Year: 2012

Canning Tomatoes 101

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We do a lot of canning here, especially with tomatoes. We harvest several hundred pounds every year with most of it being preserved. This year I’ve been getting a lot of questions about canning and tomatoes seem to the most popular.

The Bristol Pound – changing our relationships with the money we use

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September 19th will see the launch of the UK’s most ambitious and sophisticated community currency scheme – the city-wide Bristol Pound (£B). The project, 2 years in preparation, is a collaboration between the Bristol Pound Community Interest Company, Bristol Credit Union, Bristol Council, the Transition Network, nef and QOIN. The currency, like the Brixton Pound and other UK schemes, aims to create local economic resilience and greater self-determination in the face of globalisation and chain-store dominance. We also hope to change the way Bristol’s citizens relate to money itself.

Energy – Sept 12

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-Wind could meet many times world’s total power demand by 2030, Stanford researchers say
-EU proposal would limit use of crop-based biofuels
-Indian blackout held no fear for small hamlet where the power stayed on
-Asia Risks Water Scarcity Amid Coal-Fired Power Embrace

I’m better off, but…

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The US presidential election has taken a predictable turn with the rhetoric du jour that asks, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The implication being that, in the Great Recession, you can’t possibly be better off than you were in the good ol’ days of Dubya Bush and Company.

The Magic of Shales

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Under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) new rule for oil and gas, companies have been allowed much greater freedom to book reserves. On the surface, there is a good argument to be made for expanding the definition of allowable booked reserves. But in practice, this may have opened the door to false valuations of shale assets.

Review: Too Much Magic by James Kunstler

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…Kunstler has a new work of social criticism titled Too Much Magic, his first nonfiction book since The Long Emergency came out in 2005. The book is an inquiry into a skewed, delusional perception of reality that Kunstler thinks has become “baseline normal for the American public lately.” Americans, he says, have been led astray by the incredible technological advancements of recent times. We’ve come to believe that any problem we face is solvable—as if by magic—with the application of some new technology.

International Drilling Trade Group Calls Romney’s plan to turn over federal lands to states ‘Populist raw meat’

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Mitt Romney’s energy plan is devoted almost exclusively to increasing consumption of fossil fuels — completely ignoring dire warnings from scientists and energy experts that the “door is closing” on our ability to avoid irreversible, catastrophic climate change.

Chris Hedges on 9/11, Touring U.S. economic disaster zones in “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt”

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In the new book, “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt,” journalist Chris Hedges and illustrator Joe Sacco look at the poorest areas in the United States, “sacrifice zones” where human beings and natural resources have been used and then abandoned. A former New York Times correspondent, Hedges reported from Ground Zero beginning just after the 9/11 attacks…”The most retrograde forces within American society have used the specter of the war on terror or terrorism in the same way the most retrograde forces within American society used communism or anti-communism to crush any kind of legitimate dissent or any questioning of the structures of power,” Hedges said.