sastyk

I still have space in the Adapting in Place Class that starts next week - the last one for some time, I suspect, given other projects (I have to write the book about Adapting in Place, for example ;-)). aron and I will be running our Adapting in Place Class online for six weeks beginning April 5.…

The Oil Drum has a well-referenced, thoughtful summary of the present situation at Fukushima - bad and getting worse as it gets harder and harder for workers to get close to the facility. The word "entombment" has been mentioned - which may be the only viable outcome. More than a million Japanese…

On some level, all disasters are agricultural disasters. When seawater washes over land, when the earth cracks and collapses buildings, when livelihoods and lives are lost, farmers die and lose their jobs. It is easy to forget this, of course, but it is always true - and there's something…

Posting will be intermittent and light this week. It is time for spring cleaning around here - pretty much a full time job. Not only is there Pesach coming to motivate me, and my next home visit in the foster/adoptive parent prep cycle, but also there's the fact that our weirdly cold spring is…

There's a very silly article in the New York Times about controversy over hybrids vs. heirlooms. Yes, this is a real debate. No, it isn't as stark or as stupid as the Times makes it. There are plenty of horticultural reasons heirlooms can grow glorious fruit. One is size. An heirloom tomato is…

From Alternet (actual Bill text at site), it turns out that House Republicans have a plan to prevent fighting for labor rights - hunger!: Maybe they've got firehoses too! And attack dogs, that would be good. Or maybe they could just shoot them - that's an old favorite way to disrupt strikes!…

Life has been proceeding more or less apace, and it feels like a long time since I've sat down and contemplated anything, much less my Anyway Project goals. At the same time, all this business is a series of steps on the way to actually many of the things done. I hope that's true of all of you!…

In the latest news from Fukushima, water in Tokyo has been deemed unfit for babies to consume because of high radiation levels. Not surprisingly, shortages of bottled water are emerging, as people buy up larger quantities. A top Japanese official urged residents of the nation's capital not to…

One of the things I've been arguing for years is that most people in the developed world, given a perceived lack of alternatives and no narrative to explain change and sacrifice, will do almost anything to keep their present way of life. I point out that if they become cold enough most people…

From the current issue of _American Educator_, fascinating research on Equality issues by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (PDF alert!) that shows that greater economic and social equality don't make things better just for the bottom: It may seem obvious that problems associated with relative…

From Time/CNN: The ongoing struggle to snuff out the nuclear crisis occurred amid mounting confusion about key elements of risk now in play. At a hearing in Washington on Wednesday, the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Gregory Jaczko, called the radiation levels at one of…

It can be hard to sort out exactly what's happening in Japan right now, or what the status of the nuclear situation is. Euan Mearns has done everyone a great service in pulling together a summary of known and unknown and credible, intelligent speculation, while clearly indicating which is which.…

Some of you may know that a publisher contacted me last year about turning a piece of short fiction I'd written from an adult perspective into a young adult novel. There are several reasons I wanted to do this - the first is that in many ways, the young adult fiction market is much more vital than…

One of the good things that could potentially come out of the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami is an awakening of people to the reality that even in seemingly protected and developed world space, disaster, true disaster, is more common than you think, and requires basic preparedness. I pointed out in…

Sundry stuff on a busy day - and a day when everyone is transfixed by world events. First, my colleage at Dean's Corner has offered a good guide to high tech ways to donate money to Japan relief. There are 10,000 people in Japan who haven't eaten since Friday by the best estimation, and events are…

"He'll never catch up!" the Sicilian cried. "Inconceivable!" "You keep using that word!" the Spaniard snapped. "I don't think it means what you think it does." ..."Inconceivable!" the Sicilian cried. The Spaniard whirled on him. "Stop saying that word!" It was inconceivable that anyone could…

As things unfold, there will be more to say about the terrible situation in Japan and its effects in the both the present and the future, but for now, Nicole Foss (aka Stoneleigh in her super financial analyst extraordinaire identity, and nuclear safety expert...is there anything she can't do?) of…

In January of 2007, Aaron Newton, my friend and co-author of A Nation of Farmers came to Albany for four days of intense work on our book. We barely ate, slept or left the house, since we knew it would be the only chance the two of us had to hash everything out. Perhaps the single most intense…

I'm doing a bunch of stuff right now (I'm always doing a bunch of stuff, actually) that I thought I'd mention here. First, on Monday March 21, at 5:30 I'll be at the first Unitarian Universalist Society in Albany talking to Congressman Paul Tonko about peak oil, climate change and regional…

Today is the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day, founded to celebrate the achievements of women. Founded in Europe to advocate for greater participation of women in the public sphere, International Women's Day focuses heavily on those public sphere accomplishments of women - as…

The theory, of course, is that eventually an inflection point in renewable production *might* be achievable, after which point total gobal energy consumption would decline. The fact, unfortunately, is that we're nowhere near achieving such an inflection point, as Tad Patzek carefully points out:…

Over the years I know a lot of people who have asked whether I get frustrated with other people's denial about energy and environmental issues. I do, but most of the time I'm pretty good at not allowing it to get to me. Yesterday, however, I just snapped. After a phone conversation with a news…

This week's project is getting the material up for my garden plants and herb CSA - I'm hoping to be able to offer a wide variety of plants from annual vegetables (my tomato list alone is insane) to unusual edibles, native plants, flowers and herbs. My garden obsession is making me a little nuts…

If you want to see it in color, all you have to do is google image up a history of the price of oil and superimpose it on the price of various staple crops. Take a look at oil and then rice, soybeans, wheat and corn. Look closely at 2008, and at the present. I will put up a visual presentation…

I've had a number of emails recently, as I've written here, at The Chatelaine's Keys (Yes, I know the site is down - there was a billing mixup that required a fax to fix - we don't have one at home and we got a foot and a half of snow on Friday, too much to bother struggling out for. The blog will…

I had been mulling over precisely how to frame this piece for a while, when I read Erik Lindberg's "This Is a Peak Oil Story." which admirably gets at the essential point that I've been wanting to make - that our collective crisis comes to all of us at different times and different ways than we…

The phrase "oil shock" is being thrown around a lot in the national news, and events in Tripoli at the moment seem to be reinforcing the idea that we're facing an extended period of instability, and possibly a new cycle of oil price increases and the stress on personal and public economies that…

Mother Jones has a very clear visual presentation of the increase in economic inequity over the last years - 11 charts they say shows it all. I'm not sure it shows it all, but they are well worth looking at, particularly these two: And this one, which shows the perception that Americans have -…

Two good recent articles on the implications for oil prices and production of the situation in Libya. First, Tom Whipple's always cogent overall analysis: While the 1.6 million barrels a day (b/d) that the Libyans pumped in January may not appear significant in a world that produces some 88…

(Rubeus the cat meets Nigerian Dwarf Baby Meadowsweet last summer) Tuesday's New York Times has an article on the expansion of miniature dairy goats in urban areas. It is an interesting article, and has some good points - among them it rightly points out that dairy goats are a bigger deal than…