Dec

Coping with the Coming Crisis #1

Crisis, What Crisis?
The one that has to do with ‘ancient sunlight’. It has two components. This first is that one form of this ancient sunlight (oil) is running out (“Peak Oil”). The second is that using up this ancient sunlight (burning oil and coal) has unfortunate consequences for the weather and so life on our planet (“Global Warming”).

On this blog?
This blog is about health, and I’m planning to keep this focus. But the readers are interested in planetary and ecological issues too. How do I know? Because Isabella Mori was kind enough to do a guest post for me called A Clean Body and Mind on a Clean Earth – it became the most popular post and stayed there for a month – it is on its way to becoming the most popular post of all time on this blog. So, I think it is OK to add ecology into the mix on this blog.

Is there anything to do?
Talk of a crisis often leads to feelings of futility and despair. When people talk of a coming crisis few of us leap up excitedly crying, “Well, let’s get to work then!”. This is a problem when the crisis demands change on our part. Talking about the crisis can lead to people feeling less like doing stuff when this is needed most.

I’m glad to say that there is a great book that gives lots of practical and do-able advice for what to do in response to our crisis. It is Depletion and Abundance by Sharon Astyk. Sharon writes a blog called Casaubon’s Book. Sharon is from the US. She moved from New York to a small farm from where her husband commutes to work at a university. Her response to the crisis was to try and do what she thought was necessary for all of us in Western nations – to reduce our fossil fuel use by about 90%. Her blog, and this book, is about that.

This may sound daunting. It needn’t be. If you live a normal suburban life it is relatively simple and painless to make some major reductions. Trading in the four-wheel drive monster for a hybrid car makes a huge difference. It can be that easy to make a 50% reduction.

This post was going to be a simple review of the book. As I started writing it I realised the book was too rich, and the topic too important, to be confined to one post. So this is the first in a series of posts about this (I don’t know how many there will be).

What’s So Good About the Book?
The extended title gives a clue. It is: Depletion and Abundance life on the new home front, or, one woman’s solutions to finding abundance for your family while coming to terms with Peak Oil, Climate Change and Hard Times.

This book is so good because it deals with the area where we all have most control – our family and how we live day to day. This book is so good beacause it shows that we can live more abundantly than how we live today, even as we adapt to our crisis.

Sharon deals with domestic details as well as bigger questions (if we can’t travel as far because fuel is so expensive, what does this mean for health care and education?).

This book is an intelligent and practical response to the question: So, what can I do? In brief, Sharon’s answer is to live at home and do as much at home as possible. It is also clearly, passionately and informatively written.

Not so Good?
There are naturally lots of details that I could quibble over. The only big criticism I have is that Sharon’s suggestions are much easier to implement if you own a house (not just an apartment, a house). Given the price of housing in Australia (where I live) and other places, it looks like there are going to be fewer of us owning houses. Set against the whole book this is a very small criticism. I think it is a great book, that is well worth reading.

The next posts in this series will fill out much more the issues and the details that Sharon deals with.

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