I hate to say it, but this perspective, grim though it seems, is overly optimistic. When complex civilizations collapse, most people starve to death quickly, and all that are left are warring tribes, battling ferociously over whatever resources are left. And with the tipping points of global climate disruption already baked in, even that war of all against all will not last too long before most of the planet becomes uninhabitable. We are very likely looking at a superheated planet, where bacteria and fungi are the only ones who evolve fast enough to keep up with the accelerating overheating of the atmosphere, which will eventually reach a new set point, well beyond the tolerance of large organisms like ourselves.

What should we do in the meantime? My simple answer is this: grow gardens, grow community, and grow awareness. The more resilient and self-reliant that localities become, the longer they will last as the larger global infrastructures of oil, money, and material throughput collapse all around them. And the more they help their neighboring communities to achieve greater resilience, the less vulnerable they will be to desperate marauders who seek to kill them and take everything they have. Contiguous groupings of resilient, locally self-reliant communities are the best way to survive the inevitable collapse of our industrial civilization...for a while.