Sharon Astyk

Thinking Thanksgiving II: Cycles

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If you want to make a traditional Thanksgiving dinner wholly from scratch, you start ahead of time. If you want to make it from food you’ve raised yourself, you start way, way ahead of time – like in January of the year before. In some ways, it starts even earlier, but January is the new year – and when you grow your own, you are always thinking of the future – even if not consciously about any particular dinner.

Ingredients of Transition: Inclusion and diversity

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Transition tends to appeal to what academics call the ‘post-consumerists’ i.e. those who have reached a level of sufficient wealth and education to feel comfortable in letting go of some of it, who are often, but not always, white and middle-class. However, if Transition is serious about creating resilient communities but fails to create a process over which all sections of the community feel some sense of ownership, it will not truly be creating resilience.

Neither apocalypse nor paradise

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Thanks to Dave Ewolt for his response to my piece “Peak oil risks becoming an apolcalyptic cult.” I would like to respond to some of his excellent points. I agree that peak oil and climate change are grave threats to human civilization. I hope things will turn out as rosy as Dave seems to think. But I am sure that to help things turn out as well as they can, peak oil and climate activists need to do a much better job reaching out to the mainstream. To start with, it’s time to go beyond telling stories of either societal collapse or re-localized paradise.

You are who you eat with

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When the 10 Garcia-Prats boys got together every night for dinner, they shared more than food around the table. They talked about the successes and frustrations of their days. The older boys helped the younger ones cut their meat. They compared their picks for the World Cup, a conversation that turned into an impromptu geography lesson.

Thanksgiving: a time to think about gift economies?

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If our current system fails us, we should have at least some idea regarding what options might be available that could perhaps be pieced together into a new system that works. As I looked at gift economies a bit, I realized our current system has a substantial element of gift economics in it. Perhaps if our already functioning gift economy can be expanded, it may play a role in transitioning to a more suitable long-term economy. … An important difference between a gift economy and an exchange economy is that in a gift economy, a bond develops between the gift giver and the recipient, while in an exchange economy, the parties often don’t care if they ever see each other again.

No time for lullabies

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As the industrial world muddles its way deeper into crisis, books and articles that claim that the solution to all our troubles is already in hand continue to proliferate. There are good reasons why soothing claims of this kind are so popular right now — and better reasons why they need to be set aside for more practical perspectives.

Economic Growth: A zero sum game

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Understandably growth, growth and more growth is the mantra of politicians, economists and media commentators the world round. However, what if future growth is just not possible? The recently released World Energy Outlook (WEO) from the International Energy Agency (IEA) did not go so far as to say that future growth is no longer possible, but it does suggest that at the global level future economic growth is now a zero sum game. In short, China and India’s gain is the OECD’s loss.

Can energy retrofit loans bring wonderful life to economy?

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America is beginning to look a lot like the dark “Pottersville” vision in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Jimmy Stewart’s character George Bailey is shown a town where the middle class has been destroyed and lives in poverty under the thumb of evil Big Banker Henry Potter. Bailey’s heroic efforts to help the middle class saved Bedford Falls. America can help the middle class prepare for energy shortages with energy retrofit loans — or funnel billions to Potter-like promoters of Too Big to Fail energy projects. Where’s that angel Clarence when we need him most?