About
Sharon February 23rd, 2008
About the Site:
My focus is on families of every shape and kind, and on what is achievable for ordinary people, with ordinary skills and ordinary budgets. I believe that most of us can reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, help mitigate global warming, create local food systems and enable the creation of a life of abundance, even in the face of depletion.
I also believe that it is possible to develop strategies to do this on a larger scale than in our immediate communities as well. Thus this website invokes Victory Gardens and past times of national unity and self-sacrifice as a model of what we could do. In this, the past has a great deal to teach us about how to live well and happily with much less than most people do.
60 years ago, we faced an enormous crisis. Fascist expansionism, and the danger of new weapons in terrible hands pushed the entire country to work together. Everyone in the US and among our allies made sacrifices unimaginable to most of us. Young men went to war by the tens of thousands - every mother, father, sister, brother, wife had a family member in the war. People stood up to be the first in line to sign up to serve their nation. And everyone who couldn’t go to war did all they could. They had meatless days, gas rationing, wheatless days. They saved tinfoil and old clothes to make bandages, they knit socks and baked. Women who’d never held a job went into the factories and out to the fields to take over the work of men who had to leave. The economy was devoted to preventing a fascist empire, and to keeping our nation safe. Everyone from the president of the US to the children who collected cans were working together towards the same goal.
Today, we face a crisis of even greater magnitude. Despite the name of the website and the references to the World Wars, no this isn’t the crisis the present administration is manufacturing by destroying Iraq. We must drop our emissions of carbon down dramatically, if we’re to maintain a healthy planet, stay safe from hunger due to drought and flooding, and prevent the spread of disease (www.climatecrisis.net, www.climateark.com). If we are to have enough energy to ensure that we and the rest of the world have food, medicine, shelter and clean water, we have no choice but to conserve radically and prepare for the coming energy crisis (www.postcarbon.org, www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.com). Our economy and our political reserves are heavily overdrawn as we try to maintain wars on several fronts, while spending like there’s no tomorrow in Washington. Our own Department of Energy and NASA tell us that unless we turn all our energies to preparing for an energy crisis and dealing with climate change, we’re not going to make it. But our leaders aren’t leading us there - they are distracted by other agendas.
Once, presidents called on us to sacrifice, to work together for the sake of our nation and the world as a whole. This time, the call has to come from the bottom up, since our leaders won‘t lead, from the citizens who see what a bleak future we could have and want to change it. We need to work together on the same scale that we did during World War II, conserving resources, building infrastructure, changing our world so that we can go into the future, heads held high, knowing we both did what was necessary and did right to preserve our future and the future of our children and grandchildren. Our leaders have made it clear that they aren’t prepared to take us where we need to go, so all of us must lead the leaders. They think that Americans are too foolish and selfish to understand the need for sacrifice, and too accustomed to our wealth and privelege to be willing to give things up so that our children and grandchildren can have a better life. But that’s simply wrong. We have the courage, the intelligence, the ability and the sense of justice to do it. And this website is dedicated to helping each of us find our way to preserve resources for a common future.
About Me
I’m a writer, teacher and subsistence farmer, and the author of two forthcoming books on Peak Oil and Climate Change — Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front (Fall ‘08) and A Nation of Farmers (And Cooks) (Spring ‘09), the latter co-authored with Aaron Newton. Both books are forthcoming from New Society Publishers. I used to run a small, Jewish themed CSA, but now we’re concentrating on subsistence agriculture, growing food to share and teaching others to grow food. My training was in literature, focusing on the Renaissance and demographic and cultural crises of the 17th century. I’ve switched to focusing on the demographic and cultural crises of the 21st century for the moment, but retain an interest in all things literary. In my spare time (of which there isn’t much), my husband Eric and I are raising Eli (7 1/2), Simon (6), Isaiah (4) and Asher (2), and assorted critters and livestock, building an agrarian future.
About the Site’s Creation:
This website was a gift to me by an online friend, Deb, and I want to give her the full credit to which she is due. She designed the site and put it together, did the unimaginably tedious work of both importing all my old material and also walking techno-moron me through every step of even the simplest process. One of the best things about doing this work is meeting passionate, engaged and generous people. Deb is one of them - I’ve never met her, and she gave me this enormous gift of time, energy and beauty.. If you appreciate the clarity and attractiveness of this site, recognize it had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with Deb. I thank her.
- Comments(0)