Now on ScienceBlogs: Oldest Human-Made Object in Space
It is a really simple idea - things that can't go on the way they have been, usually don't. Sooner or later things that have no future just stop. We all know intellectually that we can't all live and consume like middle class Americans, that our kids are going to have a harder time because of our way of life, that Empires end and ecological disasters cause things to come to hard stops. We know it, but we don't KNOW it. This blog is about coming to KNOW, and figuring out where we go from here. I'm a science writer, teacher, environmental activist and small farmer who is trying to put her lifestyle where her mouth is, and live in a way with a future. When not writing books, serving on the board of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, I run my farm with my husband, where we raise dairy goats, herbs, pastured poultry, heirloom vegetable plants, children and havoc.
Category: women
Most graveyards have a "children's" section, or family stones record the brief and incredibly short lives of children - and a world where losing at least one child was a norm.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:45 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: population
The demographic transition is not a product of wealth or cheap energy in large quantities - we can see that by viewing the history of demographic shifts in Europe and the US. Instead, it is mostly about enabling people to make different reproductive choices, and supporting those choices - it requires no coercion, no high energy infrastructure, and is comparatively cheap to achieve.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 10:18 AM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: peak oil
Legal protections for women and children should be fundamental, but we live in a society that regards them as optional luxuries to be abandoned in hard times. Without a shift in the way we regard women's issues, we are likely to see more of this horror.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:18 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: women
I don't know that I ever announced this on the blog, but I'm off tomorrow to NYC for an event run by CUNY Feminist Press - last fall they named me one of 40 Young Feminist Writers under 40 whose...
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:33 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: women's work
this version of history, men invent things - the automobile, the oil well, the Haber-Bosch process, alternating current. Men consume things - all the figures with cars and cell phones. Men extract resources - the lumberjack chopping trees, the miner in his coal mine. Some of this is true - most major inventions were inventions of white males, coal miners and lumberjacks were men. But the story Heinberg tells is both explicitly and by implication a story of male invention, male progress, male consumption, male destruction.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:16 AM • 44 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: demographics
There is no way to get away from the fact that when states of any kind determine they have an investment in reproduction - in encouraging or discouraging it, it is very difficult to balance a broad commitment to a certain demographic future with the real bodies of the women.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 5:55 PM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: women
also think it is important, as we study events and history (we're homeschoolers) that my kids ask the question "where are the women" and "where are the people who aren't white" whenever they aren't at the center of the story and "what does the world look like through the people who weren't the victors or the center."
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 1:39 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: African-American
Note that this is tucked way, way down on the CNN front page - way below the news about a few Prius owners and their problems, way, way, way below the Death of Peter Graves or the induction of Abba into some hall of fame. Decline and fall stuff always is.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:53 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Economy
Housewifization of labor renders the household economy invisible, and things that are invisible can be infinitely exploited. Reclaiming the household economy, then, is a radical act.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:41 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: women
Women feed the world - and I mean that quite literally.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:28 AM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front
A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil
Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage and Preservation
