sastyk
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Note: This is another lightly revised version a piece I wrote some years ago at the oldest incarnation of this blog. It answers a question I get a lot - if people have been saying that the oil is going to run out for years, and if 30 years ago people thought we were going to have an ice age, why…
Over at Dot.Earth, Andy Revkin points out that basic preparedness is important - and that he'd have benefitted from some.
If I'd followed my colleague Tom Zeller's advice and invested in a wood-stove-style insert for my fireplace -- as I've muttered about for years -- my family wouldn't have had…
It has been an exciting morning - and it isn't even 10 o clock. Today was the day to pick up our new buck goat, Ring Bearer (again, not responsible for his name). For those of you who have never had the pleasure of having a buck goat, or do have buck goats, but own pickup trucks or other more…
One of the pleasures of blogging here has been the focus that this community has on issues of public health. Doing everything we can to maintain the health and well-being of populations through a shift into a different model of life is an issue that is deeply important to me - I don't always agree…
I have an enormous amount of respect for Stuart Staniford, who I think is one of the best minds working on our collective ecological crisis. That said, we've had some serious debates, because I've tended to think that our situation, particularly our longer term food situation, is more serious than…
Note: Most of the Independence Days material will run at ye olde blogge , but I wanted to post the year three start up over here too, since my readership isn't entirely overlapping. If you want to post status updates, the weekly thread for that will be at my other blog, but you can sign up here…
On Saturday evening as my family went out to synagogue for purim, I was astonished - driving through Schenectady there were only a few inches of snow on the ground. Now we often get more snow than lower elevations, but this time the difference was astounding - we have nearly four feet of snow on…
I really should be working on the book, but just a couple more:
The amazing Louis Jordan performing "There Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" - fabulous!
I admit, I have a lasting fondness going back to high school (hey, I'm a kid of the 80s, what can I say) for John Mellencamp, and he certainly…
There are a few snow showers still falling around here, so that means it has been snowing here continuously since Tuesday morning. We have a little less than 4 feet of snow on the ground. Which makes it hard for me to remember that spring is nearly here - in fact it has been warm through the…
I knew I could count on my fellow Science Blogger Dr. Klemetti for a good take on the physical reality of the Chilean Earthquake, so I checked in this morning, only to see him, quite property, take the MSM to task for inane rhetoric, notably an MSNBC headline that reads "Is Nature Out of Control?"…
Three feet and counting so far. The prediction for the "upper elevations" (that would be us) is that we could get another 1-2 feet before tomorrow night. So while I am lost in meditation of the stunning beauty that surrounds me and trying to locate my woodpile, our car and the dog, all of whom…
Just a reminder that if you are in the relevant parts of New England, I'm going to be doing a couple of presentations there. First, a week from Saturday, on March 6, I'll be at the NOFA NH annual Winter Conference in Concord New Hampshire all day. I'm both giving the keynote talk about food…
In a recent previous post "Do You Have to Grow Food" I pointed out that the impact of urban gardening is vastly greater, in the aggregate, than most people believe. We tend to think that little gardens here and there make no difference, but in fact, they add up rapidly. Consider the impact of US…
Mother Jones notes that in private interviews, Glenn Beck, fiery loon of the right, privately seems to believe in anthropogenic climate change.
Last week he mocked climate scientists for being "alarmists" who believe that "we're all going to die in a fiery flood." Not long ago he touted the global…
Note: 1 1/2 feet of snow so far and still falling - we may get more than three by the end (the words "in the higher elevations" are generally the ones you want to listen to when forecasts are made for my area). Power so far, but not expecting it to last. Smaller dog must boing around in snow to…
Not as off-topic for this blog as it might seem, I thought this (which I found through Gene Expression, one of my new favorite reads) essay on the merits of evolutionary psychology to be a very good and clear way of expressing my doubts on the subject.
He writes:
Daniel Dennett has advanced the…
Well, there's sledding, and snowmen, and drinking cocoa. There are board games and lessons (we already homeschool the younger three) and sitting around snuggling. There's room cleaning and barn chores and shoveling. There's music to practice and baking to do and new skills to learn.
And there…
In January, the same month that unemployment "fell" to 9.7% (by which we mean we only lost a few hundred thousand jobs, and we hadn't yet done the inevitable upward revision), we learn that about 20% of Americans were underemployed or unemployed and finding it hard to make ends meet. This compared…
Some of you will remember that I was whining a few weeks ago that I had snow envy - that I was jealous of the snow folks in the mid-Atlantic were getting, while we Northeasterners, who have come to expect snow, go nothing. Even on the day when there was snow in 49 out of 50 states, my neighborhood…
Some of you may have noticed that ye olde blogge, www.sharonastyk.com has been down for a while due to a nasty virus. Well thanks to a reader, Josh, who did a buttload of work out of the kindness of his heart, we're back in business! Woo hoo!
I've finally also figured out how to divvy up the…
Note: If you asked my sisters, both of whom are deeply stylish, elegant and aware of fashion, who you should call before you called me to discuss issues of style, they would probably come up with about a billion names. And that's because they love me. Anyone else could come up with 3 billion.…
Note: It is customary at the Jewish holiday of Purim to give money to charity, and also to give out Mishloach Manot, or gifts of food to friends and family. This week, besides being just a bit more than a month before my book deadline, is the grand baking festival of hamantaschen. Hamantaschen…
Because of the enormous impact of agriculture on climate change, pick up any book about "green" solutions and you'll find the suggestions that you grow a vegetable garden. Bang into the "we can't go on as we are" end of the environmental movement (mine), and you'll see the general assumption that…
From Alternet, a good piece on what it really means to be one of the six million Americans with no income at all save food stamps:
In March 2009, in the midst of the worst job crisis in at least a generation, Eva opened the last welfare check she will ever receive. She is one of a growing number of…
Crunchy Chicken , goddess of environmentalism and yours truly have something really, really cool to announce. Actually, no, it is really, really hot - sizzling in fact. Unfortunately, we can't tell you what it is until next week, except that it involves seriously awesome science and extreme…
Many of us in the Global North probably have a mental image attached to the word "farmer." Here's a pretty good approximation of most of our impressions of what constitutes "the average farmer."
Most of us probably don't realize that the "average farmer" on a world scale looks rather different.…
In keeping with the reminder I got that I should back up a little bit, and present my ideas more coherently for those who haven't encountered them before, I thought I would add a post about why someone might want to start seeds, and how to do it, to supplement the posts on winter sowing and the…
In many ways the enormous outpouring of support for Haiti after the earthquake was very moving. In other ways, not so much - consider the International community's total lack of interest in whether Haitians will be able to feed themselves in the upcoming year - "We're very happy to send our…
Yesterday, I spent a long time filling seed flats and pressing seeds into dirt - and then I took them outside and set them to germinate. The temps were hovering right around freezing, and there was light snow coming down - the perfect conditions for growing things. Or at least, for winter sowing…
Note: This is a repost from ye olde blogge (which, I am informed by the kind gentleman who is helping me debut it will be back to function by early next week - thank you all for your patience!). Aaron Newton and I are starting up our farm and garden design class today, and we'll be posting a lot…