sastyk | February 28, 2013It is pretty simple - if oil resources are finite, how do you gauge the value of different oil uses? Ultimately, a use of oil should meet one of two simple criteria:
1. Does it reduce long term oil usage, as required by the reality of finite-ness?
2. Does it do something that nothing but oil can do?
Robert Rapier takes President Obama's reference to using oil to get off oil and expands on it in a recent column, getting right to the point with a potentially viable compromise:
So I propose a compromise where we open up some of the more promising areas to exploration, and then earmark some or…
sastyk | February 28, 2013No, not about sex, we've been having variations on that one for years. But Eli will be 13 in a couple of weeks, Simon is 11 1/2, Isaiah is 9 and Asher is 7. Meanwhile most of my recent placements have been school-aged kids, several on the cusp of (or over it) puberty and adolescence. So here's the most important talk I give to older kids - the one that I append to every other big discussion:
At the moment you think (and it will probably happen to you eventually - it does to most kids your age) "I am all alone" or "No one else has ever felt this way/done something this bad/been in as much…
sastyk | February 24, 2013I get invited to speak to a lot of US Transition groups, and often I go. Often the leaders are blog readers, sometimes people I know through the internet, often future-friends. While every talk is different, they have some real similarities. Whether speaking in a suburb of Maryland, a large city in Ohio or to a coalition of rural towns in Virginia, I know that some things will probably happen.
I will meet wonderful, kind hosts who will put me up in their guest room and on their couch. I will most likely speak at a Unitarian Church (although I have spoken in many, many different kinds of…
sastyk | February 24, 2013It has been a long couple of weeks. It took a full week for the stomach virus to drag through the entire household two weeks ago...when I thought we were done, well...not. Last Friday we were finally clear, and able to leave the house again...just as Eli began his week long school break (Eli, who has autism, does not like breaks in his routine, so this is not a good thing.)
On Saturday, after my first night's sleep entirely uninterrupted by anyone saying "Mooooooom...I don't FEEEEEEL Good," we took an emergency placement of two children, a six year old boy and 10 year old girl. They were…
sastyk | February 11, 2013I don't think Eric and my eyes have ever met in one of those soppy, romantic looks couples give each other over a puddle of vomit before. Yesterday, however, they did.
We've been battling a nasty, slow moving stomach virus at our house (four down, four still to go ;-P), and one of the children threw up rather spectacularly all over their bed, the rug and (especially helpful) a gigantic pile of library books (I guess we now own a smelly $50 copy of the illustrated Silmarillion. Yay.) I walked in on the scene, yelled for husbandly help, and he set to the rug while I faced the library books…
sastyk | February 7, 2013I opened my talk at the Community Action Partnership annual conference this year with the observation that like that weird looking guy from the old "Hair Club for Men" commercials, I'm not just a spokesperson, I'm also a client. All foster children under 5 years receive WIC, the US program that provides SUPPLEMENTAL (this word will be important in a moment) food for pregnant and nursing women, and babies and children under five. We haven't always used WIC for our foster children - a lot of the food it provides is industrial and not something we eat a lot of, but Baby Z. is formula fed, and…
sastyk | February 7, 2013Some of you may have seen this when it came out, but I was busy and missed it, and it bears repeating, because we so often think that caregiving is a product of modern capacity. From the New York Times:
Almost all the other skeletons at the site, south of Hanoi and about 15 miles from the coast, lie straight. Burial 9, as both the remains and the once living person are known, was laid to rest curled in the fetal position. When Ms. Tilley, a graduate student in archaeology, and Dr. Oxenham, a professor, excavated and examined the skeleton in 2007 it became clear why. His fused vertebrae, weak…
sastyk | February 7, 2013Are we facing Snowpocalypse this weekend? Rest assured, your blogiste is ready. Ok, sorta ready, since I'm working on my book I have to rely on husband, Phil-the-housemate and children to move a buttload of wood inside, and we do have to pick up more baby formula, but otherwise, we're ready to hunker down here and toast marshmallows while the world undergoes...what exactly?
Current forecasts place the total amount somewhere between 2.6 and 29.3 inches.
Such is the maddening, exhilarating unpredictability of weather patterns on this rock-and-lava spinning blueberry we call home.
...The third…
sastyk | February 6, 2013A lot of readers asked me to comment on Chrysler's "God Made a Farmer" ad, but I've been reluctant to do so. Sure, farmers work their butts off, and it is one of the hardest jobs in the world, but I'm not all that excited to see it being used to sell cars. On the other hand, I was pleased to see Isaac Cubillos' tribute to Latino farmers, one more step in the hard and necessary work of us recognizing the reality that those in America who till, plant, tend, nurture and harvest aren't "laborers" or "illegals" but farmers, and that farming is not the ownership of land by giant agribusiness, but…
sastyk | February 6, 2013From Baldur Bjarnason, the reality of writing on the web:
15. People will always prefer you to state the obvious and spout common sense. If you say anything that requires a bit of thinking, or that would require them to learn new skills or ideas, your audience will evaporate into nothing, no matter how important those new things are. (Also see point 8 above.) You can trust that ideas that are new and unfamiliar to an audience will be either ignored or met with anger.
16. Nobody cares when you’re right but a lot of people really enjoy it when you’re wrong. They will rub it in your face.
17.…
sastyk | January 24, 2013Good review of the progress made by Vermont's Farm to Plate Initiative (a model I'm watching closely). One of the most challenging areas for local food expansion is moving into schools and hospitals - and yet, this is also where it is most needed. I'm also pleased to see the expanded program in VT law school - expanding the number of small farms is going to involve some major shifts in a whole host of areas governed by law:
In 2011 Fletcher Allen Hospital served more than 2 million meals, actually making hospital nutrition services the largest restaurant in Vermont. They partner with 70…
sastyk | January 24, 2013A lot of readers have emailed to ask what's going on with Baby Z. If you will remember, in the beginning of July, we were placed with a newborn baby boy, straight from the hospital who, because of confidentiality issues, is known here as Baby Z. I haven't talked tons about Z's story because it is private, but it has been a while and people are reasonably wondering what's going on. The most common question I get is "Is he yours yet?" I promise, if he ever becomes so, you'll hear! In fact, the foster care process takes quite a while, and while we are cautiously hopeful that we may get to…
sastyk | January 24, 2013
I get a lot of inquiries about goats that go pretty much like this: “I’d love to have fresh goat’s milk all the time, and cheese, but my schedule just isn’t compatible with milking twice a day at 5am and 5pm, 365 days a year, so I guess I can’t have dairy goats, but I love to hear about yours.”
Well, let me start by saying that my schedule is also not compatible with milking twice a day on that schedule. Once upon a time I was routinely up at 5am, and I still start my day between 5:30 and 6, but now that my children sleep later, I’m into sleeping too. Moreover, I can’t face…
sastyk | January 24, 2013I wrote this in 2008 - now Eli is a 5'9, 120lb almost-teen. We're getting ready to celebrate his bar mitzvah in a few months, which will be an adaptive celebration of not only what Eli can do, but also what our community has done for him over the years. Adolescence and autism combine with some pretty significant challenges, but Eli is also doing well and becoming an interesting and delightful big person. It seemed to bear repeating, since so many of us deal with these kinds of challenges and worries.
Yesterday morning, Eli put on snowpants and boots before he went outside. This was a big…
sastyk | January 18, 2013It is nice to see SRI Rice Production, a really important advance in sustainable, small scale grain production getting its due here in this Independent Science News article. Most fascinating, it covers ways in which the SRI model is being adapted to other grains and crops, and its potential utility.
The world record yield for paddy rice production is not held by an agricultural research station or by a large-scale farmer from the United States, but by Sumant Kumar who has a farm of just two hectares in Darveshpura village in the state of Bihar in Northern India. His record yield of 22.4 tons…
sastyk | January 18, 2013This is being sung in my household by a parade of boys carrying Baby Z. around and singing to him. I offer it to you, well, because I find it awfully amusing. Perhaps you can guess what's on the homeschool agenda here at the farm lately. It is mostly the work of the boys, with occasional suggestions from Mom and Dad.
(To the tune of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow")
You have bilateral symmetry/You have bilateral symmetry/You have bilateral symmetry/Two arms, two eyes, one spine.
You don't have radial symmetry/You don't have radial symmetry/You don't have radial symmetry/You are not a…
sastyk | January 18, 2013I was recently re-reading Mary Pipher's excellent book from a decade ago _The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community_. The book is in large part stories of refugees and a guide to helping them navigate their new world - encouraging members of the community to act as "cultural brokers" and guides to the newest and most vulnerable Americans. It is also, however, a story about Pipher's own reconsideration of traditional psychology when confronted with people to whom the worst and deepest traumas and tragedies have happened. She comes to see the American theraputic…
sastyk | January 16, 2013A lot of readers have emailed to ask why I'm writing a book about sex. Have I given up writing about energy and environmental issues? Have I dumped big issues for small ones - instead of writing about how we should live in this new world, offering suggestions for the best sustainable dildo? Am I selling out?
To those questions I would answer "1. No. 2. Mostly not and 3. I think you have to get paid a LOT more than I get for a book contract to be accused of selling out." Meanwhile I'm taking my larger framework from the simple idea that sex is the starting point of a lot of our larger…
sastyk | January 14, 2013Stuart Staniford has a WONDERFUL post about what I think is the most likely scenario - we finally acknowledge the (obvious, scientifically clear) reality of climate change and panic, and try and fix it...having waited too long. He asks...what might that look like? He's not shooting for perfect accuracy here, just some general scenarios, and I think he comes to what is generally the right conclusion, always barring the real but harder to model possibility of a non-linear change;
The red curve shows what happens if we wait another decade - until 2030 - to start bending the emissions curve,…
sastyk | January 14, 2013Kurt Cobb as usual gets right to the practical heart of the matter in his latest column about why expanding claims about reserves, EVEN IF TRUE don't translate to cheap oil and gas:
Here's the short version of why forecasts of low long-term oil and natural gas prices are almost certainly wrong: It costs more than that to get the stuff out of the ground. Only two things could actually lead to low long-term prices: 1) Somebody could invent and deploy some genuinely brand new technology that makes it really cheap once again to get oil and gas out of the ground or 2) we could have a deep and…