SHARON ASTYK

People grasp what their drinking water has to do with them. Overwhelmingly, I think they do not fully grasp what global warming has to do with them - and that's a rhetorical failure...At the same time that highly effective movements are arranging million person demonstrations in the streets, most of the people who will actually tell their congressfolk whether to vote for change were watching Law and Order SVU.

A lot of what I write works from the assumption that we all agree that peak oil and climate change are happening and going to be life-changing events. And yet, some people who read this blog don't necessarily agree on this subject, or they don't see the effects has being as profound as I do, or perhaps the idea of peak oil or climate change is fairly new to them, and they don't know what to believe.

Many of us need nothing in the world so much as more time. Adding new projects is exhausting - and stressful. And yet, we know that there are things we want to change - for example, most of us would like to grow a garden with our kids, or make sure that we know where our food comes from. We'd like to live in communities with a greater measure of food security, we'd like to know more about what we're eating. We'd like to have more contact with nature, we'd like to be more self-sufficient. We'd like to have better food at lower cost, we'd like to have a reserve for an emergency or to share. We'd like to do more in our community and to eat with one another. We'd like to sit down to a home cooked meal more often.

Since this fashion week, despite its sponsorship by the Mercedes Benz company, is supposed to be "green" people want to know what I think of the green fashion movement. And the answer to that is that I think it is all very interesting, and I'm delighted that people are trying to deal with the enormous impact of our clothing - and that reminds me to go hit my local Goodwill for some more second-hand t shirts to go with my sweats. Meanwhile, here's a lightly revised version of the original article which appeared first at Groovy Green Magazine in 2006.

Because of the enormous impact of agriculture on climate change, pick up any book about "green" solutions and you'll find the suggestions that you grow a vegetable garden. Bang into the "we can't go on as we are" end of the environmental movement (mine), and you'll see the general assumption that growing food is part of any process of adaptation to lower resource use.

With any reasonably successful blog, you have a conversation going on, often between an author and commenters who have a long history and background, and people coming into the conversation for the first time...Balancing the degree to which you write for the regulars and to those new to you is always an interesting exercise.

In Depletion and Abundance I write about the difficulty of committing to a lifestyle change in a world where you always seem to have more time, where defining events are always on the horizon but never present. I use the phrase "time to pick up your hat" which I take from a short story by Robert Heinlein, as a way of thinking both about how difficult it is to change and how necessary.

In 2005, my first widely republished article was entitled "Peak Oil is a Women's Issue" and detailed the ways that material realities for women were likely to change in an energy depleted world. I got more than a 100 emails after I wrote that piece, mostly falling into two camps - either "Wow, I never thought of that, but of course it is" and "Oh, I've been worrying about these issues for a long time and no one ever writes about them."

Overwhelmingly history suggests that the psychological trauma of watching your world transformed often strikes men, particularly men of middle age and above, harder than it does women. How do we soften the blow?

It is true that people worked long hours in the past - but the pattern of those hours was radically different. Community thrived when more people lived and worked embedded in their community. Now most Americans spend a third of their waking hours in a workplace community, often completely unconnected from the community proximate to their home...Instead of belonging to connected social institutions, if they are members of community organizations, they are probably members of completely different ones.