For those with Millennial level attention spans...I'll shorten it to the important parts.

From Brian Kaller-...Real declines don’t happen everywhere at once, but one person or community at a time..... The activists who predicted a total and imminent crash were wrong, and the Big One never came and never will. Yet a lot of little ones did – fuel prices, bank crashes, foreclosures, outages, shortages, oil spills, fires, droughts and hurricanes, all in the last several years alone – and they might come larger and faster in the decades ahead. That’s where you come in.

Whatever you thought the next ten years would be like, perhaps you learned how to filter your own water, fix a broken bicycle, sew a ripped coat or compost your waste. Perhaps you just met a lot of people doing the same thing, and learned to listen to each other rather than the television. Even if the future didn’t precisely fit your expectations, that time was well spent, giving you something to build on and teach others.

All this runs somewhat against our most common cultural fantasies, either the leftist dream of populist revolution, or the apocalyptic fantasy of escaping in a lifeboat. It doesn’t mean rising up as a people, taking on the powers that be and winning. It means giving up that dream.

It means not winning, and not seeing crises as an opportunity to win against your political enemies, but to serve – including serving your enemies. It means preparing for an uncertain, messy future that will one day go on without you.

That, however, is how things need to happen: you change a bit, and help others do the same, and then do it a bit more, often feeling like you are failing. Only after years go by you look back and see how far you’ve come.
(personal emphasise " but to serve – including serving your enemies")

From FerFAL-
1) Artillery & infantry beats survivalist hero fantasies. Every. Single. Time.
2) Cover the basics. Food, water, shelter and medicines. (I'll add firewood)
3) Don’t get involved.
4) Attitude, clothes, and gear can get you killed or arrested.
5) Learn to deal with checkpoints.
6) Guns can save you, but they can also get you killed.

From, Asperger's gone terribly right, John Michael Greer- "Collapse Now And Avoid the Rush" sounds Remarkably like my "Mutate Now and Avoid the Post Apocalyptic Rush"
....A practical example, again, will be useful here. In my experience, it takes around five years of hard work, study, and learning from your mistakes to become a competent vegetable gardener. If you’re transitioning from buying all your vegetables at the grocery store to growing them in your backyard, in other words, you need to start gardening about five years before your last trip to the grocery store. The skill and hard work that goes into growing vegetables is one of many things that most people in the world’s industrial nations externalize, and those things don’t just pop back to you when you leave the produce section of the store for the last time. There’s a learning curve that has to be undergone.
Not that long ago, there used to be a subset of preppers who grasped the fact that a stash of cartridges and canned wieners in a locked box at their favorite deer camp cabin wasn’t going to get them through the downfall of industrial civilization, but hadn’t factored in the learning curve. Businesses targeting the prepper market thus used to sell these garden-in-a-box kits, which had seed packets for vegetables, a few tools, and a little manual on how to grow a garden. It’s a good thing that Y2K, 2012, and all those other dates when doom was supposed to arrive turned out to be wrong, because I met a fair number of people who thought that having one of those kits would save them even though they last grew a plant from seed in fourth grade. If the apocalypse had actually arrived, survivors a few years later would have gotten used to a landscape scattered with empty garden-in-a-box kits, overgrown garden patches, and the skeletal remains of preppers who starved to death because the learning curve lasted just that much longer than they did.

C5,

Read the links when you first posted them. Well worth the time.

Thanks scrounger. I've been doing plenty of scrounging myself. I travel to the areas Spring Clean Up events and haul in my building materials for the year. Lots of recycled windows for me this year. More greenhouses on the way. I've got about another 3 weeks of squirrelling away recyclables. My muscles hurt.

I found this today- Resilience is The New Black.
Though not as profound or helpful as the last three, It deserves recognition. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/05/resilience-is-the-new-black.html

"Which brings me to my second point: a loss of faith.
For most of my adult life I have banged the drum for sustainability. I don’t anymore. Sustainability is about voluntarily balancing three factors: human needs, environmental health, and economic viability. My observation is that it has been a failed movement and that the conversation has naturally shifted to resilience."

"Dennis Meadows, a well-known scientist who has been documenting unsustainable trends for over 40 years, puts it this way:
The problem that faces our societies is that we have developed industries and policies that were appropriate at a certain moment, but now start to reduce human welfare, like for example the oil and car industry. Their political and financial power is so great and they can prevent change. It is my expectation that they will succeed. This means that we are going to evolve through crisis, not through proactive change."