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sastyk | February 16, 2010With any reasonably successful blog, you have a conversation going on, often between an author and commenters who have a long history and background, and people coming into the conversation for the first time. Sometimes the people coming in are hostile, sometimes curious, sometimes troubled by what they are learning, annoyed by you or dismissive. Sometimes they stay, and sometimes they look in and look out. Balancing the degree to which you write for the regulars and to those new to you is always an interesting exercise. That's been an issue for me lately - I've now been at science blogs a…
sastyk | February 11, 2010
In _Depletion and Abundance_ I write about the difficulty of committing to a lifestyle change in a world where you always seem to have more time, where defining events are always on the horizon but never present. I use the phrase "time to pick up your hat" which I take from a short story by Robert Heinlein, as a way of thinking both about how difficult it is to change and how necessary.
On the one hand, the story is a typical 1950s nuclear era tale of apocalypse - in it, the main character, a bartender, is dealing drinks when two scientists walk into his bar. Both are terribly, terribly…
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 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…
sastyk | January 14, 2010
I have managed to completely freak Zuska out, and for that, I can only offer both apologies and sympathy. It really sucketh deeply when people come bang up against the realities of depletion and climate change. And one of the things that so insidious about the painfulness of this encounter is that a lot of times, people who are ordinarily more critical in their responses, go to the worst possible scenarios with a kind of horrified fascination.
This is not totally unreasonable - not only is there tremendous social pressure to go to the apocalyptic (plenty of movies, lots of tv, fiction...)…
sastyk | January 11, 2010I'm back after four days of teaching a workshop at my house. It was awesome. It was exhausting. It was fascinating. We milked goats (note, very small adorable goats sell themselves. It is not necessary to talk them up, just to frisk people trying to hide goats under their jackets on the way out ;-)). We talked lactofermentation. We laughed a lot. We cooked on the woodstove. We knit stuff (ok, they knit stuff, I didn't knit much, since I was trying to manage everything). We talked about the future and where we think it is going. We laughed a lot. We talked about growing things and…
sastyk | January 4, 2010Note: This is the beginning of a multi-part series on agricultural education, the farming demographic crisis and the question of who will grow our food - what the problems are, how we will find new farmers, how they will be trained. To me, this is one of the most urgent questions of our time.
A quick, Jay Leno style quiz for the man and woman on the street.
Who will grow your food in the coming decades?
A. My friendly neighborhood agribusinessman will grow my food on a plantation the size of Wyoming using nearly enslaved non-white folks who are deported minutes after harvest. Or maybe…
sastyk | January 3, 2010Longtime readers will know I'm a deep admirer of _The Automatic Earth_ where Stoneleigh and Ilargi do economic analysis. I think Stoneleigh has outdone herself this time, with a primer on resilience, cycles and where we're headed. Definitely worth a read - probably two reads.
I particularly like this bit of work on resilience, which clarifies and expands slightly on Buzz Holling's.
Resilience arises from a redundancy that has the appearance of inefficiency and a lack of critical structural dependency on specialized hierarchy, neither of which conditions are likely to be met at the peak of…
sastyk | December 28, 2009Energy Bulletin ran this excellent piece from the New York Times on a crisis facing Mongolian Goat Herders who are attempting to deal with unstable world markets, climate change and overgrazing. I was fascinated by the clear way that the author of the piece lays out the vicious circle that they've entered into, and I was struck by how useful an example it is of the kind of ecological vicious circle that we face all the time:
To compensate for low prices, herders have been increasing supply by breeding more goats -- a classic vicious circle. Mongolia's goat population is now approaching 20…
sastyk | December 24, 2009I spend much of my life making the case for changing one's life (and not just one's life - for supporting political and social change that is associated with it) in fairly radical ways, very quickly. I spend a lot of my time writing, and periodically I get on a train or a bus or something and go stand up in front of people and make the same case. I know this is a diffcult thing for many people, whose infrastructure envelopes them and pushes them powerfully towards a particular way of life, so I try to make good arguments for doing it now. I make moral arguments, about the use of a fair…
sastyk | December 10, 2009There's an old Far Side cartoon, with a split panel, one side showing St. Peter greeting people passing the pearly gates, saying "Welcome to Heaven, here's your harp." On the other panel, the Devil greets folks at the gates of Hell, saying "Welcome to Hell, here's your accordion." My guess is that getting off the plane in Copenhagen to attend the climate talks, is, for most of the truly sincere people who care so much about the climate, a lot like entering into the warmer territories - oh, goody, you get polkas too! No torment will be denied!
Here's what we know about Copenhagen so far -…
sastyk | December 8, 2009Last year I was invited to speak at a Green Energy Event in the West. Most such events make their actual money from their vendor halls, and this one had as one of its focal events the premier of the new Ford Hybrid, which was just being released. Thus, there were many Ford executives at the event. I arrived early to the drinks-and-food-for-the-speakers-and-vendors bit the night before the event formally began, since I had been told it would take longer for me to walk there than it did, and the only other person present from the event was a Ford executive. We got to talking - he was a…
grrlscientist | July 29, 2009tags: TEDTalks, politics, society, Why Societies Collapse, Jared Diamond, streaming video
Why do societies fail? In this video, Jared Diamond uses lessons from the Norse of Iron Age Greenland, deforested Easter Island and present-day Montana to talk about the signs that collapse is near, and how -- if we see it in time -- we can prevent it [22:42]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
esiegel | April 7, 2008What's going to happen to all the stars in the Universe as they get older? Well, just as nothing can live forever, stars can't live forever also. Why? Because they run on fuel: burning hydrogen into helium, for example. When they run out of fuel, something's gotta give. Barbara Ryden reminds us of an excellent and appropriate quote by Dylan Thomas:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
But what exactly happens to the star depends very sensitively on what the mass of the star is.
If you've got a tiny little star, less than about 40% of the mass of…