User blog:Ottawaprofessor/Sharon Astyk Blog Site

Sharon Astyk is one of America's well recognized voices about peak oil and climate change. She is a writer, teacher, blogger, polymath and farmer who covers issues that range from agiculture to energy policy, from food preservation and cooking to religious life and democracy, while trying to live a life that corresponds with her principles. Some days she even succeeds. She is the author of three books: Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front, which explores the impact that energy depletion, climate change and our financial instability are likely to have on our future, and what we can do about it; A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil co-authored with Aaron Newton, which considers what will be necessary for viable food system on a national and world scale in the coming decades, and argues that at its root, any such system needs a greater degree of participation from all of us; and Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Preservation and Storage which makes the case for food storage and preservation as integral parts of an ethical, local, healthy food system and tells readers how to begin putting food by. All three books were published by New Society Publishers.

Sharon is a prolific blogger, updating her site www.sharonastyk.com almost daily, and her work is widely published in both print and internet media. She has been interviewed by the New York Times, the Washington Post and National Public Radio among other media, and speaks widely on Energy Depletion, Farming, Climate Change, Food Preservation and the role of religious Communities in our ecological crisis.

Believing that it isn’t enough to just advocate for a more sustainable, greener life, Sharon and her husband, Eric and sons Eli, Simon, Isaiah and Asher have set to trying to live one. They farm in rural upstate New York, raising vegetables, pastured poultry and dairy goats at Gleanings Farm, a 27 acre homestead. Before she began writing, Sharon ran a CSA, delivering vegetables, eggs and flowers to more than 20 families at its peak. Her family uses less than 1/8 the energy and resources of the average American household, and attempt to prove that even families with children can live sustainably. The founder of the Riot 4 Austerity, a movement that has five thousand members who try and live on vastly fewer resources than the Western norm, Sharon believes that the personal and the political are not fully separable, that we cannot call for restriction of resources without giving people a vision of a life that is graceful, desirable and low-impact.