Casaubon's Book

About

Eliot's Casaubon was a fool, and there is no key to all truths. And yet, the truth is that our present crises are much more of a piece than most of us have fully understood. The problem isn't just the economy, or our energy use, or global warming - or rather, they are all part of the same larger problem. But what to call it? How to get a hold of the tail of the crisis Ouroborous? Maybe this time, the fools are right and synthesis is the name of the game. So here's my attempt at the universal code, the synthesis of all things, or at least, all things of interest to me.

I'm a writer, teacher and small farmer living in rural upstate New York. I write primarily about food, agriculture, energy issues and climate change, but am cheerfully willing to make forays into almost anything that seems relevant. I'm the author of 3 books and am working on a fourth, all from New Society Publishing. Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front is my attempt to answer the question "how do we live now that we know our present way of life can't go on?" A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil co-authored with Aaron Newton, is an exploration of the world food crisis, and what will be needed to keep us food secure through climate change and energy depletion - it argues that what is most urgently required is that we all get much more deeply involved with our food. Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Preservation and Storage is a how-to practical book on how to store and preserve food, and how to cook it and enjoy it, that came out of the first one, trying to help people who want to eat better, cheaper and more sustainably do it all year round. I'm presently working on a book on how to adapt to living with a lot fewer resources, not in the dream eco-village or perfect straw bale home with a 20K renewable energy system, but in the place you live now, whether city, country or suburb, with the stuff you've got now and with the ordinary,imperfect, and probably reluctant people you already live with and around.

And because I think all of our ecological problems are going to change our lives, I'm working on actually living the things I write about. We were grad students living in apartments, with no agricultural training whatsoever, but we believed we needed to create local food systems, so we did. Now I live on Gleanings Farm, a patch of land in upstate New York where we raise a lot of our own food as well as dairy goats, pastured chickens and turkeys, meat and fiber rabbits, medicinal herbs and bedding plants for other people. Before I became a writer, we ran a small, Jewish-themed CSA, delivering vegetables, fresh bread, flowers and eggs to up to 20 families. I'm married to an astrophysicist by training who teaches environmental physics and space science and tries to convince his students that the earth is a planet too. Together we're raising our sons and attempting to get along while using about 1/10th of the resources of the average American. And yes, it sounds crazy to us too. But believe it or not, we're having a grand time.