sastyk | April 2, 2010I'm a day late with Nate Hagen's piece, but I just have to link here - it has a beauty and elegance I really admire, and Id do wish him the very best of luck in his new venture. In fact, I'm starting to think that maybe I can cash in too!
OK - here it is in a nutshell - though I used to think the main problem with economic theory was that it ignored biology on the demand side and ecology on the supply side, I now see the reality is that neither biology nor ecology has incorporated enough economic theory. Basically, my efforts at falsification of positive economics even down to the day to day…
sastyk | April 1, 2010It is funny, when you interact with people on the internet, you develop a mental image of them - or at least I do. And sometimes people look pretty much like you expect, but sometimes not. I've found this situation to be particularly acute at science blogs, where I rapidly developed strong mental images of my colleagues, only to find that most of them are totally different in real life (thanks Google for clueing me in) than the sense you get from their blogs (even their photos can be misleading). I'm not sure what the correct word for someone whose internet presence creates a mistaken…
sastyk | March 29, 2010Passover is a holiday deeply concerned with inclusion - at one point during each seder night, we open our doors and leave them open wide, and call out "let all who are hungry come and eat." One year, teaching Hebrew School to 10 year olds, I asked them what would happen if they called out and a stranger came in and sat down. My students, largely from affluent and middle families in a leafy suburb where most strangers are likely to be much like them, were to a one deeply uncomfortable with the notion. They expressed fear at the thought of the stranger coming to their table, even surrounded…
sastyk | March 28, 2010Half of all food waste in the developed world happens at the consumer end - that is, we throw the food that we've purchased or grown away for some reason or another. It spoiled from mishandling, it gets wasted, or for some other reason goes uneaten. We're rarely conscious of this - just as we are rarely conscious of the enormous impact of personal actions at every level. Divide American food waste among 300 million people, and dumping that apple or tossing those fries just doesn't seem like a big deal.
A very small minority of American food waste happens at the farm and field end - this is…
sastyk | March 28, 2010Chores sounds like such a dreary word, and until I moved to a farm, I would never have believed that I'd have anything positive to say about it. As a kid, I did chores around the house, and while I may have groused less about the dishes and cleaning gutters as an adult, I certainly didn't (and don't) love the jobs.
But on a farm, chores are something else - they are bookends to each day, a formal structure like the forms of a sonnet or musical scales that shape the day. They can be speeded up, slowed down, slightly elided and occasionally contracted out, but for the most part, they are…
sastyk | March 25, 2010
I'm not the challenge queen - that title could go to her Crunchiness , with whom you can freeze your buns, change your menstrual supplies and do a host of other moderately sexualized activities for fun and ecological profit or to Chile, who is currently preoccupied with moving house but regularly gets folks using their sun ovens, eating more locally and moving more. In all these years, I've only done the one, my Independence Days Challenge, now in its third year.
But I feel it may be time to diversify - I've been mulling over other possible challenges for a bit, and finally one came to me…
sastyk | March 25, 2010It is interesting that young and unemployed (two words that are now virtually synonymous) and highly educated folks are using food stamps to buy high quality food - and taking a lot of heat for it. I can understand the visceral reaction that people have, but I also think it is fascinatingly difficult to try and figure out what we think poor people should eat - we criticize them freely for buying junk, and then we criticize them for buying high quality food. Where is the space that the poor are free to choose in?
Controversy about how they use food stamps marks an interesting shift from the…
sastyk | March 25, 2010I've had a lot of people ask when I was going to run food preservation and storage again, and ta da! I am. I'm doing it as a six week course, run asynchronously online on from April 15 to the end of May. I'll put material up on Thursdays, but you can participate at your leisure.
The class will cover everything from the very basics of setting up a food reserve to more advanced food storage, the reasons for storing food and water, how to handle medications and special diets, deal with kids and elders, and how to save money doing it. We'll also cover all the major food preservation…
sastyk | March 24, 2010Charles Greene and colleagues confirm what the evidence has added up to - that we're probably already too late to avoid crossing major tipping points, and that the scientific consensus has been in error - but not like the right wing wants you to believe. Instead, the compelling evidence for climate change is that even the most rigorous scientists have understated how radically our world is changing.
As one of the authors of "A Very Inconvenient Truth," published in the peer-reviewed journal Oceanography (March 2010), Greene said that he and his co-authors conclude that the United Nation's…
sastyk | March 23, 2010Simon came in the door calling "Moooooooomm....Moooooommmm!!" It didn't sound like the "someone is bleeding to death" call or the "Isaiah said my hat looked funny and I beaned him one with a rock and he had the temerity to hit me back and it hurt..." cry, each which has a certain urgency too it. Nor was it even the much more relaxed "by the way, I haven't seen my littlest brother for a long time, like since before lunch, and you told me not to let him fall in the creek, but I really wasn't paying attention" one.
No this was a "Mom, I've got something cool to tell you" call. What, I…
sastyk | March 23, 2010I came back to my computer to find that many of my fellow Sciblings have recently taken up issues of resource depletion from various interesting perspectives - doing my work for me, I guess ;-). It isn't exactly news to most of us that we've been using just about every resource on the planet far too casually, but it is interesting to see them tied together.
At Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel takes up issues raised by Helium's scarcity and the fact that our use of it to make children's toys may seriously imperil future research capacities.
At Dr. Isis's blog, she builds on this by exploring…
sastyk | March 23, 2010Hi Folks - It has been a week since I hit the wall and took off from the computer, and I'm back, at least sort of. The combination of a lingering illness, exhaustion from trying to finish the book, stress from a book not doing what I wanted to and just way too much time in front of the computer hit me all at once, and I really needed to step away for a while.
My wonderful editor at New Society (and the kind marketing director who I also dumped my stress on) have been really nice about my melt-down, and we're talking now about a new deadline and release date for the book. I'm very grateful…
ejohnson | March 22, 2010When we think of our planet's water, we usually think of the vast saltwater oceans that contain 97 percent of it. But the other three percent is equally important to ecosystems and to life as we know it: freshwater found above ground in lakes, rivers, and ponds, and underground in aquifers and streams.
World Water Day was designated by the U.N. General Assembly in 1992 to call attention to issues surrounding freshwater around the globe. This year, with the theme "Clean Water for a Healthy World," World Water Day organizers hope to bring the concepts of wastewater management and water…
sastyk | March 16, 2010Hi Folks - I've been under the weather physically and stressed out mentally, overwhelmed by a book that isn't coming together and generally pretty unhappy recently, and I have decided it behooves me to take a vacation from the blog. So no posts for a least a week. I'm talking with my publisher about how to handle the book situation, but mostly, I need to get away from my computer for a while. Back when I've got my mental health back. And apologies to anyone I owe email or attention to - I will write back soon!
Sharon
ejohnson | March 16, 2010The 2010 Pi Day Bake-Off was such a smashing success that it would be a challenge for even the most extreme pie enthusiast to fairly judge all 35 entries.
So we've gone ahead and narrowed it down for you to what we hope you will agree are ten very deserving finalists. We based our choices on a mixture of creativity, presentation, and volume of the collective "OHMYGODYUMMMM" sound that they elicited when presented to our respective offices.
Once you think you've settled on your choice, vote for it in the poll on Serious Eats before midnight on Thursday. And if you have a pie in the running…
sastyk | March 16, 2010A new Gallup poll suggests that Americans are less worried about most environmental issues than they have been since Gallup began polling 20 years ago.
"Americans are less worried about each of eight specific environmental problems than they were a year ago, and on all but global warming and maintenance of the nation's fresh water supply, concern is the lowest Gallup has measured. Americans worry most about drinking-water pollution and least about global warming."
People grasp what their drinking water has to do with them. Overwhelmingly, I think they do not fully grasp what global warming…
ejohnson | March 15, 2010We're running out of pie references to use here, so bear with us.
In this post we have a Chicken Tikka Masala pie from Duchess Shiraz, a classic Apple Pi pie from Kate Gaudry, a Stuffed Mac & Cheese Pie with 4-Herb Crust and an Avocado's Number Pie from Veronica Vadakan, and a Cookie Cake Pie (WHAT!) from Dorothy Nguyen.
Duchess Shiraz of the Duchy of Domesticity blog went the savory route with her Chicken Tikka Masala pie. With ginger, garlic, cilantro, garam masala, chili powder, turmeric and more, this pie promises to be long on flavor, short on time in existence.
Kate Gaudry stuck…
sastyk | March 15, 2010Reaching the hellacious end-of-book period where I do nothing but merge endlessly with my computer. Thus, low on new content. So you can read this stuff instead.
First, check out "Little House in the Ghetto" which will be going on my blogroll just as soon as I figure out how to change my blogroll.
Waking up from this entrancement and becoming aware that options exist has given me opportunity and motivation in my own life. As hobo poet Vachel Lindsay remarked, "I am further from slavery than most men." This has been an unexpected gift from downshifting (dropping out) from mainstream…
sastyk | March 14, 2010After all that work, you'll want to plant good seeds. Glenn Beck approved seeds, ideally. Well, Stephen Colbert is right on board, aware that in a disaster, we'll all want raddichio. He's even started his own crisis herb garden, because, "I may be ready for a world where the streets run with blood, and zombies rule the night and feast on human flesh. But I refuse to live in a world where I can't garnish."
The Colbert Report
Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Survival Seed Bank
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor
Health Care reform
Sharon
ejohnson | March 14, 2010Well, it is finally Pi Day—mathematicians and scientists rejoice!
The number of pies in our inbox doubled overnight, and we woke up to a virtual bakery's worth of pastries. What did we find? We'll have to break it into two posts...
In the first we have Stephanie Patterson's Corned Beef Hash pie and Blueberry Cherry Pi pie, Joan Cook's Pi(es) (a)r(e) square(d), Brownie's Raspberry Rhubarb pie (another take on r2, and Jason Goldman's Bacon and Chocolate Mousse Fibonacci pie.
You want pictures? We have pictures.
Stephanie Patterson hedged her bets and sent us both a savory pie and a dessert pie…