sastyk
Posts by this author
February 1, 2010
At 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…
January 31, 2010
In 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…
January 28, 2010
My fellow Science blogger Eric Michael Johnson has a superb post up about possible strategies for reforestation in Haiti - and the enormous economic barriers to doing so:
In other words, by providing a 25% subsidy for seed and a 75% subsidy for fertilizers both large and small farms would improve…
January 28, 2010
Note: This is a repeat from ye olde blogge, because I think this is a really useful, and probably obvious tool that wasn't obvious to me. It has made everything so much easier. I also wanted to put in the plug for the Ozone House Calendar!
Those of who know me in real life will probably already…
January 27, 2010
Buying seeds here is not a quick process. First there's the perusal of all the seed catalogs, the dreaming and fantasizing with my garden porn. Then there's the marking of all the things I'd like to try this year, which would get me a seed order about 4 times bigger than I could possibly plant,…
January 27, 2010
A while back I ran a post-apocalyptic novel book club on ye olde blogge, which was a lot of fun. It allowed us to get our doom on at low stakes. Now I'm not, strictly speaking, a hard doomer. I suspect most of the likely scenarios involve gradual declines in resource availability and increasing…
January 26, 2010
The 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…
January 26, 2010
Over the last 50 years, the average American has seen their private space more than triple. In the 1950s, the average American, according to Pat Murphy's excellent book _Plan C_, had 250 square feet per person. By 2005, the average American had 850 square feet of space in their home per person…
January 26, 2010
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post with the above title, about the way that biofuel and meat production in the US was pushing up world food prices. I observed, as has been documented in any number of studies, that when the world's poorest people and the world's richest people's vehicles (or…
January 25, 2010
One of the roles our farm has, rather unintentionally, taken on is as sanctuary (mostly temporary) for the unwanted roosters of friends and loved ones. First, there was Cora, who turned out to be Corey - and not permissable under town regulations. My step-mother relocated him here and found…
January 25, 2010
We've all been down with colds this weekend, nothing really serious, just uncomfortable. Or rather, nothing really serious in my estimation. My husband, on the other hand, is always pretty sure he might be dying whenever any minor virus hits him. So far, though, he's still alive and seems to be…
January 22, 2010
I serve on a committee at my synagogue that brings in speakers every year for a series of talks and special meals. It is a small comittee, and before I joined, the average age of the participants was probably close to 70. The former chair is a formidable and funny woman in her early 90s, who has…
January 22, 2010
Just over a week ago, I re-ran a post "How Not to Freeze" about what to do if you don't have central heating in the winter in cold places. I was fascinated by the responses I got from people who by necessity and desire were living with minimal heat.
My assumption about "how not to freeze" was…
January 21, 2010
...you just gotta love The Onion. Not only is it a lazy-ass blogiste's best friend, providing amusing commentary when you just can't get a post up, but it also does a lovely job of illustrating the scope of our ecological problems now and again. You'll enjoy this one.
"It's not like I don't care…
January 21, 2010
A friend of mine, Colin Beavan (aka No Impact Man) once observed that cutting your energy usage should be as easy as rolling off a log - that as long as it is always easier to use more resources, and the path of least resistance heads towards taking the car or turning up the heat, we're destined to…
January 21, 2010
There's yet another kerfuffle about climatology going on. First, of course, there was climategate, whose total revealed knowledge is "if you hack into people's private emails you might find out that some people, even climate scientists, are jerks sometimes." Now there's another one - in the IPCC…
January 20, 2010
Nearly all the single readers I've met have told me how hard it is to find someone who starts with the same basic mindset that they do. They talk about going on dates and trying to figure out when to ask someone "so, do you believe that industrial society has a future?" Or "what do you think the…
January 20, 2010
In my "Response to Zuska" in comments we've had some interesting discussion of whether gay, lesbian, bi and transgender folk will need to/be able to integrate successfully into rural communities, and I thought it was worth a blog post here as well, for folks who may not have read all the comments…
January 18, 2010
The definitive book on root cellars and the cold storage of vegetables is Mike and Nancy Bubel's _Root Cellaring_, and I'm very fond of this book. Over the years, we've relied on it for all sorts of things, and it has helped us find a spot in our house suitable for natural, unrefrigerated cold…
January 15, 2010
So I've spent a lot of the last few months reading beekeeping books - all the ones you'd think plus a few others. I've spent a lot of time talking to various local beekeepers as well. There's an old saying "one Jew, three opinions" - well, let's just say that my major observation has been that…
January 15, 2010
Earlier this week I wrote in "Pyr-Buck-Bees-Sheep" that I was struggling to get excited by my present book (still true, although a little better), and that what was keeping me going was farm planning - thinking about what I really want to be doing. I made my list of sustaining plans, to be paid…
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…
January 14, 2010
John Michael Greer has a superb piece up about our reluctance to seriously consider real community and organizational strategies. I think it is well worth reading for anyone interested in this question of community - because we have to ask ourselves, if this is the tool we've got, why do so few of…
January 14, 2010
Get nine women who have thought a lot about peak oil and climate change together around a dining room table, and perhaps expectedly, the conversation turns umm...blue. Get them around *my* dining room table and the turn to sex is pretty inevitable, given a certain native blueness (this is a polite…
January 13, 2010
It is always hard to grasp the magnitude of suffering in Haiti - a place that should not be so desperately impoverished, that should never be the victim of so much suffering has an almost unending depth of misery. And it has only gotten worse over the last few years, as high food prices have…
January 13, 2010
The best estimate I've seen is that in 2009 alone, we had more than 2 million first time gardeners, and from 2007 on, we've added 8 million new vegetable gardens. This is one heck of a movement. Unfortunately, it also meant that millions of people started gardening in what was, in the Northeast,…
January 13, 2010
Stuart Staniford is blogging. This is wonderful. As some of you may remember, Staniford disappeared from The Oil Drum a couple of years ago, after doing some astonishingly brilliant work on peak oil, biofuels and all sorts of stuff. Now Staniford and I disagree on a number of things, but he's a…
January 12, 2010
Ok, as you all know from my "Pyr-Buck-Bees-Sheep" post, I need inspiration to get this book cooking again. So I know you've told me before, some of you, but I want to hear about how you are making a lower-energy life where you are, or how you've found a new place to do it. I'm also looking for a…
January 12, 2010
Until I saw Ilargi's lovely obit for Miep Gies, who helped hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis and who rescued Anne's diary, I hadn't realized that she had died at 100. I can only add that there is a life worth mourning, and Ilargi's piece is well worth reading:
The Dutch language would…
January 12, 2010
Note: This is a revised version of an article I wrote for ye olde blogge about how to keep warm if you need to.
Despite the fact that I believe people should use a lot less energy, I am not proposing here that people in cold climates go cold turkey on supplemental heating ;-). This post is,…