sastyk | April 17, 2011I'll be offline much of the next few days for the Passover holiday. This is a subject we're talking about in the Adapting-in-Place class, and one that comes up a lot - how do you make environmental changes with a spouse who isn't on board? What happens when this strains your marriage?
I get emails more or less constantly on this subject: "I want to prepare for peak oil/live more sustainably/change my life to deal with climate change and my spouse (and/or the rest of my family) don't want to, or don't think it is important enough."
This is something I've heard over and over - marriages…
sastyk | April 17, 2011(Just in case you didn't grow up in the 1980s and need the reference.)
Two years ago, we bought Jessie the goat from our friends Jamey and Carol. We wanted Jessie because of her great genetics - she's a milk machine, and a sturdy, healthy goat who makes stunning babies. Zahra, her first daughter is still one of their best does. Her brother was sold as a breeding buck. We were thrilled to be getting Jessie.
Even more thrilled because Jessie swiftly became my favorite milker. (Sshhhhh, don't tell the others I play favorites.) She's sweet, she's gentle, she's easy going - whatever you do…
sastyk | April 17, 2011Lucy Worsley has a Guardian piece about the merits of medieval architecture as a model for a lower-resource use future:
Domestic life in the past was smelly, cold, dirty and uncomfortable, but we have much to learn from it. I spend much of my time working as a curator in Britain's historic royal palaces. But recently, for a television series, I've visited a lot of normal homes dating from the Norman period to the present day, and I've concluded that the houses of the past have a huge amount to teach us about the future. When the oil runs out, I think our houses will become much more like…
sastyk | April 15, 2011Well, first there's the baby goats. Last Friday, we collected our foster goat, Tayish. He belongs to a friend from our synagogue who won him in a raffle, believe it or not. He's a 10 week old wether, and the kids have made a pet of him. Here's Simon holding him:
Then, on Sunday, Bast gave us our first birth and our first doe of the season, Calliope. It was nice for Bast that she just had the one little one - last year in her first season she had triplets!
Each season's babies name choices have a "theme" - this year is Greek mythology. Calliope was a (probably hopeless) expression of…
sastyk | April 14, 2011Let us imagine that you are MacGyver, that 1980s tv guy who can build an atomic bomb out of gum and duct tape. You are facing a world-shattering crisis. You have a pile of scrap materials out of which you must build a high speed vehicle to effect your escape from this crisis, which will certainly involve you outracing a dramatic explosion. There are wheels, gears, sticks and the all-important duct tape. There's also a big claw-footed bathtub. Now, when your need is for lightness and speed, do you attach the bathtub, just because you've got one lying around?
This analogy was used to me…
sastyk | April 13, 2011Please stand by. Ok, don't stand by, go plant something ;-). Sorry folks, I've tried to post two articles that have disappeared into the ether. The hard drive on my desk top died and the laptop is giving me fits too. I've even got baby goat pictures to show you, but I can't get them up at the moment.
Cuteness coming as soon as the technical limitations are lifted!
Sharon
sastyk | April 7, 2011I'm getting a lot of questions via email and comments about our experience entering into the foster parenting world, and I did want to talk about this. Some people are critical, and think we're nuts (quite possibly), some people want to watch because they want to try this too (cool), some people have been there themselves in some portion of the system - as a worker, parent or child and have a lot to teach us. I wanted to put up a post that tells more about where we are and what we're doing - and also includes an important caveat about what I will and won't be writing about.
What I Will And…
sastyk | April 7, 2011I'm going to be here. I'm kind of hoping some of you will be too! I'm going to be giving the first of several talks I'm doing in the next few months about bioregional food security - what it is, how regional issues connect to the larger world, and how to build it. This weekend I'll take on my own area, the Capital Region of NY and on June 2 (more info coming soon) I'm going to talk in Newburyport about the North Shore of Massachusetts, where I grew up.
Meanwhile, the reskilling festival is going to be awesome! I'll be there in the afternoon with my husband and kids for a while, and I…
sastyk | April 5, 2011Today is the first day of our Adapting in Place Class - if you are interested I still have 2 paid spots ($175 for the six week online asynchronous class - or equivalent barter) and have had two scholarship spots open up for low income participants (one through someone not taking a spot and one, kindly through donation!) . Please email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com if you'd like to join the class. You can see the syllabus two posts down.
So what is Adapting In Place anyway? I'm writing a book about it (coming out next fall), I talk about it a lot, but what exactly am I getting at? It is…
sastyk | April 4, 2011There's a very good piece in the Guardian about the ways that Eastern Japan's energy crisis is a model for experiences we might have in the future:
For large parts of eastern Japan that were not directly hit by the tsunami on 11 March 2011, including the nation's capital, the current state of affairs feels very much like a dry-run for peak oil. This is not to belittle the tragic loss of life and the dire situation facing many survivors left without homes and livelihoods. Rather, the aim here is to reflect upon the post-disaster events and compare them with those normally associated with the…
sastyk | April 1, 2011I still have space in the Adapting in Place Class that starts next week - the last one for some time, I suspect, given other projects (I have to write the book about Adapting in Place, for example ;-)).
aron and I will be running our Adapting in Place Class online for six weeks beginning April 5. The class covers every element of adapting your life both for things to come and things that are now, from going inside the walls of your home or apartment to community, family and security issues, from the ordinary (laundry) to the extraordinary (handling life transitions).
This is our most…
sastyk | April 1, 2011The Oil Drum has a well-referenced, thoughtful summary of the present situation at Fukushima - bad and getting worse as it gets harder and harder for workers to get close to the facility. The word "entombment" has been mentioned - which may be the only viable outcome. More than a million Japanese people risk losing their homes for a very long time, if not for good.
There are a lot of discussions of the future of nuclear power out there. Most of them don't assume declining other energy resources, however. The emerging assessment I see is that while modern nuclear plants are much safer,…
sastyk | March 30, 2011On some level, all disasters are agricultural disasters. When seawater washes over land, when the earth cracks and collapses buildings, when livelihoods and lives are lost, farmers die and lose their jobs. It is easy to forget this, of course, but it is always true - and there's something immensely sad about people loving a place and having to leave it at any time. But there's something particularly poignant about this:
Mr. Sato, 59, is a 17th-generation family farmer, a proprietor of 14 acres of greenhouses and fields where he grows rice, tomatoes, spinach and other vegetables. Or did grow…
sastyk | March 28, 2011Posting will be intermittent and light this week. It is time for spring cleaning around here - pretty much a full time job. Not only is there Pesach coming to motivate me, and my next home visit in the foster/adoptive parent prep cycle, but also there's the fact that our weirdly cold spring is supposed to warm up, at least a bit. Once the weather hits the 50s with any regularity, and the garden season starts, it is all "House? What house? Who even goes into the house anymore?" Add to that the fact that we've hit the critical "8 weeks before last frost" date in the life of a grower, and…
sastyk | March 25, 2011There's a very silly article in the New York Times about controversy over hybrids vs. heirlooms. Yes, this is a real debate. No, it isn't as stark or as stupid as the Times makes it.
There are plenty of horticultural reasons heirlooms can grow glorious fruit. One is size. An heirloom tomato is often a big, robust plant. The central stalk is usually indeterminate: it keeps shooting up after setting fruit. Mr. Ball, of Burpee, recalls a customer telling him about a Brandywine plant that crept into the house through a second-floor window.
An heirloom tomato will also have a lot of leaves, in…
sastyk | March 24, 2011From Alternet (actual Bill text at site), it turns out that House Republicans have a plan to prevent fighting for labor rights - hunger!: Maybe they've got firehoses too! And attack dogs, that would be good. Or maybe they could just shoot them - that's an old favorite way to disrupt strikes!
Much of the bill is based upon verifying that those who receive food stamps benefits are meeting the federal requirements for doing so. However, one section buried deep within the bill adds a startling new requirement. The bill, if passed, would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family…
sastyk | March 24, 2011Life has been proceeding more or less apace, and it feels like a long time since I've sat down and contemplated anything, much less my Anyway Project goals. At the same time, all this business is a series of steps on the way to actually many of the things done. I hope that's true of all of you!
As you'll remember, the goal of the Anyway project is to integrate our preparations for a harder future with our daily life now, to turn them many parts into a whole. As I wrote previously:
The larger idea of the Anyway Project is to make our lives work more smoothly. Most of us stand with feet in…
sastyk | March 23, 2011In the latest news from Fukushima, water in Tokyo has been deemed unfit for babies to consume because of high radiation levels. Not surprisingly, shortages of bottled water are emerging, as people buy up larger quantities.
A top Japanese official urged residents of the nation's capital not to hoard bottled water Wednesday after Tokyo's government found that radioactive material in tap water had exceeded the limit considered safe for infants.
"We have to consider Miyagi and Iwate and other disaster-hit areas," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said. "I'd like to again urge consumers not to…
sastyk | March 21, 2011
One of the things I've been arguing for years is that most people in the developed world, given a perceived lack of alternatives and no narrative to explain change and sacrifice, will do almost anything to keep their present way of life. I point out that if they become cold enough most people would shovel live baby harp seals into their furnace to keep warm, while carefully justifying why this is reasonable and necessary and probably convincing themselves that baby harp seals like to be burned alive.
I have been thinking much about this metaphor lately, as the tone of the discussion of…
sastyk | March 18, 2011From the current issue of _American Educator_, fascinating research on Equality issues by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (PDF alert!) that shows that greater economic and social equality don't make things better just for the bottom:
It may seem obvious that problems associated with relative deprivation should be more common in more unequal societies. However, if you ask people why greater equality reduces these problems, the most common assumption is that greater equality helps those at the bottom. the truth is that the vast majority of the population is harmed by greater inequality.…