[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Depletion and Abundance

[Bill Totten]

Life On The New Home Front

Review of Sharon Astyk's Depletion and Abundance: Life On The New Home
Front {1}

by Amanda Kovattana

Energy Bulletin (October 16 2008)


When smart women liberate themselves from the mainstream life they were
trained to aspire to and write about what they did instead, the rest of
us benefit from a serious intellectual challenge to what is touted as
progress. Formerly an academic in early modern literature, Sharon Astyk
whose blog {2} I've been enjoying, has brought to peak oil the much
needed female perspective.

And what does that look like? Think Vandana Shiva meets Barbara
Kingsolver meets the Tightwad Gazette {3}. Sharon aligns herself with
the powerdown philosophy first put forth by Richard Heinberg. She gives
a convincing argument of why we are not going to save ourselves with
renewable technology. But more than that. She firmly reminds us, in true
Vandana Shiva style, that women have been doing most of the work of life
so that others can participate in the "world" and make money off the
formal economy. She provides a much needed reminder that the informal
economy, that mostly takes place at home with making things and growing
things and raising children, is going to be moving to the forefront of
our lives when it comes to the post industrial life of post peak oil.
And she does it by reclaiming this traditional sphere of women's work
from a feminist perspective.

This was important to me because she points out that we did not do the
world a service by demeaning this work in order to liberate women. We
just gave women the keys to the men's room, so to speak, and left this
rather important work to paid minority laborers and third world sweat
shops. This, so that the second half of the population could then be
shifted to the high octane life of dependency on manufactured goods and
services. I never did buy that life, but living in the States you have
to work hard not to participate in it. I had my third world upbringing
to offer me another model, but Sharon has the harder task of prying
loose the modern, convenience-run family from this dependency. She meets
the challenge head on by tackling the many beliefs that without a high
tech, high energy life we'd be back to eating insects. This is what I
find so condescending about the assumptions of the first world, but
through Sharon's compassionate eyes I get a glimpse of what it's like
for a modern woman to weigh out the costs of this high octane life.
Chapter by chapter she takes on the myths of our lives that have gotten
all tied up in this dependency ie: education, health care, home
maintenance and food growing and preparation. Her ideas are mind
expanding in a way reminiscent of Ivan Illich {4}, but with more home
grown examples.

And by sharing her life in a country farmhouse, raising four boys, she
shows what this domestic life would look like. I am gratified to watch
her admonish her boys for insulting the food she serves them. She is a
model for child raising that I have longed to see. Yet she humbly admits
all her shortcomings while sharing what she is striving for. Her book is
a lesson in becoming a responsible citizen. A manifesto for domestic
self-reliance as she urges everyone to start a garden.

This brings to the peak oil community a different quality of discourse.
It robs it of the thrill of big solutions, of high tech wonders or
policies imparted by government decree. Local government plays a role,
but mostly in changing codes that do not now allow the raising of
livestock in your backyard. She brings the solutions down to what
ordinary people can do locally. She even argues against the high expense
of a solar powered home and suggests going more low tech. Thus her peak
oil vision becomes one of frugality and old time homesteading
technology, which begins to look a lot like a depression era America.
(And I'm prompted to call on an octogenarian friend to ask her what that
was like.) This vision also robs the peak oil thrill seeker of the
satisfaction of seeing the world change in some dramatic way that will
fundamentally affect the way we live. No we have been here before and it
ain't anything special. You can all go home now (and make do with what
you have).

The promise of abundance given in her title derives from her
satisfaction in a happier, simpler life. And people do respond to this
message. The only thing missing for me is some kind of intellectual
payback. I'm not much for doing something because it's the right thing
to do for my kids blah, blah, not having any. If it's just going to be
about duty and obligation where's the fun in it? For me becoming
self-reliant has always been about thumbing my nose at corporations by
not buying into their crap and not having to work so hard to pay for it.
(And not participating in their unethical rape of the world.) This may
be the end of the line for me and peak oil as a framing device. Sharon
has written the definitive book about living in a peak oil world and I
have nothing more to add, but by grounding it so practically in everyday
living preparations she also leaves me no political context in which to
express this activity as a form of protest. Just surviving an unpleasant
future is not enough. Sharon does mention that the opulent way we live
robs others across the world of their share of resources, but this is
not a book that galvanizes the political message of anti-globalization.

When a young East Asian man at the train station, saw this book in my
hand, he expressed intense curiosity about it and I told him that it was
about how diminishing resources would force us to live differently, more
efficiently and frugally which would be good for us - especially
Americans. So for a moment there we shared our third world perspective
on the fallacy of the American lifestyle and I was able to offer him an
alternative position to it. If this is how the book is received by
Americans, then Sharon has done good.

_____

Amanda Kovattana is a regular contributor to Energy Bulletin. She just
wrote another piece on a talk by Naomi Klein {5}. This review also
appears on Amanda's Flckr blog {6}.

Links:

1 http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/4015

2 http://sharonastyk.com/

3 http://www.tightwad.com/

4 http://www.flickr.com/photos/earthworm/549722550/in/set-72057594058670187

5
http://www.flickr.com/photos/earthworm/2949939425/in/set-72057594058670187/

6
http://www.flickr.com/photos/earthworm/2947454683/in/set-72057594058670187/

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/46908

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