sastyk | April 22, 2013From the Japan Times:
Former Irish President Mary Robinson’s foundation for climate justice is hosting a major conference in Dublin this week. Research presented there said that rising incomes and growth in the global population, expected to create 2 billion more mouths to feed by 2050, will drive food prices higher by 40 to 50 percent.
“We must prepare today for higher temperatures in all sectors,” said Gerald Nelson, a senior economist with the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
All of the studies suggest the worst impacts will be felt by the poorest…
sastyk | April 22, 2013I wrote this a few years ago for Earth Day's 40th anniversary, and frankly, I haven't changed my mind.
I bloody hate Earth Day. No offense to those of you who love it, and I know there are some awesome Earth Day programs out there, but by the time we get there, I'm spending my days hiding under the covers, because every freakin' time I open my email inbox a wave of the most nauseating spew of greenwashing comes flowing out.
Guess what? A major department store chain, nearly in bankruptcy, is now selling the eco-tote, made from organic sheepskin, embossed with "Think Global, Act Local" to…
sastyk | April 22, 2013Interesting about the ways climate change will impact Saudi Arabia's agriculture - already strained pretty much to the limit by inhospitable heat and drought:
The difference between ETo and precipitation indicates that there may be a loss of soil moisture by 0.181 m/year (0.042–0.236 m/year) during the period of 2011 through 2050. Increase in temperature was estimated to be 1.8–4.1 °C, which can increase agricultural water demands by 5–15 % to obtain the current level of agricultural productions. This study anticipates significant reductions in water sources, which can impose further stress…
sastyk | April 8, 2013I still have spaces in this class, which is designed to help others sort out the complicated intersections of multiple crises. The class is taught by both me and my husband, Eric Woods.
This is an exciting class for us to be teaching, since it combines so many of our strengths and experiences. Eric has a Ph.d in Astrophysics from Harvard and a BA in Physics from MIT, and has been teaching environmental physics for an number of years at SUNY Albany. I'm a member of the board of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO-USA), and a long time writer on energy, climate and environmental…
sastyk | April 8, 2013
There is a wonderful article in the Daily Mail featuring the famous photos of Lewis Hines that helped bring about Child Labor laws. Well worth a look at these incredibly important images.
sastyk | April 3, 2013Globally, almost half of all the food the world produced is thrown away. This Global number hides some critical differences however. In most of the Global South, food is lost to lack of preservation techniques. Grain gets wet in the field, and instead of being dried with machines as it might be in the US, it molds and is lost. Someone slaughters a cow, and what doesn't get eaten spoils in the heat. Fruit is harvested but bad weather means that it doesn't dry adequately....you get the idea. The majority of food is lost shortly after harvest, globally.
In the Global North, the picture is…
sastyk | April 3, 2013We're still buried in winter here - the peepers haven't even started peeping, and I suspect we won't hear them until the weekend with night temps in the teens here and ice still on the pond and swamp. That will make it the latest I've ever heard them. Despite a warm winter, March was one of the coldest on record. It is supposed to warm up to early spring temps later this week, but right now it is COLD.
Still, sooner or later, the garden will go in and spring will come, and for many of you in warmer places, water will go. Last year's hot, dry garden was unusual for us, we rarely have to…
sastyk | April 3, 2013First of all, in my first post I accidently wrote the class was starting tomorrow, April 4. In fact, we're starting the following Thursday, April 11 and running to the first Thursday in May (apparently I can't read a calendar correctly). I still have spots available, but sign up soon, because I'd like to make sure I have plenty of time for individual attention.
Here's the syllabus and class information:
Sharon has been running her small family farm in rural upstate NY for 12 years and before that, was gardening on urban balconies and in city lots in the Boston area for years before that. …
sastyk | March 29, 2013Mark Steel at the Independent has a great column on the root cause of our economic instability - poor folks and all the trouble they cause by not quite appearing to do the evil deeds they do!
It’s a tricky argument to pull off, that the poor caused the debt so they should pay it back. Maybe that’s why most weeks there are stories in certain newspapers about a woman with 45 kids on benefits, who then bought a giraffe and now that’s on benefits but she said it was cramped so the council has put it up in the Shard, and two of the kids have got Compulsive Potting Disorder so they’ve been given a…
sastyk | March 29, 2013Things have been a little nuts here.
Two weeks ago Eric and I took an emergency placement of two children, six and 17 mos. It turned out to be one of the most exhausting and stressful placements we've ever had, not because of the kids, who are delightful (although I had somehow forgotten what 17month olds are like - the "oh, yeah, I was hoping you'd pull all those books off the shelves and try and feed them to the cat" quality of that age toddler ;-)), but because of really complicated circumstances I can't talk about. Let us just say it involves a lot of things we've never been buried in…
sastyk | March 14, 2013It fascinates me that so many people in the media expected the new Pope to be a flaming American-style social liberal. Consider the New York Times which this morning notes with surprise:
But Cardinal Bergoglio is also a conventional choice, a theological conservative of Italian ancestry who vigorously backs Vatican positions on abortion, gay marriage, the ordination of women and other major issues — leading to heated clashes with Argentina’s left-leaning president.
As Rod Dreher points out this morning, this doesn't mean he's conventional, it means he's CATHOLIC - that is, he believes in…
sastyk | March 13, 2013This is an interesting paper indeed - a new PNAS paper argues that before an abrupt climate change, there is a characteristic SLOWING DOWN of climate change that might be a warning sign:
Putting our results in an even wider perspective, it is important that slowing down is a universal property of systems approaching a tipping point. This implies that our techniques might in principle be used to construct operational early warning systems for critical transitions in a wider range of complex systems where tipping points are suspected to exist, ranging from disease dynamics and physiology to…
sastyk | March 13, 2013Liked this bit from The Onion:
And it’s not like it’s actually against the law, at least I’m pretty sure it isn’t. Oh, maybe it’s against some really antiquated laws in certain old New England towns from, like, the 18th century or something. But that’s my point: Would anyone today even care if we changed some old, archaic rule? A few people might instinctively be upset about it purely because they’ve been told since they were little that it’s not okay to do that, but would anyone actually have a good argument against it other than that? I guess people just do what they’re told without asking…
sastyk | March 12, 2013This essay is a little different than most of my stuff. It is the result of a collaborative discussion on a foster parenting list I'm a part of by a group of foster parents. I've paraphrased and borrowed and added some things of my own, but this is truly collaborative piece, and meant to be shared. I do NOT have to get credit for it. So if you'd like to circulate it, use it in a training, distribute it at foster-awareness day, hang it on the wall, run it somewhere else, give it out to prospective foster parents, whatever, go right ahead. This is a freebie to all! I care much more than…
sastyk | March 7, 2013I get to play ringmaster to the Greatest Show on Earth - my own personal family farm circus with at least three rings of fun going on at any given time, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
The circus varies a lot in size (I recently overheard myself saying that it didn't matter how many people came to a celebration at my place, that I can perfectly well cook for 40 as well as 20, which is actually correct), with a baseline population of 8 (Me, Eric, Eli 13, Simon 11, Isaiah 9, Asher 7, Baby Z. 8mos and Phil-the-housemate) plus N additional members provided by foster care. I've come to…
sastyk | March 7, 2013Chances are you already have a strong opinion on this subject. There's a great deal of noise, mostly but not wholly on the American right about the dangers of fertility decline. Jonathan Last's book _What To Expect When No One is Expecting_ and Ross Douthat's recent lament about American women's TFR (total fertility rate - the reason men aren't mentioned is that men don't count in fertility calculations) is down to 1.87 children. Both writers predict fairly dire outcomes - economic stagnation a la Japan, a benefits crisis as insufficient new workers arrive. Moreover, for Douthat and…
sastyk | March 7, 2013Randy Udall at The Oil Drum puts shale "oil" in clear perspective:
Let's try a redneck experiment.
Winter's coming, and I'm willing to pay $1,000 to the first Coloradan who decides to heat their house with oil shale. I'll deliver it in October, free of charge.
Such an experiment would teach you a lot. First, you'd learn that there's three times more energy in a pound of split pine or recycled phone books or cattle manure or Cap'n Crunch than in a pound of oil shale.
Next, you'd learn that 85 percent of oil shale is inert mineral matter. This means that on a cold winter day you'd have to…
sastyk | March 7, 2013From Agrilife, apparently we're going to spend 3 million bucks to confirm the obvious - if you only breed for one thing, maximum milk production, you will be casting a lot of other critical traits to the winds:
“Fertility is a critical component of efficient dairy production,” Pinedo said. “Failure to attain and maintain a timely pregnancy is a major reason for production loss in dairy herds. Consequences of low fertility include a reduced percentage of cows at the early stages of lactation, increments in insemination costs, premature culling and delayed genetic progress.
“The decline in…
sastyk | March 7, 2013Former Scienceblogger Boris Zivkovic, now at Scientific American, has an excellent post arguing that we should eliminate daylight savings time. Given that DST was invented to save energy, it may seem strange that I agree with him, but I do - mostly because there's no evidence that it does, and the physiological effects don't merit the change:
Whether or not DST saves energy is the least of the reasons why it’s a bad idea. Much more important are the health effects of sudden, hour-long shifts on our bodies and minds. Chronobiologists who study circadian rhythms know that for several days…
sastyk | March 6, 2013About five years ago a colleague of mine, Dale Allen Pfeiffer wrote an essay I can no longer locate. At the time, Colony Collapse Disorder was just being diagnosed in bees, and one of the discussed potential causes of the problem was cell phones and cell phone towers. Pfeiffer didn't, as I remember, take a stand on this question as a cause, but what he did do was interview people and ask "If it was true that cell phones caused CCD, and knowing that we depend on bees for a large portion of our food, would you give up your cell phone to save the bees?"
The answer, overwhelmingly, was no.
Now…