Sharon Astyk is a Science Writer, Farmer, Parent of Many, writing about our weird life right now. She is the author of four books: Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front, which explores the impact that energy depletion, climate change and our financial instability are likely to have on our future, and what we can do about it. Depletion and Abundance won a Bronze Medal at the Independent Publishers Awards. A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil co-authored with Aaron Newton, which considers what will be necessary for viable food system on a national and world scale in the coming decades, and argues that at its root, any such system needs a greater degree of participation from all of us; Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Preservation and Storage which makes the case for food storage and preservation as integral parts of an ethical, local, healthy food system and tells readers how to begin putting food by, and the newly published Making Home: Adapting our Homes and Our Lives to Settle in Place, which "shows readers how to turn the challenge of living with less into settling for more".
The Edible Houseplant Project
By Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book
Thus began the edible houseplant and tropicals project. I’m hardly the only one doing things like this, but I’m determined to see what I can accomplish in particular, and how I can help others profit from it.
Mama Food
By Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book
Writing books and essays about food, I hear a lot of stories about what people ate growing up.
Why I Won’t Do the Food Stamp Challenge
By Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book
In the last few years, a number of political leaders have tried to live on a food stamps budget. A number of people have asked me to do it as well, and I’ve always refused.
What’s the Connection Between Foster Care and the Ecological Stuff?
By Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book
The fact that we can’t make professional institutions that duplicate the functions of family suggest that there is something about families that cannot be marketed, sold, professionalized or made into cookie cutter product...
If Climate Change and Population Growth Are Going to Push Food Prices Up by 50%, What Happens When you Add in Peak Oil?
By Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book
Nearly everyone is failing to take into account the role of geology, oil and energy limits in their predictions – and we’re racing towards disaster.
Food-But-No-Fuel, Fuel-But-No-Food
By Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book
Interesting about the ways climate change will impact Saudi Arabia’s agriculture - already strained pretty much to the limit by inhospitable heat and drought
Is America’s fertility decline a real problem?
By Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book
Chances are you already have a strong opinion on this subject. There’s a great deal of noise, mostly but not wholly on the American right about the dangers of fertility decline. Jonathan Last’s book _What To Expect When No One is Expecting_ and Ross Douthat’s recent lament about American women’s TFR (total fertility rate – the reason men aren’t mentioned is that men don’t count in fertility calculations) is down to 1.87 children. Both writers predict fairly dire outcomes – economic stagnation a la Japan, a benefits crisis as insufficient new workers arrive. Moreover, for Douthat and other commentators like Rod Dreher, there’s a larger moral and cultural dimension that is absolutely critical...
In the end, sometimes giving things up *IS* the answer
By Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book
About five years ago a colleague of mine, Dale Allen Pfeiffer wrote an essay I can no longer locate. At the time, Colony Collapse Disorder was just being diagnosed in bees, and one of the discussed potential causes of the problem was cell phones and cell phone towers. Pfeiffer didn’t, as I remember, take a stand on this question as a cause, but what he did do was interview people and ask “If it was true that cell phones caused CCD, and knowing that we depend on bees for a large portion of our food, would you give up your cell phone to save the bees?” The answer, overwhelmingly, was no.