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's work
his is the unexplored history of women - and perhaps the most significant unexplored segment of women's history of all. To precisely the degree that our accomplishments are accomplishments that rely on seemingly infinite flows of cheap energy, they are vulnerable to being lost as energy supplies tighten and hard choices have to be made.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:47 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: women's work
I'm sure it is only a matter of time before someone explains earnestly to me how wimmen's rights are destroying the planet
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:26 AM • 6 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: 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: Collapse
I've come to think that I'm only beginning to grasp the ways that gender and sex have been integral in creating our collective predicament. I have and do argue that at least as significant as the famed failed suburban experiment that James Kunstler and others see as central to causing our problem was the shift to a corporatized feminism that replaced women with cheap energy, "housewifized" or professionalized all labor in the subsistence economy, and, along with the push to move farmers off their land and into the workforce, was a major factor in enabling our industrial expansion.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 10:09 AM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: humor
I've always meant to write a post with this title, but somehow never got around to it. Then I saw The-always-amazing-Zuska's latest about the way that Erma Bombeck's name is being used to derogate people as being unserious and tied...
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:17 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: recipes
As I've argued before, we can't change our agriculture, or improve our health without changing the way we eat - and we do that by teaching people to cook again, to make good use fo the food they do have, and by helping them make ethical food choices. And that requires small and homely things like recipes, which have their place even in SCIENCE!.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 2:06 PM • 27 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
