Monday, March 27
Quiet Mostly Cloudy Monday Morning Coffee Muses
Tag: sustainable
A Tale Of A Simple Creek
A couple of weeks ago, I walked along a spring creek in the upper Madison Valley, just south of the town of Ennis, Mont. As my guide, Jeff Laszlo, explained, the creek is one of the unnamed tributaries of the Madison River, fed by innumerable springs along the valley’s rich…
To Mulch or Not…Too Mulch of a Good Thing.
My first house had siding of shiplap cypress. Great wood for building, tough for painting. I often wondered about those bags of cypress mulch at the garden center...seems it really is too much of a good thing... It seems that in the past ten years or so cypress logging as…
Kitchen Gardeners International
Dear Kitchen Gardener, Whats a home garden worth? With the global economy spiraling downward and Mother Nature preparing to reach upward, its a good question to ask and a good time to ask it. There isnt one right answer, of course, but Ill give you mine: $2149.15. Last year, my…
The Ethicurean: All steriled up: Produce safety guidelines throw sustainability out, keep toxic bathwater
Good article on the food safety issue from The Ethicurean Blog. Down on the farm Here’s a quick backgrounder: After the E. coli/spinach episode in 2006, big leafy greens producers in California (where the toxic spinach was grown) got together and drafted guidelines to reduce the risk of contamination on…
Cooking Up A Story: about people, food, and sustainable living
The Power of Less
The Power of Less Video from Leo Babauta on Vimeo.
Foie Gras To Sustainability?
This is an amazing story...
Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits—By Wendell Berry (Harper’s Magazine)
Anything Wendell Berry writes is worth the time it takes to digest...My recommendation is to go spend some time today with the man... The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of…
Living the Good Life
CARSON, NEW MEXICO—When the wind comes up the mesa, which it often does, there is a particular rusted-out old car nearby that whispers the same eerie, long-toned question every time: “Whoooooo?” I sometimes think: “Us.” Out in this remote part of the American Southwest lies the closest thing I have…
Energy Musing
Obama is the first political figure since Carter to understand the energy efficiency and conservation approach and actually try to present it to the American people. Republicans want to nip it in the bud -- that's why they are so aggressively jumping on the tire gauge thing. They want to…
Quick Link
Why Paul Roberts' End of Food deserves to be digested by policy makers and local-food activists alike | By Tom Philpott | Grist | Victual Reality | 08 Aug 2008 The Locavore's Dilemma Why Paul Roberts' End of Food deserves to be digested by policy makers and local-food activists alike…
Friday Morning Muse
Around these parts most of our ripened fruit happened a month or better ago. The only thing still to come are the pecans in the fall. Even so the following resonates... The Suburban Life - Thinking Ahead - Editorial - NYTimes.com It’s a good year for blueberries. Decades ago, a…
Food Musing
I have never felt that the Corporate pushers of GMOs were looking out for anything other than their own profits. That has led me to look on their actions in an unfavorable light. While this has always been a personal "feeling", I find my concerns expressed very well by this…
A trend to hope for…
Just don't let the marketing guys see the results or we'll have a ton of "Fred's Berries" coming in from out of the country... The Blue Marble: Eat Local Foods, Grow Small Farms It's not just for elites anymore. A survey of Midwesterners finds that even average food shoppers are…
What Is Blowing On The Wind?
Maybe the answer to some of our ecological problems... Out of thin air: Successful wind confab in Houston points up Texas' growing role in alternative energy development | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle Although it tops the nation in the volume of man-made greenhouse gas emissions fueling global warming, Texas has…
Authors@Google: Michael Pollan
You really have to appreciate Google putting these talks out on the web via YouTube...Here is Michael Pollan...
Solar Energy Becoming Competitive…
I saw this via KurzweilAI.net... Photovoltaic Moore's Law Will Make Solar Competitive by 2015 (Tech Talk) Silicon-based solar technology has decoupled from the semiconductor industry and is achieving steady cost reductions, so that those following PV discern a kind of Moore’s law at work. In 2005, production of silicon for…
Sobering Thoughts for a Monday Morning Muse
Paul Krugman's latest column focuses on food. Wander on over and check out his thoughts... Grains Gone Wild - New York Times These days you hear a lot about the world financial crisis. But there’s another world crisis under way — and it’s hurting a lot more people. I’m talking…
Feed Reading…
My Monday morning reading of the feeds over coffee and toast led me to this via The Ethicurean: Chew the right thing. Michael Pollan - Argiculture - Disease Resistant Staph - Concentrated Animal Feed Operations - Sustainability - New York Times Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what…
Tuesday…
From my drive home yesterday. The weather was threatening to follow me home...but it didn't. The clouds were amazing. And a little post processing in Photomatix Pro never hurts to bring them out in HDR. I drive by this location regularly since I first discovered it last fall. For a…
The romodeling saga continues with another night planned for the local Best Western…
No matter how much wishing and wanting you might do, remodeling projects take longer than the best laid plans. Looks like another night at the Best Western for the three of us. Tom Philpott has another good read up at Grist. This weeks "Victual Reality" hits home. I am trying…
Photo Friday – Old
Old Friends And old photo's of Old Friends... We still get together once and a while, me and my old friend from the 6th grade...It is over 40 years ago that I developed my first school boy crush on this old friend. She went on to be the steady of…
Wednesday – The end of week +2
Today's emails contained this week's copy of the "Weeknight Kitchen Newsletter" from The Splendid Table. I've been listening to Lynne Rossetto Kasper on the Splendid Table Podcast for a while now and enjoying it immensely. This week's newsletter contained a link to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch. I had…
Musing Through The Dog Days of Summer
From Washington Forgive me a few moments of happiness at the news from Washington. The one bit of uniting not dividing to come out of the White House in six years...Karl Rove is resigning. One of the few good quotes I've seen about the resignation of Karl Rove... "Buh-bye, Karl…
Food or Not Food?
I am in the process of working my way through Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle...A Year of Food Life, so be prepared to see more on the state of American food. Every day that goes by I read another article on the epidemic of obesity in this country...And another article…
How should you spend your food dollar?
For the record...This is day 1 of week 2 Post-Radiation. In a bit of serendipitous follow-up to yesterday's post. My email brings me this from Grist...How to prioritize your organic food dollars to get the most from your budget. On prioritizing organic purchases | By Umbra Fisk | Grist |…
Wednesday Musing – Rads + 7…
In my internet wanderings and muses I find myself being drawn to many of the same subjects that interested me 3o plus years ago. It appears the wanna be back to the lander, mother earth news reader, Rodale convert from the '60's still resides inside these middle aged bones. Which…
Web wandering on a Thursday morning…
This story caught my interest the other day. A Factory Farm Near You - New York Times Once upon a time, only a decade or so, it wasn’t hard to know where factory hog farms were because they were nearly all in North Carolina. But since those days, the practice…
On Any Given Sunday Morning – I Muse
Via The Ethicurean this morning I followed a link to the following... In his Meat Manifesto, Fearnley-Whittingstall corners the reader: “Are you,” he demands, “among the millions of consumers putting pressure on farmers to produce mountains of cheap meat of dubious quality, by dubious means?” I thought I had perhaps…
