sastyk

Here's a charming example of corporate bullying - a major chain throwing its weight around so that we can't wear "Eat More Kale" t-shirts.: Chick-fil-A sent Mr. Muller-Moore a warning once before, in 2006, but did not pursue that matter. Now, Mr. Muller-Moore and Mr. Richardson are awaiting a…

I'm going to be buried under my book for the next few days as the Adapting-In-Place book finally goes to my editor, but I did want to respond to this email, or rather, get my readers to respond. Gwen writes: "I just lost my job, and after a lot of late nights and panicked budget making, we think…

Erica at Northwest Edible Life has a great post about her imperfections as a garden, and very relevant, because all of us have our Waterloos in the garden, and it is probably a bad idea to take them too seriously. But we do. I've imbued my personal Golden Grass Fed Cow of urban homesteading with…

This video is making the rounds of the internet, and of course, is particularly meaningful to me. Like this young man, I'm the child of a lesbian family with a mother and step-mother. Like him, no one every looked at me and said "you can tell she was damaged by her upbringing in a gay family." I…

So I've been offline a lot the last few weeks - as you know we had 10 kids in our house for a couple of days the week before Thanksgiving, and I was out of town until yesterday. While a few posts have gone up, I've spent absolutely no time on anything other than absolute necessities online. So…

In an interesting intersection of my interests in food and foster parenting, there's an emergent tendency to view extreme childhood obesity as a problem of medical neglect. Medical neglect can be grounds for removing children from their home and placing them in foster care, as seen in this recent…

Sadly, he's not alone, which is why this is worth debunking. Gingrich's sense that oil fields can be brought rapidly online, and his "we beat the Nazis and went to the moon so we can do this" statements reflect the general cultural misunderstandings about how oil is extracted that are endemic in…

For the last few weeks and over the next month, attention to hunger will be at its annual peak. People will donate turkeys, time and checks, canned goods and garden produce to food pantries. Many of us will find ourselves thinking of those in need in this season. We'll dish out cranberry sauce…

I grew up with handy parents, and I learned some things from them - cooking, chopping wood, making do, but there were still things I missed out on. Even though my step-mother is a talented woodworker, I never learned. Even though she does plumbing repair, I didn't pay attention when I could have.…

My mother in law ate a roasted turnip at my house the other day. It was unfamiliar enough to her in that form (she'd had mashed turnips before) that she had to ask me what it was, and it was a reminder of the fact that this time of year truly is the only time that many Americans come in contact…

I'm going to guess that not many of my readers would have imagined that your blogiste would be planning to be out at the stores at 5am on Friday. She never has done anything of the sort before. While not really much of an advocate of "Buy Nothing Day" (I'm more for "buy little year"), generally…

As you may remember, after waiting for a long time for a sibling placement, Eric and I took what was supposed to be a weekend placement of a little boy, M. back in October. We picked him up on a Thursday afternoon, anticipating he'd go to his father on Monday, but for various reasons, that didn't…

Here is the single biggest question to consider about the economic, energy and environmental unwinding we are facing - what will the economy look as we go? I get more questions about this than about anything else - what should people do for work, what should they do with savings, how should they…

Robert Rapier was one of the great pleasures of ASPO-USA's recent conference - his presentation was one of the best and as a long-time admirer of his work, it was a pleasure to finally meet him personally. I also like his current piece on the most common misconceptions about peak oil. Like him, I…

A superb article by Benjamin Dueholm in Washington Monthly about Foster Parenting and its connection to politics and a whole host of other things. Well worth a read: In a way that we never really anticipated, welcoming Sophia into our home led us into the wilderness of red tape and frustration…

Someone once observed that attending an ASPO-USA conference is like trying to drink from a firehose - there's just so much information, so many amazing people, so many sessions, so much to do that it can be overwhelming as well as stimulating, engaging and delightful. Helping to RUN an ASPO-USA…

Between now and 4:30 Tuesday morning, I have to get 1 extraordinarily cute lion, three vikings and a clown ready for Halloween (the Vikings are going to pillage a neighboring town with two of their best friends, the other two are just trick or treating), do a few dozen errands, shovel out the snow…

From The Onion: Admitting they had "absolutely no idea what the fuck [they were] doing," millions of Americans immediately ceased trying to manage the country's large-scale, ongoing disasters and pleaded with U.S. scientists, economists, educators, philosophers, and inventors to intervene and make…

In _Depletion and Abundance_ I spend a lot of time talking about the ways that the informal economy is actually more robust in some ways than the formal economy, and the ways that informal economy activity can strengthen our home economies. I argue that in the Developed world, the informal economy…

The phone rang about 2 on Thursday afternoon, just as I was about to settle down with my book draft for a long, dull afternoon of revisions. If I was implicitly fantasizing about something to get our adrenaline pumping, I got it. Our social worker called and asked if we would consider taking a 17…

On the 31st of October we will officially reach 7 billion people on the earth. Over the next week or two we'll be talking a lot about population issues, and I wanted to start by doing a light revision of an article I wrote some years ago about a concept a lot of people don't grasp very well - the…

Yesterday was World Food Day, and NPR has a good piece about the role of speculation in food prices: The economists argue that increased trading is a significant part of the reason grocery prices are higher this year. And grocery prices are indeed up this year. For example, in August, the average…

Brian Davey of FEASTA argues that we could do debt cancellation ethically, while leaving the larger financial system intact, and that OccupyEverything should focus its message on the idea of Jubilee. Instead we need a scheme with a pattern of rewards and incentives that is more appropriate to the…

From David Leonhardt at the New York Times, a good, if very partial explanation of why the overall future of the US and the Global North generally doesn't look as promising as the 30s. See if you can guess what's missing from the article. Still, the reasons for concern today are serious. Even…

From Yale Environment 360, more questions about future UN population projections: For now, we can indeed be highly confident that world population will top 7 billion by the end of this year. We're close to that number already and currently adding about 216,000 people per day. But the United Nations…

Lots of stuff to update you all on. First, the family expansion project - still nothing new. After three months of waiting, we've decided to expand our looking in a few different ways - our county just doesn't have a placement, and after all the work of getting ready, we're anxious to get one.…

The first "seed" catalogs of the year are always the tree catalogs, and now is a good time to begin siting and planning for next year's tree stock. We try to add trees to our home orchard every single year, sometimes just a couple, sometimes more. Now with 27 acres, it may seem that our choices…

Last year at the 2010 ASPO conference (and over the years at other places) I've highlighted the connection between oil prices and food prices - and the ways that our increasingly tightly tied oil and food systems unravel together. If you missed these graphs last week, they'll give you the…

It was interesting to me that my comments that protesting the economy without also including elements of economic protest were taken to mean "I think Occupy Wall Street is bad." I still think that to be genuinely effective, protests of capitalism have to take into account what will replace it -…

Perhaps the first widely read piece I wrote was entitled "Peak Oil is a Women's Issue" and focused on the ways that an energy decline might affect women. At the time it was written (the earliest version appeared in 2004) the peak oil movement was largely a group of men, mostly geologists, oil men…