A year and a half ago, with real-estate prices falling, Dmitry Orlov, a forty-six-year-old software engineer from Leningrad, sold his apartment in the Brighton section of Boston, along with most of its contents, and bought a sailboat—an old sharpie made from Douglas-fir marine plywood, on which he and his wife, Natasha, a literary translator, now live, debt-free. They rent a slip at the Constitution Marina, near the Boston Naval Shipyard, and he walks to work at a nearby advertising agency. For errands, Orlov rides a bicycle, which he sometimes parks on deck. It’s been a long time since he owned either a car or a television (“When I’m in front of one for five minutes, I think it’s lying to me and I want to take wire cutters and clip the power cord”). He has outfitted the boat, which is named Hogfish, with solar panels and six months’ worth of propane, and figures he can store an equivalent supply of rice and beans down below. “It’s basically a survival capsule,” he said recently.

A doomer: “That’s the exciting thing about collapse—the breaking down of barriers and definitions that just don’t work anymore.” Illustration by Barry Blitt

Orlov moved to the United States when he was twelve, and returned to the Soviet Union for the first time in 1989, shortly after his uncle, a political prisoner under the Andropov regime, was released. During his second trip back, in 1990, the country was suffering from a fuel shortage, and he financed a road trip to the medieval towns of Pskov and Novgorod with a trunk full of vodka, trading half-litre bottles for ten litres of gasoline from black-marketeers along the way. (This was just after Gorbachev’s anti-alcoholism campaign, and Orlov capitalized on a death in the family by redeeming a funeral’s worth of vodka coupons.) The only comparable resource seemed to be bluejeans, of which he’d brought only one pair. No one wanted rubles. He internalized the lesson for future reference: “When faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money.”

Over the course of several visits, Orlov observed the social effects of the Soviet breakdown and concluded that there were some peculiar advantages to his home country’s dysfunctionality. Bloated bureaucracies move slowly, and are therefore slow to die. Long breadlines force people to consider backup plans, like kitchen gardens. Orlov’s 2008 book, “Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects,” identifies the ingredients of what he calls “superpower collapse soup”—a severe shortfall in the production of crude oil, a worsening foreign-trade deficit, an oversized military budget, and crippling foreign debt—and argues that his adopted country, with its “American-style Potemkin villages” and “highly compensated senior lunch-eaters,” is not only vulnerable but likely to fare worse. (“Make no mistake about it: this soup will be served, and it will not be tasty!”) “Now we’re in hospice care,” he told me. “The bailouts you see can be viewed as ever bigger doses of morphine for a patient that’s not long for this world.”

In 2006, Orlov published an online manifesto, “The New Age of Sail,” in which he extolled the virtues of what might be called bourgeois survivalism. “She must look like a proper yacht, and not a shanty boat or a barge, because she must give coastal property owners no reason to complain to the harbormaster about the ugly thing spoiling their precious view,” he wrote. “She should give the impression that she is sailed by people of obvious quality and distinction, of the sort that snooty coastal property owners might want to invite over for gin-and-tonics and to catch up on the goings on in San Tropez.” Life on a boat has the additional benefit, he wrote, of providing “isometric exercise similar to a Pilates workout,” because of the constant jostling of the sea. “People who live aboard are rarely overweight.”

Hogfish, whose hull is trimmed red and gray, looks the bourgeois part; aside from the solar panels and bicycles, it is indistinguishable from the weekend yachts cruising in and out of Boston Harbor throughout the warmer months. Regarding the domestic considerations of the transition to aquatic sustainability, Orlov said, “I think my wife is very realistic, but I can’t say that she’s all that in favor of it. We’re doing it in stages.” For now, he keeps a ten-horsepower Yamaha outboard motor handy, in case of emergency or faint breeze, and just before Thanksgiving he installed an on-demand hot-water system to take the bite out of a coastal New England winter. He plans, meanwhile, to establish a trading network along Lake Champlain for transporting Vermont apples and maple syrup to farmers’ markets in New York City, and hopes to be able to undercut diesel trucks on price when the oil market resumes its upward swing. “We don’t have a long wait before sail-based transport is the only option,” he said, anticipating more dire environmental conditions. (From the manifesto: “In the future, I expect coastal property owners to get downright excited when they see any sailboat, whether it looks fashionable or not, paddle out their leaky canoes, and try to barter jewelry, silver cutlery or pretty seashells for the things they desperately need.”) Should the trading not suffice, and the need to raise chickens arise, they’ll set sail and relocate to a more rural base of operations, where Hogfish, which has a flat bottom, can double as a trailer home.

Until recently, Orlov identified the readers of his book, and of a blog that he maintains, Club Orlov, as belonging to three basic cultural categories: “back-to-the-land types,” united in their opposition to industrial agriculture; “peak oilers,” who worry about the shock effects on energy markets of reaching the maximum global crude-extraction rate; and all-around Cassandras, or “people who sometimes derisively are called doomers.” (The doomers are currently enjoying a little less derision, which is a mixed blessing, because it is axiomatic among true believers that mainstream respect means that it is too late for anything to be done.) But in the past few months, judging from the e-mails he receives, Orlov has acquired a fourth audience, composed of financial professionals, who have been, as he said, “bolstering my gut feeling that the United States is bankrupt.” A number of them have placed orders for multiple copies of his book, and he took some pleasure in imagining them passing it on to their friends and families this past holiday season as a grim kind of stocking stuffer.

One of Orlov’s greatest fans is the author James Howard Kunstler, whose 1993 book about suburban sprawl, “The Geography of Nowhere,” is a staple of collegiate urban-studies curricula, and whose weekly blog column, Clusterfuck Nation, can be read as a sustained critique of the cheerful globalism championed by Thomas Friedman. His latest contribution to the doomersphere is an engaging novel, “World Made by Hand,” set in the post-collapse future, and while it’s not apocalyptic by the standards of, say, Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” it is comprehensive in its imagination of the disasters that await us: dirty bombs and race wars and dengue fever and flu epidemics and forced shavings by religious fanatics and hurricanes in New England in June. (Kunstler resists the doomer label—“I’ve never been a complete collapsitarian,” he says—but the fact that one of his bombs detonates in Washington on “twelve twenty-one” is likely to please superstitious adherents of the Maya calendar, which concludes its first cycle on what is now the Internet’s most popular day of reckoning: December 21, 2012.) “World Made by Hand” is set in a small town north of Albany, where the residents have no oil, no coffee, no spices, no mail delivery, and only sporadic electricity, but marijuana cultivation is booming and they’re growing “buds the size of plums.” Capitalism and human ingenuity persist; it’s only the economic incentives that change. “The action is going to be in smaller towns in the years ahead, because the cities are going to be so problematic,” he told me.

Kunstler likes to say that the United States has “a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of,” and when I proposed visiting him last fall in Saratoga Springs, where he lives, he advised against taking the train. Hudson River foliage in October struck me as one of those things that, like vodka and pot, retain their appeal even in a dismal fiscal cycle, so I bought an Amtrak ticket. Sure enough, about midway up the line, the train came to an unplanned stop, and did not resume forward progress for more than a half hour, during which the conductor befriended the family sitting in front of me—a father and his two young daughters, from Vermont. Theirs was an unlikely, if fitting, alliance between economic populism and nouveau hippiedom. “There go the stockbrokers,” the conductor said, as a southbound passenger train whizzed by on the left. “As long as they’re on the train they can’t be spending your money.” Meanwhile, the father, whose hair was long and braided, pointed out the window at a speedboat on the river and said, “Look at him, wasting gasoline.” They might both have sympathized with Orlov. The family, it turned out, was planning to stop in Saratoga Springs for lunch, and they grew louder as the wait persisted. Finally, after we’d started moving again, the conductor made an announcement: “Albany is next. That’ll occur in twenty minutes. Of course, based on past performance, who knows?” I got off in Albany and rented a car.

Kunstler showed up at my hotel wearing jeans and a bright-red vest over a flannel shirt, with a small hoop in his left ear. He is bald, with a neatly trimmed gray mustache, and walks with a bounding theatricality, perhaps owing as much to his thespian days at SUNY-Brockport, in the late sixties, as to the overwhelming correctness of his warning, back in 2005, about a “worldwide pyramid racket” involving subprime mortgages and what he later called “incomprehensibly abstract mutant financial ‘products,’ ” such as derivatives and credit default swaps. He was also carrying a long umbrella (the forecast was partly cloudy), which he used to prevent me from crossing the street in front of a car that didn’t appear to be slowing down. “Fuck you, asshole!” he yelled at the driver, an unwitting enemy combatant in the new class warfare (transportation division) that Kunstler believes will soon have Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton hiding from more than just the paparazzi. Shortly after we turned left onto Broadway, the town’s main commercial stretch, Kunstler ran into a couple of acquaintances, a local real-estate developer and the owner of an art gallery that had just shuttered, eating lunch at an outdoor café. “Your vision is coming true, only through the back door,” the developer said, presumably referring to the fact that gas prices—Kunstler is a prominent peak oiler—did not seem to be the catalyst of the current upheaval.

“I’d say an emergency meeting of the G7 is pretty much the front entrance,” Kunstler said. “Although who would have thought Iceland would be the first to go?”

Kunstler saw degeneracy everywhere. Stopping in a pharmacy to drop off a prescription for sleeping pills, he was nearly bowled over in a narrow aisle by a heavyset woman, and remarked, “Our fellow-Americans just don’t look that healthy.” The tattooed arms of a young man standing next to a young woman at a crosswalk qualified him as a “bad boyfriend.” (The proliferation of tattoos, Kunstler has written, is “a symptom of the growing barbarism in American life,” and the fact that tattoo parlors now rent space on main thoroughfares, like Saratoga Springs’ Broadway, rather than in back alleys, is “a harbinger of social dysfunction.”) Kunstler showed me a motel at the corner of Broadway and Division Street, near the outdoor café, that he considered “the most low-quality Western-civilization architecture conceivable.” Its name was the Downtowner, although its appearance suggested a Roadsider. “Look at the details,” he said. “Look at those stupid mangy little shutters and those horrible windows, and the horrible steel railings and those ridiculous pilasters. Everything about it is just so cheap. And the thing that amazes me is that this is the stuff that we built in the most confident and flush period of our history, in the sixties, when, you know, we were basically ruling the world!” Farther along, we came across a faux-Georgian bank, which he said was “basically fabricated out of the cheapest shit you could possibly get, stuck onto a brick box. Except it’s not even a brick box. It’s an aluminum-frame box with a brick veneer, meant to visually get across a cartoon idea that this is a plantation house, and therefore a dignified building—you know, with a dignified activity, banking, going on.” Hard as it may be to believe, Saratoga Springs rates comparatively well in Kunstler’s assessment of America’s built environments.

The architectural criticism was inextricably linked to our national predicament, because in Kunstler’s view the American economy since the Second World War has essentially been one of continuous sprawl-building, made possible by cheap (but diminishing) energy sources, and, given what we’ve built, it amounts to “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.” As long-term infrastructure, McMansion subdivisions and the big-box retailers that service them are only worth the scraps that can be salvaged by scavenging, he contends, and when oil stops allowing people to indulge the current fantasy, Bergen and Fairfield Counties will become Hobbesian slums, highway strip malls will be recolonized by sumac trees, and the hulking sheds formerly known as Kmarts will be good for little more than Pentecostal roller rinks. (Economic collapse bodes well for fundamentalism, as people seek holistic explanations for the wipeout of their savings.)

“We make so many assumptions about the things that we know necessarily continuing to function the way they are now,” he said. “I find that hilarious.” Take skyscrapers: their efficiencies may become nightmares in a blackout, as the elevators stop working. And when natural-gas reserves are depleted to levels at which pressure falters, the pipes will freeze and burst, the halls will flood, and offices and apartments will become instantly uninhabitable. Large cities will then need to decompress almost overnight, and reconcentrate along their waterways, which offer both potential power sources and shipping routes. The industrial zoning of riverfronts and canals was not an unfortunate accident. Or, put another way, the Gowanus Canal is a model of sustainable urbanism. Goodbye, greenways.

That morning, on his blog, Kunstler had mentioned Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s best-selling book “The Black Swan,” about the inevitability of unforeseeable events, and now he elaborated. “We don’t really know how collapse proceeds,” he said. “We have reason to believe that it can happen pretty rapidly and comprehensibly, in ways that we’d find shocking and unbelievable until it happens. We’re in the middle of one right now. I mean, you and I are walking happily down a little alley in a small town, but really around us all kinds of stuff is in dire trouble—you know, banks in dozens of countries, people in Iceland are hoarding food. Three weeks ago, none of the people in Reykjavík thought, Oh, on October 13th our currency will be worthless. ”