sastyk
Posts by this author
November 29, 2010
It has been just about a year since I made my transition to Science Blogs, and other than the kerfuffle in July and the fact that they still don't pay us particularly often, in general, I think this has been a successful move for me - particularly in my larger goal, which was to reach a readership…
November 29, 2010
Two updates for the Post-Apocalyptic Novel Reading Club. First, I realized that I have scheduled two things for the first of the upcoming month - my "Anyway Project" updates and the first discussion of _The Witch of Hebron_. This is far more than I am likely to accomplish, so I've decided my…
November 23, 2010
I hope my readers will forgive me today for lapsing back into my prior profession rather than my present one as an energy and environmental writer. You see, before I gained fame and fortune writing about our ecological situation, I was a mild-mannered college teacher, whose favorite and most…
November 23, 2010
If you want to make a traditional Thanksgiving dinner wholly from scratch, you start ahead of time. If you want to make it from food you've raised yourself, you start way, way ahead of time - like in January of the year before. In some ways, it starts even earlier, but January is the new year -…
November 23, 2010
The always-brillliant and funny Christine Patton aka The Peak Oil Hausfrau, in the latest Peak Oil Review Commentary, has turned her sights to the IEA's recent predictions, managing to properly skewer both the IEA's predictions and the predictive value of economic modelling (two great tastes that…
November 22, 2010
I was about to write something about the FAO's recent warning about the food situation, but it turns out I don't have to, since Liz Borkowski at the Pump Handle beat me to it - great link to Raj Patel's piece in the Guardian as well. Definitely worth a read!
The UN Food and Agriculture…
November 22, 2010
The centerpiece of any homegrown Thanksgiving meal, assuming you are not a vegetarian, is inevitably the homegrown turkey. And there are a lot of good reasons to get a local turkey or raise your own - there's the flavor which is richer and deeper, an essence of turkey thing, there's the fact that…
November 19, 2010
In yesterday's NY Times Op-ed, Kristof apologized for comparing US income inequity to that of "Banana Republics" - that is, for insulting other nations by comparing them to the US, which has now achieved wholly unprecedented levels of economic injustice.
My point was that the wealthiest plutocrats…
November 16, 2010
PANRC, by the way, is the acronym for "Post-Apocalyptic Novel Reading Club" pronounced by those in the know (ie, the person who just made this up 3 seconds ago) as "Panric" ;-). And while December's selection (we'll start on 12/1), Jim Kunstler's _The Witch of Hebron_ has been out for a bit, Kurt…
November 15, 2010
This will be a quiet week - I've got my Dad making his annual visit, a talk, a short trip, and then a slew of guests arriving for the weekend for Simon's 9th birthday party and Simon's first Torah reading (he's too young to read in the main synagogue, but he'll be the youngest kid ever to chant…
November 10, 2010
Local food is elitist! This trumpets from one paper or another, revealing that despite the growing preoccupation with good food, ultimately, it is just another white soccer Mom phenomenon. Working class people (who strangely, the paper and the author rarely seem to care about otherwise) can't…
November 9, 2010
Variations on the obligation to love one's neighbor show up across both the religious and secular spectrum. They tend to provoke a range of responses - from those who attempt to sort out what loving people who are not part of your immediate tribe would mean, to those who reject the necessity.…
November 9, 2010
First of all, in response to reader suggestion, I've changed the names of the categories. People rightly felt "domestic economy" and "household economy" were too confusing, and reader Apple Jack Creek suggested we change "domestic economy" to "domestic infrastructure." Claire also suggested that…
November 8, 2010
The oft-discussed 10,000 mile Caesar Salad, used to illustrate the degree to which our food system is drenched in fossil fuels, really is only a piker when it comes to the spaces that food can make you cover.
10K miles by airplane, refrigerator truck, etc... is nothing compared to the distances…
November 4, 2010
I have a vivid memory as a teenager of yelling at my Mother, "I didn't ask for two mothers! I don't need two mothers! I don't even want *you* and you got me this other one who won't leave me alone!" I was 14 and about as revolting as every other fourteen year old, or maybe just a little more.…
November 4, 2010
Note: A cold, wet day in November seems like as good a day as any to talk about owning a wood cookstove, re-running a piece I first wrote in 2007. When people come to my house, they are often a little disappointed to see that it looks pretty much like other houses. But the wood cookstove really…
November 3, 2010
The election is over and the results are depressing, much as expected - it was not a good night for anyone who believes that the most important work of government in hard times will be protecting ordinary people. This is a stretch to imagine at the best of times, and this was not them.
There's a…
November 2, 2010
The Peak Oil Hausfrau revealed that the news about the climate isn't all bad: it is good for the minions of hell:
However, legal experts say that Hell's colonization of land owned by various Satanic holding companies is all perfectly legal. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, an avid…
November 2, 2010
Stuart Staniford is turning his customary care and attention to recent climate change drought projections, and the results are frightening, but also critically important. There's a summary of his posts on this subject here - read them all.
Sharon
November 1, 2010
It hasn't escaped my notice that today is November 1, and I'm supposed to be starting the Whole-Life Redesign Project. In fact, I am starting it - I'm taking the opportunity created by my kids being out of the house to move all the food storage around and clean under things and get rid of things (…
November 1, 2010
Here are 100 of them. Got a fave?
Sharon
November 1, 2010
Like my colleague Mike the Mad Biologist, I'm horrified by a story out of Indiana in which parents of disabled children who are no longer receiving state aid due to the state budget crisis, were told that they could drop the kids off at homeless shelters if they were unable to care for them at home…
October 31, 2010
With November coming 'round tomorrow, I realize my chances of re-starting the post-apocalyptic reading group for November 1 are probably pretty faint ;-). Again, this is pretty much a reflection of where my brain is these days. I *meant* to get us started for ummm...tomorrow. But while I realize…
October 31, 2010
I admit, maybe because of that intellectual slowdown that the cold weather and dark days call, but I'm confused about which one of these is the real Onion Headline - that thing about the Brookings Institute guy or a BBC headline that reads "World Bank Leads Economic Push on Nature Protection."…
October 31, 2010
A blog is a window into the intellectual world of its owner, I'm reliably told by people who think about this stuff. That's what's so compelling about the good ones - again, so I'm told.
So here's what's been going through my intellectual world lately....
....BOING.
....BOING.
You know that screen…
October 26, 2010
Along the theme of time - finding it, using it, fast, slow, in-between - I thought I'd re-run this post. I have a *lot* of experience with four little boys, one autistic, in getting things done around the kids ;-) - they help now a lot more, but sometimes this is still necessary, so I thought it…
October 26, 2010
I really liked Asher Miller's HuffPo article on an assessment of clean energy's scalability by three mostly conservative think-tanks. There are so many analyses done out there that simply work from the assumption that magic technology fairies will erase time and depletion and make it possible for…
October 26, 2010
One of the tensions in my life -is that between two kinds of time. "Fast Time" is the world I live in, the one with a two hour meeting scheduled at 7pm, my husband's classes at 12:35, Eli's bus at 8:15 and 3:30... payments due by the first of the month, etc... It is the world run on clocks and…
October 21, 2010
(Stachys, at about 3 weeks)
Today Stachys and Hemp enter the monastary. They are the youngest of the boys and at 8 weeks plus, it is time for them to leave their Moms. Stachys is just about 8 weeks, and at that point, could conceivably start breeding his sisters and his Mom (he's *huge* too - I…
October 21, 2010
Robyn's Adapting In Place Blog has a really great sermon she gave about teaching kids about the environment. I really like her points both about multiple environmentalisms, and also about the way kids react to empty nonsense like "101 ways you can save the planet." The whole thing is well worth a…