Rob Hopkins, of the amazing Transition Culture in Ireland, lead a recent meeting on energy descent in Lampeter, Wales.

I talked about peak oil and the need to begin preparing for it at a community level. I talked about the experience of Cuba and of the process which gave rise to the Kinsale Energy Descent Plan. 

I happen to know a little (very little) about this town.  My mother’s grandmother was born near there, a fact which drew me to hike up and down the green hills to find my people in my mid-20s. I didn’t find many people, but I found the overgrown foundation of a house and a sense that these small towns didn’t have much need for the technology that shaped my life.

One of the points Hopkins makes fairly frequently is: older structures are already prepared for power down.  This is true for buildings as well as for human structures like governments.

Hopkins mentions the Cuban experience.  My local Post Carbon group recently showed “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.”  Wow.  What a film.  An article last summer in Yes! Magazine compares the post-Soviet power down in Cuba and in North Korea.  Guess who survived best.  How and why Cuba was prepared offers very interesting lessons to those of us who will meet (or whose children will meet) peak oil in the near future.

When I’m contemplating the many ways civilization, and even humanity, might collapose, it doesn’t help to be nudged along by NASA scientists telling me I’d better freak out about the likelihood that one of about 20,000 asteroids will fall to Earth and destroy a major city. (Is that all?) They spend more than $4 million a year at NASA already looking for asteroids, but they want at least a billion dollars to find them all by 2020.

Robert Reich’s article in The American Prospect on NASA’s asteroid report is very well timed, since I also happened to have just finished reading the latest in my series of apocalyptic novels this week — a newish young adult novel by Susan Beth Pfeffer called Life As We Knew It.

See that looming moon on the cover? In the fictional world of the book, scientists told the people of Earth that an asteroid would hit the moon, but they made a little miscalculation.

Last Fall I read another novel of teen post-apocalyptic survival, Into the Forest by Jean Hegland. Life As We Know It is nowhere near as bleak, if that can really be said of such a desperate situation. Through the main character Miranda’s diary, we see her make the gradual switch from superficial teen focused on boards on a fan site to becoming an essential member of her own family as they work to survive a nearly impossible situation.

A lot of reviews of Life As We Know It mention that the readers want to run out right then to buy canned soup and collect firewood. The focus on remaining resources definitely makes it clear that planning helped some survive. Whatever it takes to get people to prepare themselves for catastrophic disaster or more common emergency.

I am keeping my library account on notice to find the companion novel recently finished but yet to be published.