this point, you've mapped out your basic personal survival. Now is the time to start exploring survival for a larger group. I personally like the idea of small communities, but I also think it's a natural conclusion in a suddenly low-energy world. Without major infrastructure or vast amounts of usable energy, local community-centered societies are the only immediate possibility. Collective civilization will have to wait a while.

Detailed planning is important to ensure a community's long-term viability, and that's the next project I plan to tackle in the near future. This is a fairly alien concept in America, as evidenced by the unchecked sprawl in every locale. A community allows individuals to specialize in certain areas (but perhaps not too much, or we could find ourselves without needed skills again if disaster strikes) and distribute the workload. There is strength in a close-knit community as well as increased security.

Farther down the line, communities can gain strength from each other and build networks of mutual trade and support. There will likely be a lot of dark forces our there (e.g. displaced gangs, paramilitary groups) that a single community could not hope to conquer. Alliances of healthy communities should have a much easier time dealing with those types of undesirables.

So, it's a long road to fully prepare, which is probably why there is so much jumbled information out there. You have to start small and dream big, all the while increasing your chances of not only surviving, but thriving.