New Voice for Sustainability at Peaknix.com

New PeakOilDesign member Nika has a fantastic and relatively new blog called peaknix. Nika is a life sciences researcher and has several blogs documenting her organic farming activities, adventures in cooking from the backyard, and liberal homeschooling. I'm very impressed with Nika's insight and all that she has accomplished in improving the way she and her family live their lives. Nika is clearly an asset to this site and the Peak Oil/sustainability communities. Her writing and path reminds me very much of Sharon Astyk and I suspect Nika will soon be widely recognized as another strong voice for sustainability. An excerpt from peaknix.com:

I guess its about waking up.

Part of waking up to peak oil is to realize that our consensus reality has been holding us back. That middle class consensus reality masked the edge-nature of our existence. We chose to believe that we were entitled.

We are not.

– Repeat after me –

We. Are. Entitled. To. Nothing.

Our gift right now is of time but its not really about bunkering down.

Its about releasing the entitlement mentality and embracing change and then understanding resilience and cultivating some level of optimism.

I am a mom of three – last winter, when I GOT peak oil on an intuitive level, the first thing I mourned was peak education.

I had to realize that there is simply no way that I could afford to put even one child through college (I went to school on Pell Grants and scholarships, my parents didn’t pay for the core costs tho they did cover food and dorm – never cheap – don’t know what Pell Grants are? Ask the republicans and Reagan specifically).

I panicked and then did that V-8 head-bonk thing .. I have known this for a long time but was never able to articulate it. It was freeing in some ways to realize that the cost of education has become CRIMINALLY expensive.

Not only do we homeschool, I intend to steer my children into organic farming internships and agricultural sciences. Not so much because that is how we will survive but because those activities will make SENSE. My job .. it doesn’t make SENSE in the transition. That’s ok, I have learned one important thing in grad school – how to learn.

I am not saying that things are peachy or that it’s the apocalypse nor am I saying that you should not prepare.