ElementalMom

I’m a huge fan of Sharon Astyk’s. I love that she can look at everything going on in the world, and see it as an opportunity for growth, for change, for setting up a good life. I find her stuff to be both honest, and optimistic (unlike most peak oil/climate change/financial collapse readings, which are kinda like Mad Max, and quite disturbing).

So it’s with some glee that I announce that we’re going to be participating in her Independence Days challenge. Head on over to her blog to see how it works. I’ve added the widget to my blog, to let folks know that I’m participating, and I’ll post my wrap-up on Saturdays, or as close to it as I can manage. Because we’re on a boat instead of on dirt, it’ll be pretty heavily modified sometimes. But I think it’s important for folks to see that, if we can do this, anyone can, and any steps towards independence are good steps.

Here’s my first installment, for the first week of March:

1. Plant something – This weekend, I’m planning the early crop in our garden box at Big Daddy Community Garden in Oakland, and I’m starting herbs in pots on the back transom.
2. Harvest something – Picked lemons from my benefactor in Oakland
3. Preserve something – Juiced the lemons and froze the juice, dried some of the peel.
4. Waste Not–  I’m looking into the local farm cycles, to see what kinds of bulk purchases we can get in on.
5. Want Not – We did two entire days of errands on foot last week. Woof!
6. Build Community Food Systems – I’ve been bagging on all my neighbors to get some preparedness together. It’s amazing how resistant people are to simply having a bag of beans and a bag of rice available, even though a lot of these people go to Costco and could easily afford it. So I continue to harass the people nearest me physically.
7. Eat the Food – We made our own lara bar knockoffs. Pretty good, and a great replacement for sugar mayhem.

So that’s us, for this week. If you’re thinking about joining up, let me know in the comments, and be sure to leave a link to your blog, so we can share each other’s progress, and be encouraging.

I adore Sharon Astyk. I read her blog semi-religiously, and she’s the closest thing to come to convincing me that moving off the boat and onto dirt might someday be an OK idea. So whenever she cranks out a new book (as she’s been doing lately), I pounce on it.

A Nation of Farmers, her second book, is fabulous. You can stop reading here; the rest of this post is just me babbling.

Sharon sees the same signs as I do, that things are changing, faster than our culture’s capability to keep up. But unlike most of the other Peak Oil/Depletion folks out there, Sharon sees this change as opportunity. Hers is, considering the subject matter, the most optimistic of viewpoints. Her answer, in a nutshell, is that we have to fall back to our agrarian roots, focus on maintaining our food supply, and build communities around each other.

You get done reading an Astyk book, and you come away thinking that the complete fall of the American Lifestyle as we know it would probably be a good thing. And if she had her way, we’d end up eating better when all was said and done after all. She has brilliant ideas about, and arguments for, taking charge of your own food supply here, now, no matter where you are or what your circumstance.

Everyone, absolutely everyone, should read “A Nation of Farmers”. It might be what’s between you, and feeding your families in the future.

This post, from the inestimably brilliant Sharon Astyk, had me standing on my chair cheering.
No. Just No.

She’s right, of course. We don’t have to. We have ways of fighting back against the doom. We can do this. You can do this. But please, for everyone’s sake, for the sake of mine and yours and ours and theirs… get going. Now.