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Sharon Astyk and hard times
Rod Dreher, Crunchy Con
Yesterday I was driving back from lunch and listening to a radio talk show. The interviewee was making a lot of sense. She and her husband are raising four kids on $40,000 a year in upstate New York, doing subsistence farming. When I tuned in, she was answering a listener who wanted to know how, if she worried that climate change was going to make the world a more difficult place in which to live, she could have four children. In response, she said that the problem is not too many people; the problem was the extravagant way we Americans use resources. I'm quoting from memory, but I think she said that it takes five or six Kenyans to equal the carbon footprint of one American. Her basic point was not that we Americans should live like Kenyans, necessarily, but that our views on population are skewed by the incredible, by any world or historical standard, amount of resources we Americans consume to sustain our lifestyle.

The woman was Sharon Astyk, and let me tell you, if you follow the link to her website, you'll spend a lot of time you may not have. I have a lot to do today, so I won't be able to give her site the attention it deserves. I promise to revisit parts of it in the coming days. Wired magazine describes Astyk as "kinda the Wendell Berry of soccer moms growing their own food." She's a bookish woman in early middle age who used to run a Jewish-themed CSA, but who now working full-time in farming and raising her kids. The gist of her advocacy is that we are all moving rapidly toward a condition of living a lot poorer than we do now -- but that this isn't the end of the world. We can and should live poorer, she writes, and that inasmuch as relative poverty is the natural state of mankind, traditional wisdom has a lot to offer us to help us not only survive poverty, but thrive in it.
(2 October 2008)
Sharon gets a plug from the right side of the political spectrum. -BA

Buy local and help Main Street
Bill Berry, The Capital Times (Wisconsin)
STEVENS POINT -- On the Saturday after the big financial meltdown of September, people milled around the farmers' market on the public square here as if nothing had happened. Of course, many of them knew otherwise. But what is a person to do? The tomatoes are ripe for only so long, and a long winter is ahead.

Besides, at times like this, we have to take care of one another here at home. Financial markets may have no conscience, but the rest of us can do better than that.

The farmers' market here isn't as well known as Madison's, but it's at least as historic. Most of the buildings on the old public square at the east end of Main Street are late 19th century or early 20th century vintage, and the farmers have been coming here to sell produce for that long. Those with Polish names like Slowinski have been joined by Hmong folks with names like Vang. The market survives even as it changes here on the end of Main Street.

The "financial crisis," as it has quickly been dubbed, has led to concern about what will happen to America's Main Streets, and the jury is still out. When pundits speculate about Main Street, they're speaking in hyperbole about communities big and small across the land, not streets.

But it doesn't hurt to think about what Main Street meant to our communities years ago. They were once the centers of trade and commerce and also the heartbeat of our communities. You wanted to go someplace exciting? You headed for downtown.
(30 September 2008)

What to Do with Your Money During Tough Times
Michael Kramer, YES! Magazine
How will you get through the difficult economic times ahead? Here’s how to shop, where to bank, and how to save and invest to help you weather the storm while contributing to a more just and sustainable economy.

Millions of Americans are feeling the pinch of the troubled economy. You may have lost your job or worry about losing it. You may struggle to make your monthly mortgage payment or have already been forced into foreclosure. Perhaps you’ve incurred so much debt that you wonder if filing for bankruptcy is the only option.

Or, perhaps you’ve been saving for retirement, or have recently retired, and you worry about whether your money will stretch, considering the underperformance of your investments, and the devaluation of the dollar.

These are valid concerns, magnified by other current circumstances: “peak oil” and the resulting spike in fuel prices; the threat of global warming; and the impact of our national debt on this and future generations.

The first rule for weathering this financial storm: don’t panic. These times remind us of the importance of financial planning, particularly putting aside six months of salary and living within our means. In 2007, consumer debt rose 5.5 percent—twice as fast as wages. If you’re like most Americans, you now spend 20 percent of your budget on consumer debt. With home equity lines of credit disappearing, people are using their credit cards more, resulting in increased bankruptcy filings. What else can you do?

1. Reduce debt...

2. Build savings ...
3. Cut spending ...
4. Be patient ...
5. Green your money ...
   • Buy locally ...

   • Bank with care ...

Michael Kramer wrote this article as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Michael is managing partner and director of Social Research for Natural Investments LLC (NI), a socially responsible investment adviser since 1985 whose principals authored Investing With Your Values: Making Money and Making a Difference and “Investing From the Heart.”...
(2 October 2008)

Middle Class Lifeboat: Careers and Life Choices for Staying Afloat (video and audio)
Peak Moment via Global Public Media
Paul and Sarah Edwards are authors of a timely book "Middle-Class Lifeboat: Careers and Life Choices for Navigating a Changing Economy." In a world of decreasing resources, they ask, how do we financially support ourselves while moving towards sustainable lives? Emphasizing independent income sources, they consider dozens of possible careers from basic services to local-scale technologies. Life choices include lowering costs through simplifying, getting out of debt, and demonetizing (e.g., bartering). Or one can consider an "off-the-map" lifestyle like living abroad, off-grid, or an intentional community. This downturn is not just a cycle, they emphasize: it heralds a sea change. (www.middleclasslifeboat.com)
(11 September 2008)

A Sympathetic Critique of Localisation by Peter North
Transition Culture
Rob Hopkins writes:
I am very grateful to Pete North at the University of Liverpool for his permission to publish here the latest draft of a very important paper he has written for an upcoming edition of the journal Geoforum, which will focus on responses to peak oil. Pete’s paper is a fascinating overview of the arguments for and against localisation, which gives a deep view of the debates and of how Transition fits into that. I am involved in writing one for the same publication, which looks deeper into Transition itself, I’ll let you see that nearer the time. Pete asks for any feedback or comments you might have, do post them as comments below.

... Conclusion

In this paper I critique Swyngedouw’s conceptionalisation of the politics of sustainability as ‘post-political, arguing that climate change and peak oil are contested, and that we may well see a move away from an integrated global economy either to a new regionalism or to a new convivial economy. The question is, who is the agent? Localisation is not autarky – it is a different calculus about where economic activity should be located. There are strong and weak versions, with the weaker ones just really meaning that business will carry on as usual, but with shorter distribution networks, and a globally integrated economy will become more regionalised into the three blocks (the Americas, the EU, east Asia) that some globalisation sceptics have long argued is a better conceptualisation of the current global economy than that of hyperglobalisers (Hirst and Thompson 1996).

If we take a view that localisation does not specify any particular scale, just that goods should be produced as locally as makes sense, and these goods can include say aircraft; that there will not be a toll booth outside every city; and that peak oil will guide business to do the right thing for climate change as fuel prices stay high, then we can see a less globalised capitalism as a new regime of accumulation, with technology able to provide solutions to both problems. Deeper localisation, as suggested by Trainer and the Transition movement, seems a far more fundamental critique of neoliberal globalisation. The questions here are whether climate change and peak oil activists are able to construct a social movement able to put localisation into practice, and, if this represents a fundamental attack on neoliberal capitalism, how capitalism’s supporters will respond. We have already seen a police attack on the climate camp at Kingsnorth in August 2008: were the localisation movement to become more obviously anticapitalist then things could get interesting.

The Transition movement argues that its professed non-political stance, that has seen its arguments appearing on mainstream radio soap operas, in MP’s summer reading lists, and by conservations organisations mean it can work ‘under the radar’. It may be that the full implications of the climate and resource crises for neoliberal capitalism have yet to be fully perceived by elites. Time will tell, and the climate change movement will have to work out how to work within a changing political environment, building alliances and withstanding or avoiding attacks where necessary.
(1 October 2008)