by Doug Fine

Ever wonder what would happen if you popped into the Quickie Mart for a quart of juice and some batteries and found the shelves were empty…permanently? I do. Here’s an essay I wrote on this issue, which I’ve thought about for several years and which partly explains the Digital Age Carbon-Neutral life I’m attempting here on the Funky Butte Ranch. It ran in theWashington Post’s Sunday Outlook section, and has since been picked up by the Denver Post and other publications. It’s scaring a few people, judging by some of the feedback I got from the Beltway. Heck, the essay’s scaring me. That’s the point. That’s why I wrote it. It seems that my first three or four decades on this planet have, against all odds, turned me into a –gulp– survivalist.

Not that I’m rooting for a collapse. Comfort is good. But it seems mainstream to at least wonder about it, given the goings-on of the last two thousand years. Or the last two. Meanwhile, cross your fingers that building a Green economy is going to help the world thrive into the foreseeable future and beyond.

http://www.youtube.com/leafrockfeather#p/a/f/0/evjICqDFXgI

Doug Fine is best known as the author of the petroleum-free bestseller Farewell, My Subaru.  From his Funky Butte Ranch in New Mexico, where he posts Dispatches From the Funky Butte Ranch, he often speculates on whether he is equipped to survive if Digital Age Box Store Consumerism ever went away.