sastyk

The Food Crisis, of course. In fact it really never left - since 2007 we've had more hungry people on the planet than ever before in human history, and while we've seen brief declines in the numbers of the hungry worldwide, those declines were of such short duration that they were essentially…

As I mentioned in a previous post about Carol Deppe's wonderful _The Resilient Gardener_, all garden books are fundamentally local. That localness is why I so love _Gardens of Use and Delight_ by Jigs and Jo Ann Gardner. I discovered this book last year at my local library, and have taken it out…

"It is soooo hard to wait, Mom!" Isaiah is seven years old and when you are seven, uncertainty is torture. He asks me when the mail will get here 20 times a day, and can he go out and wait for the mail truck? I point out that it is 4 degrees F out there, and the mail won't be here for three…

Pha Lo has a wonderful piece at Salon on the ways that his family's history of locavorism was a source of shame and conflict for them, because it fit so badly into the American diet. He echoes a story I hear over and over again, both from immigrants and from Americans from traditional agricultural…

Just an update - all the copies of Prelude in circulation are presently going 'round, but if past experience is any guide, the books should have at least one more cycle before the end of the month. So watch here for the next announcement. In some ways I'm not the optimal audience for Kurt Cobb's…

Just a reminder to everyone that we'll be starting Kurt Cobb's _Prelude_ on Monday. I have several people who have copies available for circulation, so if you'd like to read along with the group, please drop me an email at jewishfarmer@gmail.com and you'll get a copy in the mail, with only the…

As you can probably imagine, Eric sometimes has more than a bit to put up with being married to me. One of the things that bothers him the most is that I'm absolutely no fun at movies. If you remember the show MST3K, I'm them - all the time. And just because the movie is supposed to be high art…

My Science Blogs Colleage at Dean's Corner suggests that in the New Year all of us should think about eating more invasive species. I'm delighted to see this idea being promulgated by both my colleagues and the New York Times, because it highlights one of the best ways of controlling species that…

As long as we've lived in our home, a colony of bumblebees has nested in the roof of our front porch. For years we've watched generations of bumblebees come and go, often quite closely. Our yard, edged with wildflowers and native plants (that sounds so much more elegant than "we don't mow much…

In my recent essay "300 Years of Fossil Fuels and Not One Bad Gal" I wrote: ...a narrative in which women's entry in the workforce is responsible for our dramatic rise in fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions can look superficially like a tool for those who would prefer that women go back…

We live in a very strange society in many ways. Think about how weird it is that almost any kind of personal preparation for the future that doesn't involve putting money in the stock market is viewed as survivalism, and as the territory of crazy people with guns. How strange is it that the…

There are a lot of gardening books out there, and whenever anyone asks me for my favorite ones, I find myself struggling to make a list. There are three rules about garden books to remember. 1. All garden books are local to one degree or another, unless they are very general. That is, all…

I get a lot of books to review, and I don't write enough book pieces, I fear. Because of this, books I really like, and books you might want to read get missed, so I've decided in the spirit of New Years Resolutions to do 31 short book reviews in the month of January, of books I think are…

Hi Folks - Happy New Year, everyone! Just a few admin things. First, I still have several spaces in my January apprentice weekend, coming up MLK weekend. This is an adults-only weekend in which we'll talk about everything, practice the winter skill set - late season preserving, goat care and…

This year I have a jump on my predictions - as part of my comparatively new role as Editor of the Peak Oil Review Commentary section, I had the fun of asking a whole lot of smart people what they think is going to happen, and thinking about their predictions first. If you haven't seen them already…

We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species. The list of its undeniable abominations is long and hardly bearable. And these abominations are not balanced or compensated or atoned for by the list, endlessly reiterated, of our scientific…

I've had a lot of requests to say more than I did in my Anyway Project Update about our decision to adopt more children, and a lot of requests to write about the project as we go along. So I will say something here, although with the caveat that the process is very new for us, we are just…

I broke my little toe this weekend, which I mention because while it is completely unimportant (the only things you can do about broken toes is tape and whine, I'm good at both ;-)), I'm using it as an excuse to take some time off this week and post lightly over the next couple. Don't ask me to…

If you haven't seen this video by Richard Heinberg and the Post Carbon Institute, you should. In a lot of ways it is an excellent summary of the history of fossil fuels, entertainingly and creatively done. In some ways, it is extremely valuable as a basic educational piece. I'm very impressed…

Just a note: Eric stepped on the overpriced device that allows us to have a slow and primitive but still wireless connection out here in middle-of-nowhere-land this morning. It is still working, miraculously (it doesn't look like it should be working), but I expect to lose internet access…

It is claiming I don't have permission to embed it (I do, actually), so you can see the video here. I gave this talk back at the beginning of October, in my conference as a member of the ASPO-USA Board. This was only the second time that ASPO has had a significant talk about the connection between…

As Urbanization Week continues, Liz Borkowski put up a great post about feeding cities that includes a nice, rational (look at the comments for more good stuff) discussion of the idea of Vertical Farming. I'm glad to see the issue come up, because it has so much power. I'm grateful to Liz for…

First of all, let me start with what I like about Jim Kunstler's writing in _The Witch of Hebron_. The thing I enjoy most is that he navigates the shoals of post-apocalyptic fantasy extraordinarily well. He neither falls into the masturbatory apocalypticism of something like _The Road_ nor the "…

Ok, as part of Urbanization Week, I'm really excited to hear more about what people who have committed to their own cities are doing to make them work. So here's your chance to tell me about your place, small city or large, and how you are improving your place, and making it ready for the coming…

Liz Borkowski of The Pump Handle and I are doing a series this week on the future of urbanization. Given that just about half the world's population now lives in cities, and that almost all projected demographic growth (we will come back to whether the UN's projections on this subject are…

I kind of wandered off on y'all - we just spent four days visiting and celebrating Thanksanukah ;-) with biological and chosen family. We didn't go to my parents' place for Thanksgiving this year, so we headed out and ate turkey and latkes together, spent four glorious days goofing off, and are…

The great thing about most Jewish holidays is that they go on forever (well, 8 days, mostly), so lazy writers have a chance to get their act together late in the holiday and make it look like they planned it. Meanwhile, I have write about 73 things before tonight and then we're leaving tomorrow…

In a perfect world, perhaps we'd all have already made our own homemade gifts for everyone, but most of us aren't that perfect. Many of us need to acquire some gifts, and the challenge is how to spend our money well, in things that are valuable, lasting and worth having. Over the course of the…

This morning four guys in camo and rifles were walking up my road at 6am, which means one of two things. Either it is Deer Season, or Canada has invaded. And that's the real reason I'm not leaving the US - I've pinned my hopes on the conquest of upstate New York by Canada, who will ruthlessly…

An anonymous guest poster at ClubOrlov makes the case that America isn't a place you want to live - and that Americans should get out of Dodge: Americans, I have some bad news for you: You have the worst quality of life in the developed world--by a wide margin. If you had any idea of how people…