The world is on the brink lately… of so many things.  Not to portray myself as Nostradamus or anything, but I’ve predicted a lot of the last 7 years of crap in the world.  I was in Florida during the height of the housing boom and could see clearly where things were headed.  What’s wrong with building houses even though we’ve a housing excess and there’s no one to live in them?  What’s wrong with building office space with no one to rent it?  Hm…

So, now I feel we’re on the brink of something else… something bigger.  A continued economic crisis and a looming energy crisis.  Oil, as we have seen, is not our friend.  It is the enemy of the environment and our health.

I am honestly telling you right now that if you don’t use the next 5 years to prepare for oil and food shortages, you are doing yourself and your family a huge disservice.  It is going to happen.  It is not a question of “if” but of “when.”

I fear we misinterpreted “the land of plenty.”  We use more than our fair share of resources, and where has it gotten us?  We’re fat and lazy and have a misconstrued sense of entitlement.

It’s time to buck up.

And I wish our President would just come right out and say it, but he’s scared.  He needs to explicitly tell us to give back something meaningful to help our country survive.  One of the most important things we need right now are victory gardens.  Don’t get me wrong – the country is already trending toward more locally grown food, but the pace needs to accelerate and fast.

We also need to start producing more “stuff” in this country, especially essentials.  We rely too much on imports and this will cripple us when oil becomes scare of prohibitively expensive.

Lastly (for now), neighborhoods and towns need to unite.  The only way to get through the coming events is to rely on each other and work together.  You may have noticed that in many places, people don’t know their neighbors after living next to them for decades.  That has to change. Even if you live in a city, you can practice urban sustainability.

Not until we unify and start taking responsibility for some of our food production will we truly be a sustainable nation.