... and so do their cars, according to Sharon Astyk. ASPO has posted about a dozen more of the talks from their October 2010 conference in DC, one of which was by Astyk under the conference's, "Can We Fill the Gap" series. James Schlesinger's and Bianca Jagger's are also posted, but I'm more curious to see Tom Whipple and John Michael Greer, myself.

In The Future of Food, Astyk speaks about how food insecurity mirrors energy uncertainty. Although the video can be watched alone, it doesn't show any of her slides (Slide 01 is above). The ASPO site includes her slideshow to the right of the embedded Vimeo. Astyk only gives occasional prompts that she has changed slides, and moves quickly through one series of graphs, so you'll have to jump forward at the least inkling to keep up. The caption in Slide 29 is cut off but says, Don't worry the first 30 years of farming are the hardest. She refers to her husband at one point, probably the fellow with the scythe in Slide 34. 

Update: Astyk believes that with less and less "oilput" - energy input from fossil fuels - we must again rely on human effort in farming. She doesn't mention animal effort, but she does note that for the first time in history, we are starting to see farming done by people that did not grow up on farms, and did not learn agriculture as a way of life.

With the decline of the auto industry, Detroit's Corktown neighborhood is transforming from suburb to farmland before our eyes, and as you can see on the video below, people with no farming background are turning to small organic farms to support themselves, just as Astyk says.