sastyk | February 9, 2010I have nothing to do with the recent kerfuffle about civility and comment policies that has been meandering through science blogs, but a large quantity of posts on the subject on a largeish number of blogs has, I admit, gotten me thinking about my own comment policies. Since I often get queries, often in personal email, about my comment policies, particularly why I let X or Y person say what they do, I thought it might be useful to make my comment policy more explicit.
My basic philosophy towards commenters is that I don't censor and I don't ban except under extreme provocation. In over 5…
sastyk | February 8, 2010Dr. Steven Koonin of the DOE recently spoke about the future of energy and its implications for the goals of the New York State University system. Given that my husband is employed by said system, and in fact teaches Environmental Physics (aka "Here's how to do the math to prove we're doomed ;-)"), this was interesting to me. Neither of us was present for this event, but a friend who was reported that Koonin stated in the presentation, as a representative of the DOE that it unrealistic to expect the US to hold carbon emissions below 450ppm and that 550ppm was the best that could reasonably…
sastyk | February 5, 2010I somehow missed this Times article in January that documents the rising number of Americans living on nothing but Food Stamps. If you missed it too, you have to read it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/03foodstamps.html
This is the American equivalent of living on $2 per day.
Sharon
sastyk | February 5, 2010Ok, maybe not. But just in case you were wondering why Americans watch the news constantly and know nothing, here's a pretty good example. Coming up next - how to write a completely generic blog post, by yours truly ;-).
sastyk | February 5, 2010So for those of you getting ready for Snowpocalypse, as the mid-Atlantic faces, gasp - a whole foot of snow, I have to tell you something. I'm jealous. I mean really, really jealous. I want your snow.
A general pattern of winter storms in my area (upstate NY) is that they come down from Canada and across the Great Lakes. We are at the very eastern edge of the snow belt in New York, and we don't usually get the giant lake-effect snows that Buffalo and other areas get, but we can generally expect to spend the winter with a solid several feet on the ground. But not this year.
Somehow, all…
sastyk | February 5, 2010Every news media I looked at it is trumpeting good news - while unemployment increased in January, we're thrilled that it was only be 20,000 jobs. Because of this, the unemployment rate fell to 9.7% amid, as we learn on CNN "hope the economy will add jobs soon."
What's buried in the middle of the report is the real news - that revisions in employment estimates show that we lost 1.2 million jobs more than the previously estimated 7.2 million. This was higher than predictions, which expected an additional million lost jobs. That means that one in every seven jobs lost since December '07 went…
sastyk | February 5, 2010Note: This is a rerun from ye olde blogge. As the book deadline approaches, expect to see some of my previous opi making appearances here. Since I've got more than 1000 of them, it shouldn't be too boring, I hope. I hope this one will help some of you in garden planning this year.
There are a million gardening books out there to tell you how to grow perfect tomatoes and lettuces. And that's important, especially after the blight disaster last year - in my house, salsa is a food group. But the reality is that for those of us attempting to produce a large portion of our calories, tomatoes…
sastyk | February 4, 2010As you all know, I live with five males, ranging from 39 to 4. As a woman raised in a mostly all-female household (mother, step-mother, two sisters), I try gamely to fit in, but find myself occasionally mystified by the guy-ness, or inadequately equipped for things like appreciating how cool it is to write in the snow with your penis. This was clearly one of those moments.
Me, (coming downstairs for a cup of tea before returning to my book) "What's with the sledgehammer, honey?"
The boys: "Daddy is going to let us smash geodes! Awesome! We tried it with the hammer, but it didn't work, so…
sastyk | February 4, 2010I've now been at scienceblogs for a couple of months, and it is fascinating to me - I went from a stand-alone blog to one with a whole lot of other people, and getting to know the local culture is a really interesting exercise. Overwhelmingly, it has been really wonderful and fascinating. Still, I have learned some new-to-me things about this culture. I thought I would do a series, seeing if I could sum up the lessons learned here as I adapt to this strange new world. So here is the first one.
#1 - The phrase "American Conservative Evangelical Protestantism" is spelled "R-E-L-I-G-I-O-N. In…
sastyk | February 4, 2010We spent about 8 months looking for a suitable dog before we acquired Mac the Marshmallow last month. Until a little over a year ago, we had two American Working Farmcollies, half siblings. Rufus, our senior dog was an unusually large dog for his breed - half again the size of either parent or his sister, Mistress Quickly, and he died suddenly at 7 of a hidden heart condition that our vet says sometimes affects unusually large dogs.
We knew that we did not want another farmcollie - or rather we did, we had loved Rufus, but that what we needed in working dog for our family was slightly…
sastyk | February 2, 2010An unsurprising but still deeply depressing article from the Guardian observes that not only was Copenhagen, billed as "the last, best hope for change" a dismal failure (duh) but that Mexico City is already a dismal failure.
Dozens of politicians, diplomats, economists, scientists and campaigners contacted by the Guardian agreed that while a global, legally binding treaty remains by far the best way to prevent global warming wreaking havoc on our civilisation, the chances of that treaty being achieved in 2010 are almost nil.
The energy has gone out of the negotiations, said some, with the…
sastyk | February 2, 2010I've got a couple of speaking engagements and another class coming up, and I thought I'd let you know where I'm going to be and when.
First, on Saturday, March 6, I'll be in Concord, NH at the NOFA-NH Winter Conference. The Northeast Organic Farming Association has been so powerful in creating conditions for small scale organic agriculture in our region that I'm thrilled to be doing the keynote for this conference. I'll be speaking mid-day on "Making a Place at the Table" and doing a workshop in the afternoon on low energy living with kids and teens. And I can't wait to attend other…
sastyk | February 2, 2010At first glance, swept yards, derived from Africa, at one time traditional in the south and now mostly the province of a few, aging African-American southerners; and Cottage Gardens, invented in Britain under the feudal system and now evolved into a trendy " flower garden style" meaning mostly a mix of abundant plants and mulched paths as seen in any supermarket magazine, have nothing to do with one another.
But looking past the obvious, the two of them have a great deal in common indeed. Both emerged from the need to make good use of a comparatively smaller piece of land for a family with…
sastyk | February 1, 2010At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above the snow...
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache'...
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry - It was
A choristoer whose C predeeded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality. - Wallace…
sastyk | January 31, 2010In 2005, my first widely republished article was entitled "Peak Oil is a Women's Issue" and detailed the ways that material realities for women were likely to change in an energy depleted world. I got more than a 100 emails after I wrote that piece, mostly falling into two camps - either "Wow, I never thought of that, but of course it is" and "Oh, I've been worrying about these issues for a long time and no one ever writes about them." I was not the first significant woman writer in the peak oil movement, nor was I even the first to ever write about these issues, but somehow this article…
sastyk | January 28, 2010My fellow Science blogger Eric Michael Johnson has a superb post up about possible strategies for reforestation in Haiti - and the enormous economic barriers to doing so:
In other words, by providing a 25% subsidy for seed and a 75% subsidy for fertilizers both large and small farms would improve their income while at the same time improving the conditions of their environment. These subsidies would also be less expensive than the current practice of punishing infractions.
"The modeling results indicate that agricultural subsidies tied to forest conservation can provide opportunities for…
sastyk | January 28, 2010Note: This is a repeat from ye olde blogge, because I think this is a really useful, and probably obvious tool that wasn't obvious to me. It has made everything so much easier. I also wanted to put in the plug for the Ozone House Calendar!
Those of who know me in real life will probably already have noted that organization isn't my strong suit. So how to keep up with all the garden tasks is a chronic problem of mine. I get particularly muddled in late spring, when there are plants to be seeded outside, tender crops to be hardened off in cold frames, and long-growing fall garden plants like…
sastyk | January 27, 2010Buying seeds here is not a quick process. First there's the perusal of all the seed catalogs, the dreaming and fantasizing with my garden porn. Then there's the marking of all the things I'd like to try this year, which would get me a seed order about 4 times bigger than I could possibly plant, even on my farm. Then there is the actual ordering, and the occasional banging against reality, like the fact that I waited too long to get that variety or this one. I'm winding up the process now, and starting to get to open the boxes of seeds.
For those of you who have ordered or at least…
sastyk | January 27, 2010A while back I ran a post-apocalyptic novel book club on ye olde blogge, which was a lot of fun. It allowed us to get our doom on at low stakes. Now I'm not, strictly speaking, a hard doomer. I suspect most of the likely scenarios involve gradual declines in resource availability and increasing poverty. In some ways this is more depressing than the grand and more dramatic scenarios that writers love to create - you can win against the zombies, but it is tough to win against the enemy "crushing national debt and gradually increasing world temperatures."
I think most apocalyptic novels are…
sastyk | January 26, 2010The New Economic Foundation's Report on the infeasibility of continued economic growth is yet another bit of analysis that points out the obvious - we have radically overdrawn our resources and that has consequences. One of them is that we can't draw down natural resources infinitely. The other is that infinite economic growth is (duh) not possible. It also observes that continued economic growth isn't actually benefitting most of the people we ostensibly care about benefitting:
...Why growth isn't working
Between 1990 and 2001, for every $100 worth of growth in the world's income per…