sastyk | June 9, 2010Gotta love Richard Heinberg's latest - suggestions for Oil Exec quotes on peak oil:
"We believe fears about Peak Oil to be . . .
a. unsupported by evidence.
b. utter rubbish emanating from cretinous doomsday cultists.
c. compellingly credible.
d. strangely arousing.
"People have been forecasting the end of oil . . .
a. for decades.
b. since the age of the dinosaurs--no, since the Big Bang.
c. with ever-greater urgency--especially since 2005, the year of maximum world crude oil production so far.
d. just to tick me off.
"Such predictions have always…
sastyk | June 7, 2010Thanks to reader Sunshine for forwarding me this AP article, which I think does a really good job of pointing up something I've been talking about for a long time - the food crisis that was in the news two years ago never actually went away. While food prices stabilized in the developed world and things like the economic crisis shoved the situation of the poor and hungry off the front pages, that doesn't mean the food crisis came to an end.
With food costing up to 70 percent of family income in the poorest countries, rising prices are squeezing household budgets and threatening to worsen…
sastyk | June 7, 2010You learn pretty quickly to adjust for what any mainstream media says about peak oil and anyone who does any kind of preparation. Consider the case of my friend Kathie Breault who has appeared in various newspaper and television accounts. Kathie is grandmother, a midwife and a permaculturist, and about the least "survivalist" person you can imagine. She knits stuff for her grandkids and teaches them to garden, rides her bike everywhere and is starting up a homebirth midwifery practice, helping women with little access to good health care give birth safely. And yet in an ABC Nightline…
sastyk | June 4, 2010Early signs of tomato late blight have been found already in Maryland, and realistically, we can expect to see it again this year. Last year for American gardeners in the east, tomato blight was a disaster. Moreover, for those of us who produce our own calorie crops, the blight on potatoes was at least as serious as the loss of salsa. What can you do to make sure it doesn't happen again?
The first is obviously make sure you remove all potatoes that may have sprouted again. The second is to plant resistant cultivars - in tomatoes there's some evidence that Stupice, Juliet and Matt's Wild…
sastyk | June 3, 2010 I was struck today by the news that the Italian region of Lombardy is going to start paying women not to have abortions. As a demographic move, it is a comparatively small and insignificant one, in a nation already well below replacement rate. If this resulted in the cancellation of every abortion in the region, it wouldn't matter very much in the great human scheme of things. What matters is whether this has effects on other nation's policies - and of course, that reproductive policies never take place fully in the great human scheme of things.
Generally speaking, I'm strongly in favor…
sastyk | June 2, 2010Most of the people who take Adapting-In-Place, reasonably enough, are doing so because they intend to stay where they are or fairly nearby in the coming decades. They know that they may not be in the perfect place, but for a host of reasons - inability to sell a house, job or family commitments, love of place...you name it, they are going to stay. Or maybe it is the best possible place for them. But I do think it is important to begin the class with the assumption that everything is on the table. Because as little as each of us likes to admit it, it is. There will be many migrations in…
sastyk | June 2, 2010I don't plug a lot of movies, mostly because I don't see a lot of movies - I spend so much more time staring a computer screen than I want to, I don't go to the movies often. But I thought I'd have a little blog film festival over the summer, showing bits or trailers of some of the best movies that both show our problems and offer solutions This one, "Taking Root" from 2008, however, is very much worth seeing:
What Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement have accomplished is important the rest of us in a whole host of ways. One of the likely consequences of increasing economic stress…
sastyk | June 2, 2010Definitely read the whole thing
More importantly, the two disasters are analogous in the unprecedented technical, administrative, and political challenges posed by their remediation. In the case of Chernobyl, the technical difficulty stemmed from the need to handle high level radioactive waste. Chunks of nuclear reactor fuel lay scattered around the ruin of the reactor building, and workers who picked them up using shovels and placed them in barrels received a lethal radiation dose in just minutes. To douse the fire still burning within the molten reactor core, bags of sand and boron were…
sastyk | June 1, 2010Nine years ago today we moved to our farm. We brought with us some boxes of stuff, some furniture, four cats, our then 15-month old son (Eli, now 10 and 5' tall), Simon, packed conveniently in my pregnant belly, and my Mom (who went home after a day or two of helping us with the little guy). I was 29, Eric was just about to turn 31, and we were about as unprepared for life on a farm as any two (or three) people could be.
Eric had grown a garden once or twice with his Mom as a kid in various apartment buildings. I'd had balcony gardens all through college and grad school, and once a year,…
sastyk | May 27, 2010Before I take off for the weekend, I thought I'd leave you with another re-run on the very basic process of adapting to rapidly changing conditions.
Today I'm starting another Adapting-In-Place Class, beginning with the basics of evaluating whether you have a future where you are, what your other choices are, and then triaging your situation. One of the most basic elements of triaging any system - whether the systems that power your house or the ones that help you keep your head together when the going gets tough, is identifying redundancies.
Why redundant systems? Well, for the simple…
sastyk | May 27, 2010My children are pirates right now. There's a fallen tree in the woods that makes a superb pirate ship, and my children have boarded and captured it. And they are singing pirate songs. Loudly. It is a very good thing that we live so far from other human habitation - if we lived in the 'burbs the neighbors would kill us.
So appropos to nothing, I'm sharing a collection of pirate songs, in the hopes that you won't notice that I haven't written much of anything this week. If I gotta listen to them, you gotta listen to them. It may, of course, be our fault for teaching the boys pirate songs…
sastyk | May 25, 2010For those of us with dairy critters, now is the time of milk overflow, but even if you aren't ever going to get a cute little goat, you might have milk around. And boy is this yummy. We'll get more complicated eventually, but this is pretty simple, and if you've never made any kind of cheese, this is a great start!
sastyk | May 25, 2010When we bought the property, the creek was frozen over, and from the property survey, we weren't entirely certain that it would belong to us. We never realized that the pretty little body of water that passed along the north side of the house would become the center of four worlds.
For the first few years that we lived here, we enjoyed the creek - my toddler children loved to visit with parents in tow, picking up stones or chasing frogs during summer, when the creek sank down to manageable levels. We enjoyed listening to its music through the open windows at night. We watched the birds…
sastyk | May 24, 2010Just a reminder that Aaron Newton (my co-author on A Nation of Farmers) and I will be running our Adapting in Place Class online for six weeks, starting Thursday. The class is asynchronous - you don't have to be online at any particular time, just participate when you like. The goal of the class is to help people develop a coherent plan for how to create a good and viable low energy life with what you have. Previous participants have told us that the class was "life-changing." This class attempts to deals as clearly as possible in such a murky subject with the question of "how should I…
sastyk | May 24, 2010
(Our new buckling, Cadfael, bred by our friends Jamey and Carol at Weathertop Farm (who are a great place to start if you are looking for little goats.) We arrived at their place recently about three minutes after he was born!
Note: This is a repeat from last year, since we've got visitors and family coming and the spring planting rush upon us. The baby goats in question are now bred teenagers, we own our own buck, Selene is no longer herd queen and Mina has mostly stopped driving Eric insane...mostly. But otherwise, all is much the same.
I've had many people email and tell me that my…
sastyk | May 21, 2010This list popped up on my screen this morning, and I thought it was an interesting window into a worldview. The article lists ten things that despite the economy, we aren't cutting back on:
Portable computers. The iPad might be the latest must-have gizmo, but the power of computers transcends trendiness. Brianna Karp, for instance, discovered lots of homeless people online, many logging in through their own laptops, like her. Shipments of notebooks have skyrocketed over the last three years, with sales in 2010 likely to be double what they were in 2007, according to the Consumer Electronics…
sastyk | May 20, 2010Russian TV offers a potential solution to close up the oil leak in the Gulf - nuclear explosions. And no, Stephen Colbert isn't going to pop out here - this is serious. Well, sorta.
As the reporter points out, the flora and fauna of the Gulf may not thank you. On the other hand, how often does one get to so perfectly set up the narrative of a 1950s bad sci fi film? I suspect the end result would be something like this:
(Image credit here)
Sharon
sastyk | May 20, 2010Thanks to fellow science blogger Ed Brayton for the link to this New York Times article, which suggests that because of ties to the company, BP chose to flood the Gulf with a dispersant that is both more toxic than many of the other options and also less effective.
So far, BP has told federal agencies that it has applied more than 400,000 gallons of a dispersant sold under the trade name Corexit and manufactured by Nalco Co., whose current leadership includes executives from BP and Exxon. And another 805,000 gallons of Corexit are on order, the company said, with the possibility that…
sastyk | May 20, 2010Damn, I wish I'd written this! John Michael Greer takes up the Victory Garden, and puts it in its proper place - economically, politically, socially - and for zombie slaying. What's not to love? And I think he has it pretty much exactly right here - that while growing your own is never the solution to all problems, it often does mediate our potential suffering - which is why as long as there has been modernity it has been a solution to its difficulties. (Before the Victory Garden movement, there was the British cottage garden movement, a direct response to the disruptions of early…
sastyk | May 19, 2010Sometimes you read a study and say "duh!" That was pretty much my reaction to a British Study just released that suggests that when men help with the childcare and housework, couples are less likely to get divorced. Gee, that's a shock. You mean women don't love soloing on the toilet cleaning?
Meanwhile the divorce rate in the US and Canada has fallen, due to the recession. Tough times simultaneously put a lot of pressure on a marriage and also create economic incentives to stay together. This can be both good and bad - no one wants to see people in violent, abusive or destructive…