In a week when the American economic system reeled and the largest government bailout in the history of planet Earth had begun, and the PG led with a story on the Steelers, I decided to reach out to the man who saw all but the football bit coming, James Howard Kunstler.

Mr. Kunstler's 2005 book, "The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century," predicted that oil would soar above $100 a barrel, that the real estate bubble would burst, that our financial system would implode, and that there would be scattered food shortages across the world.

If that ain't a quick summary of 2008, you haven't been paying attention.

A reader mailed me "The Long Emergency" in February and after I read it, I loaned it to someone and now I can't remember whom. I hope it's being read because though most likely will disagree with Mr. Kunstler's apocalyptic conclusion -- that the world economic system will indeed implode, and we're going back to an economy of small farms -- Mr. Kunstler sees clearly that America has arranged its communities and transportation system almost exactly wrong for an age of high-cost fuel.

It's noteworthy that he began writing his book in 2004, when oil could be had for about $35 a barrel, a third of its current price. The "rough ride through uncharted territory" certainly has come to pass.

Mr. Kunstler, 59, is a former writer for Rolling Stone magazine, a fierce critic of suburban design in books such as "The Geography of Nowhere," a novelist and one of the most entertaining curmudgeons writing today. His is a take-no-prisoners analysis, both sweeping and to the point.

I e-mailed Mr. Kunstler some questions Thursday and, though he was busy and found some of my questions "downright snotty," he answered them quickly. The first thing I asked was how he would prepare the nation for the days ahead if the Fed gave him $85 billion to spend, given that our government already is throwing that level of cabbage at a failed insurance company. Mr. Kunstler would begin by restoring America's passenger rail system.

"The airlines are dying. They will not exist in the form we know them five years from now. Gasoline will be extremely expensive and subject to scarcities in the years just ahead. Despite our wishes and fantasies, we are not going to run the Happy Motoring program by other means -- at least not in the broad democratic scale. If we do not restore passenger rail service, we will not be going anywhere.

"Nothing, by the way, would do more to impact our oil consumption. The fact that this is not part of the presidential debate is a disgrace."

He rejects being called a "pessimist" or a "polemicist" and calls himself an "actualist." I suggested that his prediction less than a decade ago of a Y2K disaster, and predictions in 2005 and 2006 that the Dow Jones industrial was about to sink by more than half to 4,000, made one suspect he was overstating the case again.

But he said the Y2K problem "was a single, broad-based problem that was overcome -- with billions of dollars in expenditures and countless man-hours of reprogramming." And the Dow could still crater in this credit crisis.

Mr. Kunstler was born in New York City but lives upstate in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., a place he treasures as he predicts a return to small, agrarian-based communities -- and not nearly enough room for everyone to survive. Yet when I asked what he was doing to prepare for "global doom," he rejected that term.

"That's a dumb, melodramatic, characterization of what we face, which is a set of circumstances that will compel us to behave differently."

When I asked if people should be stocking up on gold, canned goods, firewood or cyanide, he found that question particularly "snide" and answered, "The most important preparation for the discontinuities of the years ahead is making sure that you are part of a sturdy community.

"I offer plenty of hope to people who are earnest, resourceful, intelligent and brave. The Long Emergency, as I call it, will go down harder for crybabies and slackers."

Even as I reject Mr. Kunstler's end-case scenario, I see him saying sensible things that most are ignoring. Even when we drill anew, as we will, that won't be cheap because the oil will be both harder to retrieve and unlikely to keep up with the demand of a growing, increasingly industrialized, world. Even when we find alternative energy sources, like wind and solar power, and drive hybrids and Chevy Volts, these changes will begin with a negligible impact and we will use oil to build the technology.

This just in: National debt is soaring toward $10 trillion, and hundreds of billions are being committed just to get us back to where we were. That alone doesn't mean we're headed to a post-industrial future, but the current American model needs an overhaul.