sastyk | January 26, 2010Over the last 50 years, the average American has seen their private space more than triple. In the 1950s, the average American, according to Pat Murphy's excellent book _Plan C_, had 250 square feet per person. By 2005, the average American had 850 square feet of space in their home per person. And we want more - even bigger houses proliferated during the boom, with more amenities to allow people to be away from each other - private studies and bathrooms, media rooms so you don't have to watch tv with anyone else...
Now some of this may have been good and welcome - there is a case to be…
sastyk | January 26, 2010A couple of years ago, I wrote a post with the above title, about the way that biofuel and meat production in the US was pushing up world food prices. I observed, as has been documented in any number of studies, that when the world's poorest people and the world's richest people's vehicles (or their pets, to their appetite for grain fed meat) compete for food, the cars, pets and rich folk always eat first - the rich come to the table once for their share of staple grains, then three of or four more times for more grains in the form of meat. We then come to the table again for a share for…
sastyk | January 25, 2010One of the roles our farm has, rather unintentionally, taken on is as sanctuary (mostly temporary) for the unwanted roosters of friends and loved ones. First, there was Cora, who turned out to be Corey - and not permissable under town regulations. My step-mother relocated him here and found Eunice, a hen, and Corey lived a happy life on our farm for about a year, until he got aggressive and started attacking my children. After he jumped Asher, then two, as Asher puts (still with some satisfaction), "We ate Corey." There are far too many gentle animals in the world you can't keep to hold…
sastyk | January 25, 2010We've all been down with colds this weekend, nothing really serious, just uncomfortable. Or rather, nothing really serious in my estimation. My husband, on the other hand, is always pretty sure he might be dying whenever any minor virus hits him. So far, though, he's still alive and seems to be more or less ok.
What Eric does inevitably get when he gets sick is the lingering cough. This is no fun, of course - but it does have its compensations. One of them is the homemade cough syrup. Most studies show that over-the-counter cough medicines are fairly ineffective - one found that a…
sastyk | January 22, 2010I serve on a committee at my synagogue that brings in speakers every year for a series of talks and special meals. It is a small comittee, and before I joined, the average age of the participants was probably close to 70. The former chair is a formidable and funny woman in her early 90s, who has been a member of our shul since the 40s and who remembers everything. There are two older couples in their 60s, a woman in her 60s, myself at 37 and a friend of mine in his early 40s who just joined, pressed into it by desperate pleas for help and by the fact that it is impossible to deny Sadie,…
sastyk | January 22, 2010Just over a week ago, I re-ran a post "How Not to Freeze" about what to do if you don't have central heating in the winter in cold places. I was fascinated by the responses I got from people who by necessity and desire were living with minimal heat.
My assumption about "how not to freeze" was that most people wouldn't being doing this by choice. And that's probably true but I found yesterdays New York Times article, about people who trade warmth for aesthetics, bigger spaces or other considerations to be fascinating (and not just because they gave some cred to La Crunch for her "Freeze…
sastyk | January 21, 2010...you just gotta love The Onion. Not only is it a lazy-ass blogiste's best friend, providing amusing commentary when you just can't get a post up, but it also does a lovely job of illustrating the scope of our ecological problems now and again. You'll enjoy this one.
"It's not like I don't care, because I do, and most of the time I don't even buy bottled water," thought Missouri school teacher Heather Delamere, the 450,000th caring and progressive individual to have done so that morning, and the 850,000th to have purchased the environmentally damaging vessel due to being thirsty, in a huge…
sastyk | January 21, 2010A friend of mine, Colin Beavan (aka No Impact Man) once observed that cutting your energy usage should be as easy as rolling off a log - that as long as it is always easier to use more resources, and the path of least resistance heads towards taking the car or turning up the heat, we're destined to struggle. And he's right.
However, in another way, he may be wrong. While I agree with him that we can do a lot of things to make energy reduction a lot easier for people (think, using one really obvious example, how many people are simply afraid to ride their bikes in traffic, and who could be…
sastyk | January 21, 2010There's yet another kerfuffle about climatology going on. First, of course, there was climategate, whose total revealed knowledge is "if you hack into people's private emails you might find out that some people, even climate scientists, are jerks sometimes." Now there's another one - in the IPCC report, there's an error. That is, scientists took a non-peer reviewed source and transposed it into the report, and didn't back check that source. This was stupid, of course, and should be criticized and corrected.
That said, since the material in the IPCC is overwhelmingly peer-reviewed science…
sastyk | January 20, 2010Nearly all the single readers I've met have told me how hard it is to find someone who starts with the same basic mindset that they do. They talk about going on dates and trying to figure out when to ask someone "so, do you believe that industrial society has a future?" Or "what do you think the odds are that a resource depleted society can continue economic growth and what would you suggest we do about that?" It is a tough row to hoe. For those who are part of minority cultures, the struggle is even greater - finding that hot hispanic woman or Jewish guy with the dream of living offgrid…
sastyk | January 20, 2010In my "Response to Zuska" in comments we've had some interesting discussion of whether gay, lesbian, bi and transgender folk will need to/be able to integrate successfully into rural communities, and I thought it was worth a blog post here as well, for folks who may not have read all the comments. As you all know, I don't think everyone has to re-ruralize - in a recent post at ye olde blogge, I wrote that we should seriously reconsider some cities. and that people who don't feel comfortable in the country may not want to force it. So I don't personally think that everyone does have to move…
sastyk | January 18, 2010The definitive book on root cellars and the cold storage of vegetables is Mike and Nancy Bubel's _Root Cellaring_, and I'm very fond of this book. Over the years, we've relied on it for all sorts of things, and it has helped us find a spot in our house suitable for natural, unrefrigerated cold storage of our produce. It is a wonderful and extremely useful book.
We keep apples, potatoes, carrots, quinces, cabbages, brussels sprouts, pears, onions, beets, celeriac, parsnips and other vegetables on our porch for months - and that means that we mostly eat locally during the winter, and that we…
sastyk | January 15, 2010So I've spent a lot of the last few months reading beekeeping books - all the ones you'd think plus a few others. I've spent a lot of time talking to various local beekeepers as well. There's an old saying "one Jew, three opinions" - well, let's just say that my major observation has been that that Jews have nothing on beekeepers ;-). I am now thoroughly versed in the arguments for and against top bar hives and traditional box hives, for and against foundation comb...and etcetera and etcetera and etcetera.
What I haven't decided is what I actually think about these things, and what I'm…
sastyk | January 15, 2010Earlier this week I wrote in "Pyr-Buck-Bees-Sheep" that I was struggling to get excited by my present book (still true, although a little better), and that what was keeping me going was farm planning - thinking about what I really want to be doing. I made my list of sustaining plans, to be paid for by the book advance - a Great Pyrenees dog as a guardian for our livestock, a Nigerian Dwarf buck for our breeding program, Honey Bees, and Sheep for our pastures. Oh, and there's some incidental poultry in there, and my seeds and fruit trees, but that ruined the rhythym of my new chant.
Well,…
sastyk | January 14, 2010
I have managed to completely freak Zuska out, and for that, I can only offer both apologies and sympathy. It really sucketh deeply when people come bang up against the realities of depletion and climate change. And one of the things that so insidious about the painfulness of this encounter is that a lot of times, people who are ordinarily more critical in their responses, go to the worst possible scenarios with a kind of horrified fascination.
This is not totally unreasonable - not only is there tremendous social pressure to go to the apocalyptic (plenty of movies, lots of tv, fiction...)…
sastyk | January 14, 2010John Michael Greer has a superb piece up about our reluctance to seriously consider real community and organizational strategies. I think it is well worth reading for anyone interested in this question of community - because we have to ask ourselves, if this is the tool we've got, why do so few of us want to do the work? Why are so few of us able to do the work?
It's interesting to speculate about why that took place. I suspect many of my readers have encountered Robert Putnam's widely discussed book Bowling Alone (2000), which traced the collapse of social networks and institutions…
sastyk | January 14, 2010Get nine women who have thought a lot about peak oil and climate change together around a dining room table, and perhaps expectedly, the conversation turns umm...blue. Get them around *my* dining room table and the turn to sex is pretty inevitable, given a certain native blueness (this is a polite way of saying "dirty mindness"). The absence of gents from this affair (completely unintended) made us rather uninhibited about certain subjects. And at the end of one conversation, I realized that I've got a rather gaping hole in my body of works on how to go forward into the future - I've never…
sastyk | January 13, 2010It is always hard to grasp the magnitude of suffering in Haiti - a place that should not be so desperately impoverished, that should never be the victim of so much suffering has an almost unending depth of misery. And it has only gotten worse over the last few years, as high food prices have driven people to starvation, as hurricane after hurricane has battered Haiti, and now the earthquake has caused immeasurably more suffering. The best most of us can do is open our purses, and we should open them wide.
Where to? Well, all the usual suspects are good - The Red Cross, Doctors without…
sastyk | January 13, 2010The best estimate I've seen is that in 2009 alone, we had more than 2 million first time gardeners, and from 2007 on, we've added 8 million new vegetable gardens. This is one heck of a movement. Unfortunately, it also meant that millions of people started gardening in what was, in the Northeast, the crappiest garden year ever.
Well, maybe not ever. There was eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death when volcanic activity meant hard frost in July. But at least in 40 years, according to CR Lawn, head of Fedco Seeds. Here in the Northeast it rained - I don't mean a little. We got 23 inches of…
sastyk | January 13, 2010Stuart Staniford is blogging. This is wonderful. As some of you may remember, Staniford disappeared from The Oil Drum a couple of years ago, after doing some astonishingly brilliant work on peak oil, biofuels and all sorts of stuff. Now Staniford and I disagree on a number of things, but he's a genius with data, and genius is important. Whenever Staniford annoys me, I think of what Emerson said of Carlyle: "If genius were cheap, we might do without Carlyle, but in the existing population he cannot be spared." I'm glad we've got Staniford back - we can't spare him.
His latest takes Chinese…