sastyk | September 28, 2011There are ten children in my house, but six of them are phantoms. No, we haven't gotten a foster placement or heard anything new since the two weeks in August when we were asked to take two separate groups of five kids each. Both of those placements fell through, and there has been nothing since, which is sort of the problem.
I have little patience with being expectant, whether pregnant or waiting for a foster placement, and the six (this is a totally arbitrary number that I'm using only because it represents the number of van seats, and thus the maximum placement we could take) "ghost…
sastyk | September 28, 2011
As our first beekeeping summer winds down, Eric (the neurotic beekeeper) harvested a very small amount of comb honey to eat with our own apples for the new year. There's a victory there - the bees have done very well, building up to a healthy population with plenty of honey for them and us. The real trick, of course, will be seeing them through the winter, but we're pleased with the first experience and thus far our signs look good.
One of the things that allowing Eric to be the primary farmer on the beekeeping project has revealed is a fundamental difference in our approaches. Eric likes…
sastyk | September 26, 2011Dr. Wangari Maathai died on Sunday at 71, of ovarian cancer. It is interesting to me that so many of the obituaries get her work wrong - consider what the New York Times says:
Dr. Maathai, one of the most widely respected women on the continent, wore many hats -- environmentalist, feminist, politician, professor, rabble-rouser, human rights advocate and head of the Green Belt Movement, which she founded in 1977. Its mission was to plant trees across Kenya to fight erosion and to create firewood for fuel and jobs for women.
It is a small error, but an important one. Maathai did not wear many…
sastyk | September 26, 2011
It won't be news to most of my readership, but it is worth noting that the one thing that seems to be certain about climate change is that the 2007 IPCC report understated things. Sigh.
Sharon
sastyk | September 23, 20111. To hang out with me, of course ;-).
2. To make your voice heard in Washington about this issue - because we don't have much time to begin to act, and every person here who says 'I care deeply about this' helps reinforce our message of the centrality of this issue.
3, To hear Wes Jackson talk about what we're going to eat in the coming decades.
4. To get the latest in the emerging story on Shale Gas reality.
5. Because where else can you hear Nicole Foss and Jeff Rubin arguing deflation vs. inflation in the hallways?
6. Because our future depends on getting the word out and we need your…
sastyk | September 20, 2011Aaron Newton and I are starting out our first-ever Advanced Adapting-in-Place class, for people who have taken our previous course or who have been on the adaptation journey for a while. If you'd like to join us there are still spots available and world enough and time to join, so please email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com. In the meantime, the first step in sorting out what you need to do to get ready for a shifting future is to have some sense of what that future looks like - or the range of possible ways the future could look.
There are a lot of possible ways to imagine the future.…
sastyk | September 19, 2011A Thought Experiment: Due to a combination of crises - maybe a volcano explosion, the penetration of Ug99 into the main of the world wheat crop, drought in many of the world's grain growing regions, zombie invasion etc... (it doesn't really matter), the Global North experiences a catastrophic failure of its staple crops. All of a sudden grain supplies drop like a stone, and there are virtually none to be had in the market. No bread, no rice, no soybeans or corn - none of those products are available in the markets.
At first, there is panic. The government institutes a ban on the feeding…
sastyk | September 19, 2011Daniel Yergin in the Wall Street Journal:
Since the beginning of the 21st century, a fear has come to pervade the prospects for oil, fueling anxieties about the stability of global energy supplies. It has been stoked by rising prices and growing demand, especially as the people of China and other emerging economies have taken to the road.
This specter goes by the name of "peak oil."
Its advocates argue that the world is fast approaching (or has already reached) a point of maximum oil output. They warn that "an unprecedented crisis is just over the horizon." The result, it is said, will be "…
sastyk | September 15, 2011A few readers have asked me to comment on Goldman Sachs' prediction that the US will be the world's largest Oil producer in 2017. I am delighted to do so. Several possible comments come to mind.
1. Apparently Crystal Meth has become the trendy drug at Goldman.
2. How did the Yes Men get this published under Goldman's Name?
3. Goldman is apparently even less optimistic about Saudi oil production than I am. They think the depletion curve is going to be a straight line downwards.
4. Oh, wait, they are talking about "oil" not oil! That "oil" stuff is almost infinite - you can magically turn…
sastyk | September 15, 2011The only travel I'm doing this fall is for the November 2-5 ASPO-USA conference. Among the speakers will be:
Me ;-)
Wes Jackson
Dmitry Orlov
Richard Heinberg
Jeffrey Brown
John Michael Greer
Jeff Rubin
Aaron Newton
Bob Hirsch
Chris Martenson
Michael Klare
William Catton
Charley Maxwell
Lester Brown
Naomi Davis
Jean Laherre
And a whole lot more. Check out the full lineup here..
Also, remember for Saturday afternoon there will be a FREE open conference for teachers and youth/students working on peak oil issues, featuring some of these amazing people and some cool others to be announced. We're…
sastyk | September 14, 2011The USDA indicates that in 2010 there were above 17 million households in the US (out of about 115 million households total) that were food insecure, and had trouble getting enough food on a regular basis. Only 59% of those households, however, received Food Stamps, WIC or School lunches, the three largest US food subsidy programs that make up the bulk of US nutritional supplementation programs. Which means that nearly half of all households were either receiving no support despite food insecurity, or relying on food pantries, soup kitchens and other resources.
One of the most significant…
sastyk | September 14, 2011
Just watch, and understand why the death of what passed for culture in our youth is probably something we can bear with equanimity. Plus, the hair gave us a taste for the apocalyptic - the bangs are exactly what your hair will look like during a zombie attack.
Sharon
sastyk | September 12, 2011As I begin the final push on _Making Home_ my book on Adapting in Place (out next spring), Aaron and I will be offering the first ever "Advanced AIP Class" running from Tuesday, September 20 to October 25th. The class will build on the basic Adapting-In-Place skills that we've been talking about all these years in my classes, the blogs, etc... - triaging your situation, thinking about scenarios, and building both personal and community resilience, but this class moves beyond the basics into the larger question of how to make a life that both provides you some insulation from tough times, but…
sastyk | September 12, 2011
A number of you have requested information about where to donate to in order to help folks in the northeast who are recovering from the floods. Please do donate if you can - there's a lot of need out here, some of which is evolving as it finally dries up and the sun comes out! There's a long slog ahead of a lot of folks here.
For Vermont Farmers, NOFA VT has put together a farmer emergency fund to provide grants for farmers who lost crops and livestock.
(BTW, I'm more than a little stunned that NOFA-NY has absolutely nothing on their website about NY farmers, flood relief or anything else…
sastyk | September 12, 2011Ben Bernanke has the answer. It is all your fault.
Then he said something new: Consumers are depressed beyond reason or expectation.
Oh, sure, there are reasons to be depressed, and the Fed chairman rattled them off: "The persistently high level of unemployment, slow gains in wages for those who remain employed, falling house prices, and debt burdens that remain high."
However, Mr. Bernanke continued, "Even taking into account the many financial pressures that they face, households seem exceptionally cautious."
Consumers, in other words, are behaving as if the economy is even worse than it…
sastyk | September 9, 2011The first thing you need to know is that no one ever complains. I've seen a few people cry, mostly about lost pets, but what they say is "we're so lucky."
They say "We're so lucky" as elders in their 80s and 90s put all the possessions of a lifetime out on the street to be hauled away as trash. One couple told me "We're so lucky - we saved our wedding album and one picture of all the grandchildren together." There wasn't time for more before they evacuated. "We're so lucky - the kids lost all their toys, but we're staying with friends who have girls the same size as mine, so they have…
sastyk | September 8, 2011When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came to man's estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.
A great while ago the…
sastyk | September 6, 2011Mark Notaras has a great review of the UN's World Food Program on the links between food insecurity and conflict:
Brinkman and Hendrix point out that the relationship between food insecurity and violent conflict is not one way. High food prices are both exacerbated by and exacerbate the chance of civil unrest. In other words, food security is a pre-condition for political stability and political stability is a precondition for food security. The question of what came first is perhaps not as relevant as attempting to understanding how to escape what Collier and his colleagues refer to as the…
sastyk | September 5, 2011As the steam bath of summer abates and cool air moves in, as labor day weekend marks the end of swimming and time to start thinking about things like firewood and school, I find I regain enthusiasm about really cooking again.
During the summer, I'm often a tepidly enthusiastic cook - it is so easy to go out in the garden and mix greens and whatever is ripe with a hardboiled egg, some dried fruit or a bit of cheese and call that dinner. Sliced tomatoes with basil, barely cooked corn on the cob and something else quick - some grilled veggies tossed with pasta and homemade goat cheese or eggs…
sastyk | August 31, 2011Yesterday afternoon we put our work aside and drove down into the Schoharie Valley, at least as far as we could go. We wanted to check on friends in the area, and we had called down to Schoharie Valley Farms to see how they were doing and also ask about the status of the flowers I had ordered for a bar mitzvah this weekend. Despite the fact that just about everything else they had was destroyed, the flowers were unscathed. Moreover, they told us that since no one in the town had power, lights or time to preserve, we could come down and buy anything they had to preserve. So down we went,…