Sharon Astyk’s Posts

• Stamping out hunger?

  What's the point of the industrial food system if it no longer provides affordable food? 0

  Posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago

  Vermont's expansion of the food stamp program is an important story, one that demonstrates an increasing shift in our society's relationship to its food. Vermont's policy change on food stamps is likely to be mirrored by other states, and this represents both a fundamental shift in the reality of American need and also, I think, the final stake in the heart of the industrial food system.

  From the Times Argus:

• Farmer in chief?

  Vilsack's appointment is representative of the narrow range of viewpoints in Obama's Cabinet 5

  Posted 11 months, 1 week ago

  Tom Vilsack is going to be secretary of agriculture, hmmm ... Let's see, ethanol proponent, enthusiastic supporter of GMOs and biotechnologies, and political debtor to agribusiness. Yup, it seems clear that Obama really took Michael Pollan's "Farmer in Chief" piece to heart. Short of actually appointing, say, Monsanto's chairman, it is hard to imagine a choice less likely to make real shifts in our food system.

  But of course, as Rod Dreher and Carolyn Baker point out, so far there's very little from the Obama administration that should make us feel secure that he will shift the status… Read More

• You can go home again

  What I would like to say in the New York Times 7

  Posted 1 year ago

  I'm going to pretend that instead of a silly article diagnosing a pretend disease in The New York Times, I was given a chance to speak on the op-ed pages of the Times. Ignoring for a moment how unlikely that is, here's what I would have said.

  -----

  Last weekend my family and I appeared in the New York Times as victims (or perhaps purveyors) of a new mental illness, "carborexia." Apparently this is the pathological inability to produce sufficient carbon, an environmental mania so extreme that it transforms ordinary lives into obsessive madness.

  The article began with the… Read More

• World Food Day 2008: Cooking and food preservation come to the table

  Age-old cooking and preserving techniques could relieve food insecurilty worldwide 3

  Posted 1 year, 1 month ago

  Today is World Food Day, and it's time to assess the prospects for the short- and long-term future of our food. As I write this, there are more than 100 million new starving people in the world since last year. As I write this people in Iceland, one of the world's richest nations, are wondering whether there will be any imported food coming into their country. As I write this, one out of every 11 Americans -- and as many as one in seven in states with high levels of poverty -- require food stamps to be able to eat.… Read More

• NASA's latest analysis shouldn't cheer anyone

  Without coal, the most catastrophic climate scenarios may not happen 9

  Posted 1 year, 2 months ago

  NASA's latest analysis of the intersection of peak oil and climate change argues that oil and natural gas alone probably won't get us to 450ppm. If we can constrain our use of coal fairly quickly, we probably can avoid the worst outcomes -- unless of course, the impact of reduced global dimming or methane from melting permafrost gets us. Still, it all sounds rather hopeful.

  What are the chances that we're going to constrain our use of coal, so that we can avoid this tipping point? So far, the world is engaged in a massive build-out of coal infrastructure,… Read More

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Sharon Astyk’s Recent Comments

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  No question, but...

  For me, I don't think there's even a remote doubt that we will have a more prosperous future if we deal with climate change.  

  At the same time, however, what I think there is a doubt about is whether we have the base capital in both resources and wealth to do it.  That is, at a certain point, it becomes impossible to make capital improvements simply because you don't have enough to borrow against the future, or to bear the costs of the infrastructure development.

  I've written about this here: http://sharonastyk.com/2009/02/16/910/

  I am not certain we are at this point, but I think we may be awfully close to it in some ways.  That is, it becomes impossible to economize, because you are so busy remediating your present situation.

  I certainly agree "get rich and fix climate change" is a good sell - and maybe it is even necessary.  But I think that for the forseeable future, getting rich is not going to happen - and that the backlash and anger against those who told people they could have a new and better economy may end up costing us more than finding ways to sell the much harder case.

  Sharon Astyk

  Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.

  On Higher productivity and lower health costs outweigh additional spending posted 8 months, 4 weeks ago 7 Responses

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  God and Economics

  I tend to agree with Bart Anderson about the intellectual limitations of modern American economics - which in purging out alternative visions has essentially shifted from allowing one's conclusions to follow one's data, to reshaping one's data to fit presumed conclusions.  This is unscholarly - even in the humanities it would be unacceptable.

  Honestly, I don't think that it is possible to address the question of economics simply in terms of fine points of dissension - that is, I think that the discipline has to be itself open to critique and question.  And the question of whether economics is a truly scholarly discipline, or a set of assumptions to which one must adhere to participate a la religious faith is perfectly legitimate one.

  In fact, most economics more nearly resembles theology than it does science.

  Sharon Astyk

  Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.

  On Some thoughts on economists and climate and so forth posted 9 months ago 22 Responses

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  The race to the finish

  Note that this entire post was written without referring to "wood" or "forests."  Some years ago I wrote a paper on the ethics of biofuel use, and one of my points was about the language we use - I argued that we would someday see entire forests transformed into "heating biomass" or "generating biomass."  I admit, I never thought it would happen so quickly, nor that it would come from environmental activists.

  The reality is that this paper does not discuss the scalability issues at all, clearly because they aren't nearly as cheerful as the idea that we can convert our coal plants to generating electricity with wood.  At this point, we have no large dedicated plantations of wood that are harvestable for this - and we are already using just about all the "excess" wood that can come off our existing forests, so this is a recipe for deforestation, erosion, the loss of soil and forest humus.

  It ends in a race between the reduction in emissions and the reduction in the ability of soils to hold carbon.

  Sharon Astyk

  Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.

  On If Obama stops dirty coal, as he must, what will replace it? An intro to biomass cofiring posted 9 months ago 17 Responses

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  The Other Possibility

  Is that industrial agriculture will not remain cheap either, and that we won't have much middle class.  Both the reality of cheap food and of a huge middle class are quite unusual in our society - in most societies, food is one of the big expenditures, while cost of say, housing (and the quality thereof), falls in proportion, because no one has much money for anything else.

  I'm not convinced that industrial agriculture can or will produce cheap food for much longer - at least not the food we've become accustomed to. In which case, reform can and should start with "if it isn't cheap, what good is it?" question.

  Sharon Astyk

  Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.

  On Until real middle-class wages start rising, we can't end agricultural subsidies posted 9 months, 1 week ago 4 Responses

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  Banging Up Against Many Resource Limits

  I'd second Bart's mention of Heinberg's new book on coal - I know that he's been able to get advance materials - you might contact him for more discussion of this issue.

  To me, one of the major issues is that any "shift to another finite resource" strategy is precisely the strategy offered by the baby boomer generation to Gen Xers like me - that is, push the problem of on one's posterity.  In 1979, Carter identified Global Warming as a major issue and there was a solid body of research suggesting that we'd hit resource limits within a few decades - and despite the hard work of many boomers to avoid it, the solution we got was "stick the problem with another generation."

  Personally, I decline to enact that solution again - to deliver to our children a warmer, poorer world based on the assumption that resource limits shouldn't be considered until we bang hard against them.  The idea that one's posterity should endure the hardships the parents are unwilling to endure is one that has to go - simply because it is morally evil.

  Sharon

  Sharon, with dirt under her fingernails.

  On U.S. coal supply may last only 10-20 years posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 8 Responses