sastyk | June 21, 2011I came home last Monday night after three days spent in Washington working on business for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, and it was one of the most glorious homecomings I could imagine. Not only was there the joy of coming home to my boys and Eric, but also my home is more like paradise in June than at any moment.
(Mac the Marshmallow waiting to welcome me home)
We're headed into the transition point from spring to summer, and you can feel it. The spring bulbs are behind us, the peonies are in bloom, the animals are fat and happy on lush growth, and there are jars of…
sastyk | June 17, 2011I have one more crazy week involving travel and lots of other responsibilities, culminating in our final home visit in our foster care certification (as some of you will recall, we had a tough visit our second time with a social worker who was totally appalled by the farm - our social worker's supervisor kindly agreed to come out so that we won't have to deal with shifting standards (our own social worker is totally cool with it) and can be clear what we need to do and what is ok), so there will be little content this week.
So I'm asking y'all to provide content - tell me what you are doing…
sastyk | June 14, 2011In a previous post several of my commenters observed that they lived in places too humid for solar dehydrating, and had been using electric food dryers. We have similar issues here - the summers are very humid, and there is a tendency for things not to dry rapidly enough, while reabsorbing moisture overnight and molding. Fortunately, the great Sue Robishaw, homesteading Goddess, connected me to her variations on Larisa Walk and Bob Dahse's design for the "Midwest Solar Food Dryer"
We have a small version and plans for a much larger one, and have had a great deal of success with this - a…
sastyk | June 10, 2011In thousands of ways, UN policy helps shape how we respond to emerging crises, from basic poverty to world political events, from food to climate change and population. What is emerging, however, is that UN analyses are increasingly diverging from reality - as they attempt to describe our future, they have failed to adequately (or at all) take into account that most basic of all considerations, material limits on energy resources.
The UN is one of the most powerful organizations in the world influencing international policy - the IPCC, the Populaton Council, the FAO - their work informs how…
sastyk | June 10, 2011Note: I'm off to DC for ASPO-USA's annual spring board meeting. The blog will be quiet. I leave you with one of my all-time favorite re-runs, lightly updated to reflect the ongoing disconnect between dream and reality ;-). But what would life be without fantasy? I find it helpful to reflect on how the world outside and inside my heads meet and fail to meet when I test my own assumptions.
Fantasy, 1977: When I grow up I am going to be a doctor and garbage collector by day, driving my super-cool garbage truck on rounds, and at night, will become Wonder Woman, complete with breasts and magic…
sastyk | June 7, 2011My current favorite news story is one by Reuters about an outbreak of e,coli in Germany attributed to organically grown bean sprouts with the ridiculous headline "E. Coli Outbreak Poses Questions for Organic Farming." Now it is absolutely true that there is a nasty outbreak of e.coli in Germany that has made thousands of of people sick, and caused 22 deaths. This is awful. But Reuters has a little accuracy problem as it leaps to attack organic agriculture:
The warm, watery, organic growing environment suspected as the source of a deadly E.coli outbreak in Germany may produce delicious,…
sastyk | June 7, 2011Richard Glover has a very funny - and in many ways on-target analysis here.
Don't get me wrong - as I've said many times before, I know a lot of people who don't take climate change seriously, but who also recognize for various other reasons that we can't burn fossil fuels the way we are. I believe in the big tent. But there is something to be said for even metaphorically making people take ownership of their politics - and the implications of their politics.
I realize someone is going to be outraged by this - ah well, can't please everyone! I find it funny, not because I want to…
sastyk | June 7, 2011This year will be interesting - we anticipate adding two or three more people to our household (and maybe more - we're gently looking for a housemate or two once things settle down with the foster kids). In past years I've mostly been able to keep up with the "every year the kids get bigger and eat more" growth needs, but this ups the ante in several ways - besides adding more mouths to feed, we anticipate that the first few months we'll be pretty focused on the kids, with less time for garden and preservation than usual.
I could let some of it go - just accept that this year less will be…
sastyk | June 6, 2011Hi Folks - Back from the wedding and shivaree, and catching up...slowly. Tired and have much farm stuff to catch up on as well, so bear with me one more day.
In the meantime, Fred Pearce has a great essay in Nature on what's wrong with the UN population revisions that anticipate 10+billion by the end of the century. As you'll remember, I'm pretty dubious about the underlying assumptions of the model as well - it doesn't have anything to do with the real constraints we're facing. The Pearce article is well worth a read, even though I don't agree with all of his assumptions about the…
sastyk | May 31, 2011My food storage and preservation class starts today, and I thought it was worth reproducing this essay - the very basics of getting started on storing food. Why would you want to do this? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First of all, I don't think anyone who has tracked events over the last decade can argue that it would be a good thing for you to have enough food to go through a period of disruption. Whether we look at various Hurricanes, ice storms, earthquakes or events in Japan, we know that the kind of social disruption that can affect access to food supplies really does happen…
sastyk | May 25, 2011It seemed up here in the north that spring would never come - and now we're headed rapidly into that time of year when everything is ripe and abundant in our gardens and at local farms, and learning to put food up can make it possible for you to enjoy summer in winter, and continue eating locally as long as possible. It can be overwhelming when you start preserving, so if you'd like a friendly voice to walk you through it, please join us, starting next Tuesday!
The class is on-line and asynchronous, and you can participate at your own pace. Every week we'll have projects involving what's…
sastyk | May 24, 2011One of my many other hats is the one I wear as a member of the ASPO-USA board and editor of the Peak Oil Review Commentary. My favorite kind of commentary is the one that puts together short pieces from a lot of thinkers, all answering the same question - and this must be the favorite of a lot of people, because it has generated a tremendous response. Perhaps favorite response to the question "What are we missing? What part of our environmental/energy/economic crisis isn't getting enough attention?" was Nate Hagen's answer (only partly excerpted here):
Basically, though it's counter-…
sastyk | May 23, 2011Summer is just about here, and you need some summer reading. Light. Fuzzy. Delightful. Amusing. Perfect for the deck chair or the sand. Nevermind the fact that you are a low-energy, transitioning, cheap, homseteading type, and your deck chair is probably planted on your porch, and the sand is the local playground sandpit - hey, it is summer, you've got to kick back with a book. But what book? The contemporary equivalent of _The Devil Wears Prada_ isn't exactly the stuff of anti-consumerist legend. He may not be that into you, but since really you are both into your garden, who gives…
sastyk | May 19, 2011The UN FAO reminds us of the sheer scope of world food waste - 1/3 of all the food produced, most of it produce, goes to waste. While we'll never get food waste to zero, this is a scandal in a world worrying about how it will feed itself.
This is not news - the statistics have been similar for a while now. But when it penetrates, it does give people a sense of the scope of the wastage problem. That pasta with broccoli rabe molding in your fridge is really a link to a larger world and cultural problem.
The Global North and South both waste similar portions of the food they produce, but…
sastyk | May 18, 2011Crap. We've had so much flooding (not the house, thankfully, but the creek has breached its banks, the driveway is flooded and the barn has about a ton of much-needed ;-P mud added to it) that I have to cancel our planned open farm day this Sunday. We're just not going to be in shape for it, and I'd be too worried about stuck cars and kids not familiar with the property near the creek. Profuse apologies for all of you planning on coming - this sucks - and there's more rain in the forecast.
Still, no harm done, we're way better off than those near the Mississippi, and we'll plan another…
sastyk | May 17, 2011A recent email I received was pretty typical - I won't quote it here because the person meant well, but the sum up was this - they laud my decision to adopt, argue that I should have done it earlier, and point out that adoption is the solution to the population crisis. People who want children should just adopt, rather than giving birth. In the spirit of my discussion of the new suggestion that the world will hit 10 billion, I thought this was a good subject to take up.
Now as usual, I'm not going to recite my discussion of why I have four biological kids - and I'm not going to argue that…
sastyk | May 17, 2011So it turns out that there *was* a meltdown around reactor #1. Quite a lot of people suspected this from the visual evidence, but TEPCO and the Japanese government denied, denied, denied. Accusations that those arguing for a meltdown were all internet conspiracy theorists (which also occurred early in the Katrina disaster as well, and in other instances) were used to discredit people who argued that a meltdown had, in fact occurred.
This is a useful thing to know, because it gives you a sense of the dynamic being built up between governments and ordinary people as things become less stable…
sastyk | May 17, 2011The old punchline "Practice, practice, practice" applies to more than musical performance. It applies to the project of coming to terms with our new circumstances, and perhaps embracing our new lives. If you live in parts of Japan right now, or in the flooded Mississippi, or in areas recently devastated by tornadoes, you know that the day when we leave off practicing and begin performing can be far closer than you ever thought.
Ideally, I feel like my last post in the Adapting In Place series ought to be something rousing and inspiring. But at the moment, I think the quiet exhortation to…
sastyk | May 16, 2011There's a really good debate going on in the combox of my Khaki Markets Post on an issue that I've been meaning to write about for a while - to what extent is it possible for people who are seeking the same social ends to work together when they use different political means. In the comboxes the discussion is mostly over whether Progressives and Libertarians can work together on local food systems, but this strikes me as a larger - and deeply critical question.
It isn't just the libertarians and the progressives who have common ground on food systems, after all. The socialists and the…
sastyk | May 10, 2011Whenever I talk about going to lower energy usage, a percentage of people shout out something like "But that would mean going back tothe stone age, to lepers walking the streets and people throwing their feces out the window on our heads!!!" I think it is fair to say that variations on the "without power, life would be intolerable" is a common assumption.
Part of the thing that bothers me about it is that I don't think it is true. I've spent a lot of time studying history, and I don't think the lives of all of those in human history who preceeded us were intolerable. I am extraordinarily…