sastyk | April 22, 2010Starting our CSA (aka "Community Supported Agriculture") was a risk. I knew that I could grow vegetables, and more than we could eat - I'd proved that the previous year. I knew also that I could find some people who would believe me when I said I was competent to run a CSA. Beyond that, I was clueless. I'd never organized a garden to produce food for other people. I had no idea what I was doing. I'd scheduled twenty weeks worth of deliveries, starting in early June. I just didn't know what was going in the recycled laundry baskets I was using for my deliveries.
And in retrospect, early…
sastyk | April 22, 2010Perhaps my two previous screeds about Earth Day were unfair. After all, this could be the next major shopping holiday, with a lead in that rivals Christmas. Check out the New York Times for a sense of the range of products available
So strong was the antibusiness sentiment for the first Earth Day in 1970 that organizers took no money from corporations and held teach-ins "to challenge corporate and government leaders."
Forty years later, the day has turned into a premier marketing platform for selling a variety of goods and services, like office products, Greek yogurt and eco-dentistry.…
sastyk | April 22, 2010A number of commenters to my previous post argued that I'm being unfair to Earth Day - of course, there's greenwashing. of course people are cashing in, but underlying the greenwashing, there's something good and serious and worthwhile there and I'm being churlish to deny it.
And in some ways, I agree that both points are true - I am a little churlish about Earth Day, and there are some good things about it. For example, because Earth Day is an established "holiday," (it comes in after Mother's Day and Valentine's Day and probably before Father's Day and Groundhogs Day in minor holidays by…
sastyk | April 21, 2010I bloody hate Earth Day. No offense to those of you who love it, and I know there are some awesome Earth Day programs out there, but by the time we get there, I'm spending my days hiding under the covers, because every freakin' time I open my email inbox a wave of the most nauseating spew of greenwashing comes flowing out.
Guess what? A major department store chain, nearly in bankruptcy, is now selling the eco-tote, made from organic sheepskin, embossed with "Think Global, Act Local" to show your care for the earth and indifference to grammar. And not to trouble me, but just so you know,…
sastyk | April 20, 2010I've been sadly slack on content the last few days, but well, it is spring and I'm busy. And tired at the end of the day. And Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth was visiting. And well...hey, it is 66 degrees, sunny and beautiful. I'm in the middle of a piece answering a reader's question about why even economists should be concerned about peak energy but it lost to the sunshine. The problem is that the computer is in the house, and I don't go there this time of year if I can avoid it ;-).
On the other hand, what I do have, for the first time in a long while, is a working (until one of the…
sastyk | April 16, 2010Hat tip to Rod Dreher for pointing out what he deems the most depressing toy ever - yes, your little one can have his or her own cubicle! Has your two year old been falling down on the hard, tedious job of being a child - here's a way of ensuring that she's ready for a life of dismal monotony!
Now you can make home more like the office, enhance the number of hours of screen time (children between 2 and 5 years old only get a measly 32.5 hours of screen time per day on average, gotta get those numbers up!) and bring Dilbert to life for your child.
It is every parent's dream!
Sharon
sastyk | April 15, 2010I'm the lone female in a house of men - when new housemate Phil moves in next month that will make six guys in my home and well, me. There are assorted female creatures on my farm - to be precise, one dog, two cats, two rabbits, 7 dairy goats, 12 ewes (seasonal) and about 40 female birds of various types, but they do not count.
Because I'm the only female in the household, I cannot but be aware that some of the messages they get about male and female roles will be built in a fairly narrow body of evidence - ie, the woman they see most is me, so how we do things may look like…
sastyk | April 15, 2010As you know, Greer and I at times have our differences in perspective, but I think this week's column is particularly acute, and offers up two point that I think are really essential to grasp when thinking of the future.
The first is that technical feasibility is not all - that technical feasibility rests on a complex bed of other feasibilities. Thus, simply observing that it is technically possible, to, say, create zero impact cities or whatever does not usefully tell us whether we are going to do it. For example, it has been technically possible to eliminate most causes of death in…
sastyk | April 14, 2010I still have two remaining spots in my online food storage and preservation class, starting tomorrow! If you'd like to join us you can read about the class and the syllabus here, and email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com to reserve a spot or ask more questions!
Cheers,
Sharon
sastyk | April 13, 2010A reader of mine named Aaron emailed me to ask if I'd respond to Alex Steffen's latest piece at Worldchanging. Aaron writes:
I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about Alex Steffen's recent post over at worldchanging.com. I think that it is a well considered and well informed post that addresses many of the things that make me uncomfortable in your writing.
I'm really not interested in criticizing your work, or anything of that sort; I believe that the sustainability movement as a whole needs to have a strong and well reasoned message if it is to take root with the public at large…
sastyk | April 13, 2010To make up for yesterday's frivolity, today I am going to be very, very serious, and deal with weighty serious things. There will be no levity - not from me, and certainly not from my very serious readers. In fact, if I detect signs of levity from any of you, especially those of you with sad proclivities towards levity (Risa, Edson, Lora...I'm talking to you!), you will be publically denounced from my pulpit (I have to go build a pulpit now.)
More practically, I'm going to try and catch up on some things people have asked me to write about, many of which are more serious and require more…
sastyk | April 12, 2010It was a lovely weekend with lots of friends, Eli's belated birthday party, spring, peace, quiet, music, good stuff. My house is even clean. I mean, well, for me. I'm too happy to worry about anything.
So I got nothing today. I do, however, have a contract with science blogs that requires three posts a week.
Well nothing but a contract and a mind on summer, which is, I'm told, icumen in...
And one of the top songs of the last 1000 years! What have you got?
sastyk | April 9, 2010What I like about Stuart Staniford's work is that he does such a lovely job of offering useful and clear visual descriptors of things that are often otherwise made less clear. The design of a good graph or visual is worth a lot. So I thought this bit about the way sea level rise plays out in the emerging data was very useful.
For the range of climate models used in the IPCC AR4, and for multiple different emissions models, they show the prediction range associated with that model (the different colored bands). The interesting thing that emerges here is that it sort of doesn't matter much…
sastyk | April 9, 2010I know, I know, I promised you that Eric and I would start doing joint posts months ago, and we haven't done a single one. Sorry folks. Besides the fact that it has been a crazy-busy period in our lives, there's another reason. We didn't fully grasp the reality of this blogging together project. You see, it hadn't fully registered on us that in order to do it, we would have to find time when both of us were a. wholly free of all children b. awake and c. not doing something else.
These circumstances aren't really all that common in our lives, I fear. The way we manage on comparatively…
sastyk | April 8, 2010When Eric and I first wrote a letter to Eric's grandparents, asking them to consider living with us, the response was very mixed. Grandma and Grandpa's generation of friends and family were mostly very pleased and thrilled - given the bad lot of options available to many of them, finding a compatible home with their grandchildren looked pretty good. Most of them had cared for their parents, and so somewhere inside them, this seemed like a normal relationship. Some of my friends were frankly jealous - they'd lost their own grandparents, and wished for something like what we were going to…
sastyk | April 7, 2010It is a very good thing that sound and image do not travel through the internet without forethought and intent. It permits me to write sentences about my life that seem admirably clean and functional, without actually conveying the way they play out in reality.
This allows me to write things like "Eli, my autistic eldest is on school vacation and is creatively working on fine motor control using local fibers." Now if you could see what this actually means, you'd see that Eli is taking my yarn, lovingly preserved for knitting, and wadding it up, making spiderwebs and spreading it all over my…
sastyk | April 5, 2010During the period of my life when I was a professional smart-ass (ie, my adolescence), I used to complain to my mother that even the day after she went grocery shopping, there was never any food in the house, only the component ingredients of food. As I teenager I wanted to eat like my peers who seemed to have an endless supply of chips and soda around. To have to come home from school and actually scramble eggs or make a sandwich seemed horribly unfair. My mother and step-mother expressed little sympathy.
It was only later that I realized how central this "buying the ingredients of food…
sastyk | April 5, 2010There is still space in my upcoming (starts April 15) Food Storage and Preservation Online class, for those who are interesting. If you've wanted to start preserving or building up a food reserve and have no idea how to start, or perhaps you learned to can once upon a time, but want to explore the full range of food preservation options, or you've joined a CSA and want to know what to do with all that food you are getting, or cut your grocery bills - this is the class for you. Each class includes a couple of practical projects for you to try out each week.
The class is offered…
sastyk | April 5, 2010Note: This is a repeat from ye olde blogge, brought about by the barn cleaning we're engaged in.
From December to March or the beginning of April, we simply don't clean out the barn. This sounds as if it might be gross, but it really isn't - we keep layering on bedding, and sufficient carbon keeps it from smelling bad - earthy and barnish, sure, but not particularly icky. We don't just do this because we're lazy - this is good husbandry for our climate. The barn has cement floors, left over from its days as a garage, and those cement floors get cold in the winter. A very thick layer of…
sastyk | April 5, 2010Last Sunday's New York Times had an article about the shortage of slaughterhouses for those raising non-industrial and local meat.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the number of slaughterhouses nationwide declined to 809 in 2008 from 1,211 in 1992, while the number of small farmers has increased by 108,000 in the past five years.
Fewer slaughterhouses to process local meat means less of it in butcher shops, grocery stores and restaurants. Chefs throughout the Northeast are partnering with farms to add locally-raised meat to their menus, satisfying a customer demand.…