Sharon Astyk

Thinking About Heating and Cooling Differently

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Today’s posts will focus on heating and cooling and how to deal with these issues…I’m going to talk about strategies for both of these things – first of all, how not to die from heat or cold – how to live without any heating or cooling, even in very cold or hot places, and then also how to cool and heat your house using fewer fossil fuels, but before we go there, I want to talk about how we *think* about heating and cooling overall. Because that has at least as deep an effect on how we approach this as the actual method we use.

Garden Farming: The Best Investment

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Those of us who have sought security by producing our own food to eat and to sell locally instead of trying to find salvation in the pretend money that the government is pouring into the banks to save them, should count our blessings. That popping noise I think I hear issuing from the Chicago Board of Trade is the sound of grain bubbles bursting all over the trading floor.

If we all lived sustainably, could we change the world?

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The other day Andrew C. Revkin wrote, “Only direct experience seems to trigger change.” By that he meant disasters, deaths, destruction, home loss, looming gas prices, … imminent experiences that make you change your lifestyle right now because you have no other choice. I have no other way of saying this other than that really sucks. Let’s prove him wrong. Let’s change our lifestyles before things get awful. Now.

Idols of the marketplace

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Among the most pervasive elements of the conventional wisdom these days is the conviction that any solution to peak oil will have to be found within the market economy as presently structured. It may be high time to revisit this assumption.