How you know that the self-help book you’re reading is no ordinary self-help book: You get to step 1, and find out it’s titled “Rebuild Civilization.” Wow. Heavy.

That said, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, written by Albert Bates, is not just a heavy, depressing book. In fact, it’s in part a cookbook — and a humorous one at that. You get a Tuscan bean soup recipe right next to a description of a compact sewage treatment system. Yummy.

Hungry, and got no stove due to the destruction of the kitchen as we know it? Well, now you have explicit instructions on how to make seasoned roasted potatos and chestnuts over an open fire.

If you’re an environmentalist with a good sense of humor, you’ll enjoy Post-Petroleum. In a lot of ways, Post-Petroleum is like The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook. Hopefully, you won’t ever need the advice therein. But it’s a helluva lotta fun reading how you can make out like a bandit out of tight situations. Only with Post-Petroleum, these tight situations are presented in a way that it seems they could quite conceivably happen — relatively soon.

I focused on the advice that could help me right here and now, like growing my own food. At the moment, I spend about $20 on fresh fruits and veggies a week at the farmers’ market. Once I got a full-on veggie garden going on my balcony (fruit trees seem a bit out of reach at the moment), I might save some money while feeling more self-sufficient.

That said, the instructions to can, dry, and jam my own foods seem a bit extreme at this moment in time for me — about as crazy as creating a fallout shelter — which the book also provides instructions on — a la the the dude that ends up going under electroshock therapy in Six Feet Under.

Of course, most of this advice is intended for a post-ecological disaster era. I mean, this book gives you instructions on how to eke out the remaining liquid from your water pipes. I don’t think Albert wants me to do that now, but it’s kinda cool knowing I could handle this type of situation.

Post-Petroleum can seem schizophrenic at times. Its transportation advice goes from instructions for riding a horse to using dimethyl ether as fuel. I suppose those signify the contradictions of the age that we live in. In a weird way, Post-Petroleum helps put the paradoxes of our age in an order of sorts. I’ll be keeping this book to think by, to cook by, and to live by, if ecological disaster does end up coming my way –

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