Year: 2012

Living at the whim of the weather

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Today, April 11, 2012, the weather forecasters are calling for widespread freezing tonight and possibly sleet and snow here in northern Ohio. A month ago, when it should have been snowing, the temperature was around 80 and garden fools actually did some planting, even corn. In a neighbor’s garden the peas are up. They are yellow this morning because the temperature recently was below freezing three nights in a row. So while liberals had a grand time tee-heeing conservatives in March about being in denial over global warming, today the conservatives can tee-hee right back and the liberals have to eat crow or maybe snow.

First World Happiness report launched at the United Nations

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It is not just wealth that makes people happy: Political freedom, strong social networks and an absence of corruption are together more important than income in explaining well-being differences between the top and bottom countries. At the individual level, good mental and physical health, someone to count on, job security and stable families are crucial.

Medicine and placebos

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If you buy herbal remedies, you are sending money to global corporations – just ones that don’t have to abide by the public rules of pharmaceutical companies, and can sell things that don’t work. I’m neither a doctor nor a politician, but I can think of a number of ways people can improve their and their neighbours’ health. They could persuade many people to garden, getting exercise and fresh vegetables. They could persuade lawmakers to force herbal companies to abide by the same standards as pharmaceutical companies.

The daily grind, Amish style

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We’d heard that there were many benefits to milling your own flour, aside from being sure that your whole grain bread really gets the whole of the grain (commercial flour labelled as “whole wheat” omits the wheat germ, which would go bad too quickly on store shelves).

Flour milled at home is fresher, of course — you know it hasn’t set on those store shelves in its vulnerable ground form losing nutrients. Mainly, we thought it would be fun to process more of our food at home, encouraging us to eat more fresh whole foods while making our family more resilient.

Natural gas is a bridge to nowhere

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A new journal article finds that methane leakage greatly undercuts or eliminates entirely the climate benefit of a switch to natural gas. The authors of “Greater Focus Needed on Methane Leakage from Natural Gas Infrastructure” conclude that “it appears that current leakage rates are higher than previously thought” and “Reductions in CH4 Leakage Are Needed to Maximize the Climate Benefits of Natural Gas.”

The death of sprawl?

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The United States has reached an historic moment. The exurban development explosion that defined national growth during the past two decades has come to a screeching halt, according to the latest US Census figures. Only 1 of the 100 highest-growth US communities of 2006–all of them in sprawled areas–reported a significant population gain in 2011, prompting Yale economist Robert Shiller to predict suburbs overall may not see growth "during our lifetimes."

 

Can overconfidence be overcome in advance?

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What seems to be missing from the coming New York Times energy conference is a sense of skepticism about the underlying assumptions for energy sufficiency in the decades to come. The agenda, speakers, and likely attendees remind one of what a shipboard symposium might have been like on the future of trans-Atlantic shipping held in the salon of the Titanic exactly one hundred years earlier. Maybe it’s inevitable that the hard questions won’t be entertained until the disaster occurs and we realize there aren’t enough lifeboats.

Creating community: Lessons from Occupy

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Whether Occupy is able to deal effectively with the substantial external threats and internal obstacles is yet to be determined. It will depend partly on the capacity for self-reflection and compassionate listening, as well as the success of channeling anger and frustration into powerful, constructive action.

Many specific suggestions have come from psychologists and activists, such as those at the OccuPsy meeting last month in Oakland.

Gleaning for good: An old idea is new again

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Foraging for food — whether it’s ferreting rare mushrooms in the woods, picking abundant lemons from an overlooked tree, or gathering berries from an abandoned lot — is all the rage among the culinary crowd and the D.I.Y. set, who share their finds with fellow food lovers in fancy restaurant meals or humble home suppers.

But an old-fashioned concept — gleaning for the greater good by harvesting unwanted or leftover produce from farms or family gardens — is also making a comeback during these continued lean economic times.

A time of gifts

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We are a market people. In a world where all things are a commodity – air, water, food, animals, the seeds we plant in the ground, the minerals under the ground, the genetic make up of our bodies – money is our god. Everything we do we do in the name of profit. We emulate the rich, we despise the poor. All things on earth are property. This bird, this child, this lake, this mountain has value only insofar it can bring us financial reward. Every day we bow down to Mammon.