Back to Work

As a lot of you probably knew long before I did (we loaned our computer to our housemate who is frantically prepping for his orals ;-)), Scienceblogs took down the Pepsi blog. This actually exceeded my requests to management as parameters for me coming back. I had asked that Scienceblogs create a separate area for its advertorial content, mark it explicitly as such, and distinguish it visually from the other blogs. They removed it entirely. So I'm back.

There are other issues at scienceblogs as well, which you've probably all heard about now - I think my colleague Martin Rundkvist gets a lot of them really right, but most of them are less relevant to me than others. I came here pretty much for one reason - because I thought the acknowledgement that peak oil and the problem of resource limits was a mainstream issue that deserved a public platform among other major scientific issues affecting our future. I didn't even care particularly that it be my blog they picked up - in fact, I was surprised they did because I'm not a scientist, I'm a writer, and while I do science writing, I also do other writing - and had no intention of changing my focus. I asked, when recruited, if they wanted to reconsider. They said not, and here I am.

Dealing with our material limits is a basic scientific challenge, and someone should be writing about it among the folks doing other science writing. As long as putting this up on a science blogging platform usefully brings it to people's attention who might not otherwise know about this stuff, and as long as writing for science blogs raises the profile of peak oil and climate change and sustainable food issues, rather than lowering it, I'll be here (or at least until they get such a large stable of energy writers that I'm not needed anymore ;-).)

On the other hand, I'm spending a few days visiting family right now, among other things celebrating my aunt's 90th birthday. So while the blog is back online, it will be quiet as I, well, live my life.

Sharon