ISBN: 978-0-86571-614-8. "Depletion and Abundance: Life on the
new home front (or, One Woman's solutions to finding abundance for your family
while coming to terms with Peak Oil, Climate Change and hard times)" by Sharon
Astyk was published by New Society Publishers in 2008. This paperback's 273
pages include acknowledgements, six parts, fourteen chapters, two appendices and
index. Sharon's work is not familiar to us in the Europe but the accolades in
the blurb comes from the likes of Bill McKibben, Dmitry Orlov and John Michael
Greer. Early in her acknowledgements she thanks her influences who include
George Monbiot, Julian Darley, Richard Heinberg, Dale Pfeiffer and Rob Hopkins.
However this is the only mention of Rob in the book and no Transition books are
mentioned in the appendices. As this work is three years old (we write in late
2011) then this may indicate the age of this book in a fast moving field in
which Rob Hopkins has been rapidly accelerated to thought-leader. So, before Rob
there were people like Sharon. She is struggling with the very question that we
struggle with in the Transition movement and it is thus: how do we get an entire
society to move to a sustainable future of natural abundance (and away from an
unsustainable lifestyle of artificial fossil fuel "abundance") voluntarily
BEFORE it is forced upon society involuntarily? Whilst it can be a pleasure
rather than a pain?Some believe that it cannot be done voluntarily. As George Monbiot wrote in Heat: nobody every rioted FOR austerity. So Sharon setup a scheme called "Riot for Austerity" with fellow Americans online to do, voluntarily, what many believed couldn't be done without technology or unacceptable sacrifice. Their aim was to reduce their consumption footprints to levels almost unimaginable to the western mind. Unlike ... more »