I believe to cling to hopes that life will go on just like it has with a 4-8% oil decline is completely unrealistic. Aside from this being simply a belief, if a plausible one, it seems a bit of a straw-man. If life is indeed no longer going on "just like it is [now]", but is nonetheless sufficiently close that "transportation to and from work, school, grocery/pharmacy, shopping, etc" is at issue, then all this hard labor seems a rather superfluous waste that might be better spent on, say, more productive adaptations to less oil. OTOH if things are allowed to go so far that all this hard labor is truly unavoidable, then such transportation seems unlikely to be a huge issue, as we will be in a doom scenario such as 'cjwirth' harps on ad nauseam, with little or no "work, school, grocery/pharmacy, shopping, etc" to be transported to. That's what I see as incoherence in the list of points.

...in bygone times, the town blacksmith, tanner, baker, or shopkeeper, was not necessarily also a farmer. That's rather hedged, not a terribly blanket statement. However, and for example, IIRC, at the historic site of Bethabara in North Carolina, I was told that about 1/3 of the working-age population was engaged in occupations other than farming, circa 1800. I was quite astounded since that was quite inconsistent with what I was taught in school, namely that the percentage of farmers back then was in the high 90s, but there it is. I suspect that what I was taught, and what I sometimes read here, owes a little something to a synthetic romantic mythology, some of it propounded by people riding philosophical hobby horses about matters such as "the simple life" - and seeing nothing at all odd about riding them over some of the most complex machines ever built - Web servers!

During the war, the young men were off fighting. Yes. And somewhat older men were farming, but with great assistance from priority fuel rations and some assistance from younger men with agricultural draft exemptions. And in either war, the currently tremendous population of frail people in middle and old age simply did not yet exist. Back then, they were still carried off in great numbers by infectious disease or its treatment - penicillin was not yet in wide use and the sulfa drugs had nasty side effects and serious issues with effectiveness - something which was often still greatly aggravated by heat or cold. For good and sufficient reasons, "flu" derives from "influenza di freddo", and likewise, a good deal of European poetry [scroll down to "In Winter"] and literature muses on the terrors of deadly winter.

A little fresh air and exercise... Another straw man, perhaps. We're not discussing raising a few luxury vegetables of negligible caloric value as a hobby - which is what, if the truth be told, even many of the victory gardeners were up to. We're discussing a great deal of time-consuming back-breaking work, not just "a little fresh air" (hard labor to be done by people who in at least a good many cases are plopping down in front of the TV in the evening and pretending to watch through half-closed eyes because they're knackered out.) So I still think that as a prescription, it's rather less suited to the population of 2008 than it might have been to the youthful population of the early 20th century.

...wanting to look good for the rare picture-taking event. LOL.