sastyk | January 31, 2011Remember how I said I was going to do 31 book reviews in January, and well...didn't? On Friday, I finally got reliable internet back, just in time to shut down for the sabbath, so now I'm playing catch up. Got to get about 25 book reviews done today. That should happen, right?
Just a reminder for those participating in the Post-apocalyptic Novel Reading Club (PANRC), we'll be finishing up _Prelude_ by Kurt Cobb this week, and moving on to _Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson next week. We're following that up in March with Pat Frank's _Alas Babylon_. Also, there are still spots in…
sastyk | January 26, 2011I am *still* without full access to my email, although new stuff is at least being forwarded to Eric's account. I apologize profusely for the difficulties, but I know that some people who tried to register either got bounces or got through, but are buried in my gmail account without my having access, so I would ask you to please send again! I'm very, very sorry about this! I'm told (for the fourth day running) that the problem will be resolved by my ISP by tomorrow. Hopefully this time it is actually true.
Meanwhile, if you haven't registered for the class, and would like to, I will at…
sastyk | January 26, 2011The good news is that everyone was more or less happy about Obama's stated energy policy last night. The Republicans were happy because Obama was talking about a "clean standard" which actually means "let's burn fossil fuels in a barely less harmful way" - ie, let's switch some dirty coal to natural gas, and pretend that "clean" coal is a reality, and that nuclear plants will come online rapidly and without massive subsidies. The Democrats were happy because some Republicans might tolerate a "clean energy" standard that takes emphasis off solar and wind. And everyone was happy because we'…
sastyk | January 25, 2011Paul Kingsnorth has a brilliant article on what underlies the disproportion in attention between flooding in the Global South and Global North, and what it says about how we see the world:
This imperial narrative morphed, after the death of the Western empires, into the narrative of 'development' that we still cleave to today (I recommend this explanation of the process). Now, the world is divided up into 'developed' countries and 'developing' countries. Developed countries are largely white. Developing countries are largely brown. The latter are assumed to be on an inevitable trajectory that…
sastyk | January 25, 2011There's quite a bustle among my colleagues about the deficiencies of recent studies about whether X female thingie evolved as a strategy to prevent rape. My favorite such study is one that seems to think that the only critical thing that happens when women ovulate is that they might get raped. The (probably bullshit) increase in strength, for example, one study showed couldn't be part, say of making sex more fun, could it?
Mike the Mad Biologist as always makes a cogent analysis of the general limits on that study while Greg Laden critiques speculation about tears being used to limpify…
sastyk | January 25, 2011A number of readers asked me to comment on the recent Argentine report that predicts disaster for world food supplies based on Climate Change in the near term. I hadn't done so because I was honestly puzzled by the report, which got a lot of attention, and raised awareness of climate food issues, but seemed to be predicting a much greater degree of near-term warning than is likely, barring extreme climate forcings. I was a little surprised to see such a comparatively obscure report get so much attention, when in fact, more reputable analyses have been largely ignored.
I'm grateful then that…
sastyk | January 24, 2011Note: I'm way behind on my 31 books resolution - I'll have to hurry to catch up. In the meantime, will you count these 12? I bet you don't own them!
Worms Eat my Laundry by Alcea Grovestock - Worms are hot - in-house domestic composting is everywhere. But have you considered the way red wigglers could augment your laundry routine? After all, so many of us, taken up with homestead and farm work, garden and family chores have developed that layer of laundry that never seems to get washed, composting at the bottom of the hamper. With the addition of red worms and regular contributions to…
sastyk | January 24, 2011Gardeners like to compete with each other over who has the worst soil. You wouldn't think we'd be proud of this, but what can I say, we're a strange bunch. One will argue for his hard clay, baked in the sun, another for her sand, without a trace of organic matter. I've got my own candidate for the worst soil ever - the stuff in the beds around my house.
Oh, texturally, it is among the best I've got - sandy loam, warms up nicely, isn't too wet like much of the rest of my soil. It had some nice enough foundation plantings, and I mostly ignored it for the first few years I was here. But a…
sastyk | January 20, 2011
Sorry for the extended radio silence. A combination of Apprentice Weekend, followed by Fellowship Application due, followed by ice storm related power outage, followed by internet outage of indeterminate cause, followed by visitor, followed by a series of family administrative things put off because of all the previous means that I'm just now online, and my email is still down, so if you've tried to contact me, please be patient! I'm not ignoring you, just discombobulated. I apologize for the difficulties - especially if you have tried to register for the garden design class and been…
sastyk | January 13, 2011I'll be offline until Tuesday of next week, running my winter apprentice weekend (or Goat Camp as one attendee called it ;-)). The next one will be offered in May, and will be a family-friendly long weekend (tentatively Memorial Day weekend - I'll confirm that in the next week). You can bring the kids, stay with us or camp, and we'll have baby goats and chicks along with a chance to do herb growing, milking, dairying, tree fodder crops, and many other projects! If you are interested in a spot email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com.
In the meantime, Aaron Newton and I will be running our annual…
sastyk | January 12, 2011
The Food Crisis, of course. In fact it really never left - since 2007 we've had more hungry people on the planet than ever before in human history, and while we've seen brief declines in the numbers of the hungry worldwide, those declines were of such short duration that they were essentially meaningless - earlier this year when the UN trumpeted that the number of the hungry had dropped back below 1 billion, it admitted that this excluded Pakistani flood victims, the impacts of the crisis in the Russian wheat crop and a host of other late-year issues.
On the lists of guests no one ever…
sastyk | January 11, 2011As I mentioned in a previous post about Carol Deppe's wonderful _The Resilient Gardener_, all garden books are fundamentally local. That localness is why I so love _Gardens of Use and Delight_ by Jigs and Jo Ann Gardner. I discovered this book last year at my local library, and have taken it out half a dozen times, enough that I must, finally, purchase it.
The Gardeners bought an old farm in Cape Breton and gradually, over decades, transformed it into a place that is both beautiful and productive, despite terrible soil, a cold climate and a host of disadvantages. What's wonderful about…
sastyk | January 11, 2011"It is soooo hard to wait, Mom!"
Isaiah is seven years old and when you are seven, uncertainty is torture. He asks me when the mail will get here 20 times a day, and can he go out and wait for the mail truck? I point out that it is 4 degrees F out there, and the mail won't be here for three hours, but he and his youngest brother still go out until the cold drives them back.
What's he waiting for? Not birthday presents or toys, he's waiting for the Murray McMurray hatchery catalog to come in the mail. Isaiah, you see, is a poultry addict, and his addiction is all my fault.
Last year we…
sastyk | January 10, 2011Pha Lo has a wonderful piece at Salon on the ways that his family's history of locavorism was a source of shame and conflict for them, because it fit so badly into the American diet. He echoes a story I hear over and over again, both from immigrants and from Americans from traditional agricultural communities - we were embarassed about our diet, made ashamed or even punished for eating real food, told what we were eating was gross. He writes about his local, organic, sustainable diet:
I remember watching grown-ups lose their identities and self-worth, slip into depression and cycles of…
sastyk | January 10, 2011Just an update - all the copies of Prelude in circulation are presently going 'round, but if past experience is any guide, the books should have at least one more cycle before the end of the month. So watch here for the next announcement.
In some ways I'm not the optimal audience for Kurt Cobb's _Prelude_ in that I generally hate thrillers. I find the "ordinary person caught up in a chase sequence" thing silly, and while I can read science fiction and suspend belief long enough to believe in wormholes and colonization, or mysteries, and believe that the town of Whateverville experiences a…
sastyk | January 7, 2011Just a reminder to everyone that we'll be starting Kurt Cobb's _Prelude_ on Monday. I have several people who have copies available for circulation, so if you'd like to read along with the group, please drop me an email at jewishfarmer@gmail.com and you'll get a copy in the mail, with only the requirement that you pass it on if more people want it! Kurt is going to be able to participate in our discussion as well! But first, I promised a discussion of sex and gender in The Witch of Hebron.
I said I'd write another post about _The Witch of Hebron_, this time explicitly addressing the sex…
sastyk | January 6, 2011As you can probably imagine, Eric sometimes has more than a bit to put up with being married to me. One of the things that bothers him the most is that I'm absolutely no fun at movies. If you remember the show MST3K, I'm them - all the time. And just because the movie is supposed to be high art, well, that never did stop me.
Early in our marriage we realized that we were both happier if we limited our joint film time to one of two categories - truly great movies, which we both enjoy, or ones bad enough that Eric doesn't mind pitching in on the commentary. There are, of course, far more…
sastyk | January 5, 2011My Science Blogs Colleage at Dean's Corner suggests that in the New Year all of us should think about eating more invasive species. I'm delighted to see this idea being promulgated by both my colleagues and the New York Times, because it highlights one of the best ways of controlling species that get out of control - eat them. The reality is that with almost 7 billion people needing food, Japanese knotweed, garlic mustard and the rest of the pests don't really stand a chance if we take these food sources seriously. There are a host of great recipes here worth considering.
Not only might…
sastyk | January 5, 2011
As long as we've lived in our home, a colony of bumblebees has nested in the roof of our front porch. For years we've watched generations of bumblebees come and go, often quite closely. Our yard, edged with wildflowers and native plants (that sounds so much more elegant than "we don't mow much") is a pollinator's paradise in many ways, and we've been delighted to see them among the nearly 100 species of pollinators we've spotted over the years. Because we live in such close proximity, the bumblebees, l like the Pheobes that nest under the porch eves, are old friends.
Part of my farm…
sastyk | January 5, 2011In my recent essay "300 Years of Fossil Fuels and Not One Bad Gal" I wrote:
...a narrative in which women's entry in the workforce is responsible for our dramatic rise in fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions can look superficially like a tool for those who would prefer that women go back home and come out of the workforce, and would like to blame feminists and feminism for our present ecological disaster. Indeed, if no one has come up with this ideological claim yet, I'm sure it is only a matter of time before someone explains earnestly to me how wimmen's rights are destroying the…