sastyk | August 30, 2010About a year ago I was sitting around with a couple friends and they asked me where I thought my career was going. They were genuinely curious - what does blogging actually lead to? What kind of career advancement might a blogger get eventually? Can you transfer from blogging to journalism? Get a job at a better blog? Where does all this take you?
My comments was that in many ways, I don't know the answer to that. I think in the longer term, journalists and bloggers are going to reconnect, but how that connection may happen, or what the future of that connection might be is extremely…
sastyk | August 30, 2010I give a lot of credit to people who try and make peak oil and climate movies - trying to overcome the natural impulse of most people to say "Let's not go see that movie about how we're all doomed, instead, let's go see The Expendables" is one of those tilting at windmill things I admire. The problem is that even your doomy blogiste here would probably rather watch a decaying Sylvester Stallone than sit through most of the movies. No matter how thoughtful and well told, nothing is going to get your Grandmother or your 19 year old nephew who likes explosions to sit through _The End of…
sastyk | August 30, 2010"...and that's true love and homegrown tomatoes." - Guy Clark
Guy Clark's song is true - and over here we've got homegrown tomatoes and true love coming out our ears. The true love can be put up for winter until it is chilly and huddling together for warmth looks good, but the tomatoes, well, they have to be eaten, and preserved. So that's what your blogiste is doing today.
You might as well listen to the song while I'm at it:
sastyk | August 29, 2010Jessie finally kidded early Monday morning, giving us a solid ten baby goats, five does and five bucks. And on Thursday while celebrating one of my best friends' birthdays, we set them almost all out on parade (we ran out of kids to hold them before we ran out of kids to be held):
(From left to right, Isaiah and Poppy, Simon and Hemp, Josiah and Marshmallow, Asher and Heliotrope, Gideon and Stachys, and Rachel and Licorice.)
Missing from the lineup are Calendula (seen here in a not-terribly flattering picture of me - Calendula is the top doe, Licorice is hanging out on the bottom)
And here…
sastyk | August 26, 2010Phil-the-Housemate asked me recently for advice on getting his dissertation done. He's ABD, and having a tough time getting down to it. Asking me seems odd to me - I eventually baled about 1/2 way through my doctoral dissertation, due to a combination of childbearing, agriculture, slackdom and change of focus. But I did write three books in 2 1/2 years, so I do know a little something about finally giving up the slacker habits, I suppose.
The sum total of my advice to him went pretty much like this "Phil, there's no substitute for the ass in the chair." And this, I think is probably the…
sastyk | August 25, 2010It is tempting to despair of all action. And sometimes those who despair are right. But sometimes they aren't. And this, I think is an important and central point for everyone who hits those moments when they simply don't believe society will self-correct in any measure from its impending ecological disaster. I should be clear - I don't believe it will self-correct in every measure, or even as much as I wish desperately it would. But I also do not believe that what one does to mitigate suffering, soften impacts, make life livable or plan for a better outcome is wasted.
I'd tell you why…
sastyk | August 24, 2010The realities of climate change and energy depletion mean that at some point, we will encounter situations where there is not enough of an energy resource or one of the things it enables - whether food or transport or whatever, to go around. In fact, eventually we will enounter many of these shortages. Whether they arise initially from a situation in which there are actual shortages or whether the shortages are structural problems of transport or caused by inequity and dishonesty almost doesn't matter - we are going to run bang up against problems of access to resources.
When that happens,…
sastyk | August 23, 2010A number of people, including Ilargi and Stoneleigh at _The Automatic Earth_ have long pointed out that the interventions that the government has made in the housing market hasn't served the people. They observe, for example, that by propping up house prices artificially they've benefitted more affluent, generally older homeowners, at the expense of younger, poorer people, renters and those who would like to get into the housing market but can't afford its (still) inflated prices. The problem with this, besides the generational and class screwage is that these strategies don't serve even…
sastyk | August 20, 2010On ye olde blogge, in 2008, I ran a post-apocalyptic novel reading club for about six months. Why, you ask? Well, why not? When you deal with real doom, mocking (or praising on the rare occasions when it is good) fictive doom is theraputic - and fun. All of us, I suspect, have a secret stash of these books - so why not come out and talk about them here? I've had tons of requests to bring it back. Well, requests granted - it is coming back! I'm shooting for the first read to be ready at the beginning of October - meanwhile, does anyone have any suggestions for a first book? I'm pretty…
sastyk | August 17, 2010The IEA is the bestest agency in the world at admitting peak oil without actually admitting peak oil. They've now achieved a record - three years in a row of precisely matching the language and predictions of the peak oil community without actually saying the words. Matthew Wild points out the incredible overlap:
According to the IEA's latest Oil Market Report, published August 11, global demand will reach 86.6 million barrels per day in 2010, and then 87.9 million barrels per day in 2011, assuming a continuing global economic recovery. This means demand is set to pass the all-time high of…
sastyk | August 17, 2010It is that time of summer here - the one where you can't eat all the vegetables pouring out of the garden, and the farmers can't keep up with all the stuff their farms are producing, and many things that are precious and rare much of the year are cheap and abundant. Besides eating yourselves into a coma on ripe tomatoes, okra, eggplant, peppers, blackberries, peaches, sweet peppers and the ubiquitous zucchini, it is time to think ahead to the days when the idea of thinking "oh, no, more ripe vegetables" will seem strange and alien, and you will be desperate for red and green and orange and…
sastyk | August 16, 2010Busy week here, as Eric attempts to wind up his online teaching class, my parents descend for a week of family projects and fair going, and we deal with the daily realities of a rapidly-onrushing fall, complicated (happily) by a long trip and an early Jewish holiday season. So I give you something I wrote way back in 2007.
The other day I thought I'd try out three "fast, easy, healthy, local" recipes that were sent to me from a green website that shall remain nameless because I'm not trying to give them a hard time - I appreciate what they are trying to do.
Why? Because my job now is to…
sastyk | August 12, 2010This is the the time of year for most of us when everything is ripe and abundant in our gardens and at local farms, and learning to put food up can make it possible for you to enjoy summer in winter, and continue eating locally as long as possible. It can be overwhelming when you start preserving, so if you'd like a friendly voice to walk you through it, please join us.
The class is on-line and asynchronous, and you can participate at your own pace. Every week we'll have projects involving what's overflowing in our gardens and markets to get you familiar with the basics of preserving the…
sastyk | August 12, 2010Actually, it isn't all that slow, because a decade ago, all of this would have been largely unthinkable. The problem is that we don't see the gradual decline and fall - we are only vaguely aware that some things aren't quite what they used to be, and our progressive narrative tells us that they will soon be much better. But the problem is that's not necessarily true - there's little evidence for it. Even the most optimistic economists (and I don't recommend the most optimistic economists ;-)) have to admit our long term economic problems are extremely pressing. Add in resource depletion…
sastyk | August 12, 2010"Sauerkraut!"
She said it with an absolute certainty, as though it was an order - get yourself some sauerkraut! It was said kindly, but as though I should have figured this out already for myself.
And she was right. The woman sitting next to me on the bench outside my synagogue was a Russian woman of late middle age, the mother of five sons, the survivor of all most of what was thrown at the Russian Jews. She knew things, and wasn't shy about telling me, although her English and my poor Russian made the conversations challenging at times.
I was pale, greenish and pasty from the epic morning…
sastyk | August 11, 2010You asked for baby goat pictures - we've got baby goat pictures!
(Calendula meets Rubeus the cat)
(Basil, one of Bast's two boys in her set of triplets)
(Goldenrod, the other buckling - not sure if you can really appreciate his gorgeous coloring!)
(Asher holding Calendula, Goldenrod and Basil's sister)
(Phil the housemate holds Marshmallow - or we assume it is Marshmallow, since she and her sister are pretty much identical)
(Simon and Isaiah were told they absolutely should not smile while holding Licorice, Marshmallow's twin).
(A visiting friend, Gideon, holds Meadowsweet, the first…
sastyk | August 11, 2010I'm pleased to see Grist exploring Urban Agriculture in the US in their "Feeding the City Series". America needs a focus on urban ag particularly because we have so deeply abandoned the ordinary and routine participations that city dwellers have always made to their foodshed. If you look at either our past or the present in most of the Global South and in many Global North Nations as well, we see that there's nothing very unusual in the urban dweller participating in food production. Indeed, most nations on the Global South produce at least 20% of their meat and produce within city limits…
sastyk | August 11, 2010I didn't know Matt Simmons personally, and after some of his frankly ridiculous claims about what was happening in the Gulf, I am a little ambivalent about writing about his demise. One is supposed to speak well of the dead, and while I think some of his work on the Gulf (including his early claims that the flow rates from the well were much higher than were reported, which was entirely correct) was good, some of it was inappropriate fearmongering, and that shouldn' be glossed over.
At the same time, however, I think Simmons deserves to be remembered for his most stunning accomplishment -…
sastyk | August 10, 2010Dr. Isis is reconsidering the work-life balance issues with her usual thoughtfulness over at her blog, following on a longer conversation about the ways that this problem is (unfairly, obviously) shunted exclusively onto women. This is something I agree with - and I think her "Sack up, Dudes" is probably the most concise and accurate answer to the problem of inequities between men and women in the home.
As much as I totally agree with Isis that the shifting of the problem onto women is just plain old wrong (and it should be obvious that this is not something that happens in my house (if…
sastyk | August 9, 2010Wendell Berry has an essay in which he argues that the greatest single evidence for the merits of British culture is that they developed sixty-five breeds of sheep:
What does it mean that an island not much bigger than Kansas or more than twice the size of Kentucky should have developed sixty or so breeds of sheep? It means that many thousands of farmers were paying the most discriminating attention, not only to their sheep, but also to the nature of their local landscapes and economies, for a long time. They were responding intelligently to the requirement of local adaptation. The result…