Comments willa has made

You need this: http://www.historichomeworks.com/hhw/reports/reports.htm#Windows

Reglazing old windows isn't hard. There's even a tool, the Prazi Putty Chaser, to make it easier. And there are plenty of window restoration people who are way cheaper than replacement-window installers if you can't take it on yourself. Such people can also use strippers to take paint off the edges of sash and the channels they move in, and that's really what you care about--if the paint isn't getting ground into dust, the lead exposure is negligible.

And I agree that if you have storms and weatherstripping and still have cold drafts, your issue is around the frames, not through the windows. Also, you may have drafts coming in through your siding in other places and forcing its way into your house at the windowframes, if your walls aren't insulated. New windows won't address any of that, but they will have a huge negative environmentla impact, fail in a few years (look at the warranty period--the seals in double-glazed windows is designed to last just a few years longer than that), and not have all that much impact on heat loss. Oh, and they will reduce the size of your windows by a few inches all the way around, since they will sit inside your current window openings.

Quorn!

Quorn roasts are always the answer.  Seriously, if you tasted a carved pieces of turkey breast and then a piece of Quorn roast, you might not be able to immediately say which was which.

BioD, as for a vegetarian diet not being better than  better than an omnivorous one...um, no.  A cow can either be slaughtered or kept for dairy, but a cow produces many, many more pounds of milk than meat over the same period of time.  Likewise a chicken; my friend keeps chickens for both eggs and meat, and if you calculated the average amount of food provided per year by each (it would have to be an average, because the meat birds start being converted to meat after just a few months), I'm pretty sure the eggs would win.On Smaller breasts are better, and other advice for holiday-bird quandaries posted 1 year ago 28 Responses

A "sacred practice"?

Only a man could say a thing like that.

I mean, yes, cooking can be fun, probably spiritual ("spiritual" just ain't my thing), etc...but it helps when it's not a chore.  When men cook, it's about artistry and love for one's family and whatnot, because it's not a baseline expectation for men

 I 100% do not support eating at KFC ever (and I think I can honestly say I have never eaten there, so I guess I don't know what I'm missing, other than animal cruelty), but I think you should understand that yours is not the only perspective.  When putting dinner on the table is a thankless task that's only noticed if it doesn't get done, it certainly raises the appeal of a ready-made meal.

And yes, Virginia, that expectation is still alive and well.  Even women who do fly planes or perform surgery or whatever all day are still doing a far greater than equal share of the housework.On How I beat KFC's 'family meal' challenge posted 1 year ago 46 Responses

Burt's Bees

I swear I am not a Burt's Bees corporate shill.  I feel like every single product recommendation on here prompts me to recommend their stuff instead, but seriously, they make really nice shaving cream and lotion aftershave.  

The Body Shop also makes a really nice one, but it has a number of things in it that I can't identify, so I'm assuming it's more toxic than the Burt's.  The ingredients in the Body Shop stuff are: Water, Stearic Acid, Myristic Acid, Potassium Hydroxide, Coconut Acid, Glycerin, Triethanolamine, Fragrance, Panthenol, Phenoxyethanol, Sesamum Indicum (Sesame) Seed Oil, Tocopheryl Acetate, Sodium Hydroxide, Butylparaben, Methylparaben, Propylparaben, Retinyl Palmitate, Tetrasodium EDTA.

TBS also makes a nice synthetic shaving brush, so no badgers have to suffer for your smooth, hairless body parts.

My fiance shaves with a straight razor, and while there is a learning curve (he cut himself more at first than he would with a safety razor), it's not that hard.  Sharpening and stropping properly are the hard parts.  Well, and you need a leather strop, which I guess is a dealbreaker for those who are more strict vegetarians/vegans than we are.  He shaves 1-3 times a week usually, and gets good results with that amount of stubble--two weeks' worth, or one day's worth, seems to be harder to shave with a straight razor.On A dozen men's shaving creams get put to the blade posted 1 year, 6 months ago 13 Responses

both?

I dunno, Canis, both are pretty egregious.

I use Bon Ami, personally, and it works well enough for me.  But, OMG, the ingredients are mined!  Guess what--there is no company so eco friendly that they have a little fairy hovering over the (100% post-consumer recycled) containers waving its little wand to fill them up with something that cleans like Ajax and yet is so nontoxic you can sprinkle it on your cereal instead of sugar.  Everything comes from somewhere, and any product that you use to fight dirt is going to, well, fight dirt in some way.  If it were really that nontoxic and biodegradable, the microbes would be flocking to eat it!On A test of eight green bathroom-cleaning products posted 1 year, 8 months ago 23 Responses

Americana

Y'all, somebody beat you to the punch on this one.  There's a whole genre of music that sounds like country but isn't populated by Republican climate-change deniers:  Americana.  Most of the country music put out by the overpackaged "big stars" is written by Americana folks.  

It's just the "front of the house" part of the industry that's on the other side, and I think they are largely responsible for the fact that so many country music lovers think we are against everything they stand for.  When it comes right down to it, the Americana singers and songwriters are obviously plugged into the needs of the country audience (or they couldn't keep writing well-received songs for them), but the audience is being sold a very different (and unnecessary) spin.

It just isn't true that you can't be a green redneck.  And I say all this as someone who won a big ol' belt buckle with my name (and my horse's name) engraved on it as a kid in 4-H.  On Global warming could thaw relations between enviros and those who live closest to 'the environment' posted 1 year, 8 months ago 7 Responses

Shock!

I maintain, as I have done since the California video first came out, that the only shocking thing about it is how stupidly shocked people were by it.

Come ON, people, the meat industry hasn't ever been humane.  It wasn't humane in the days of the great cattle drives (would you want to be driven hundreds of miles with nothing to eat but what you could graze on if you stopped somewhere grassy for the night [if you were a grazing animal]?).  It wasn't humane in the days of rail transport to the Chicago Stockyards.  It wasn't humane back when your neighborhood butcher cut up your meat to order (small businesses have their virtues, but humane treatment of animals isn't really one of them), and it isn't humane now when those cuts are pre-wrapped in styrofoam and plastic wrap, even if there's an organic label stuck on.

All that said, small farmers are not necessarily kind to their animals either.  Ask anyone who's gotten a horse from the Amish.  Ask anyone who's rescued livestock from a hoarder who was supposedly a farmer or breeder.  Ask anyone who's seen animals given as little shelter and healthcare and as low-quality feed as possible to achieve the desired weight or milk/egg production,  The only solution is to know your producer personally, and even then...

I buy my eggs from Jane, the farmer down the road.   Jane is a neat lady, and I like her a lot, but it turns out that when she and her husband went away over Christmas, it was too hard to find someone to care for the flock, so they sold them all at the livestock auction!  Now, during those birds' useful lives with Jane, they had space aplenty, good food, etc, and were happy birds, but I bet they're either dead or living a much less cushy life now.  I'll still buy eggs from Jane before I buy them from any commercial producer, even a Certified Humane one, but it isn't as if Jane, because she's such a nice lady and my neighbor and all, is offering those birds a happy, healthy, long life in return for their egg-laying services.On 'Downergate' reveals gaps in mad-cow testing and trouble in school-lunch sourcing posted 1 year, 8 months ago 12 Responses

I'll keep the fluoride, thanks

Jonahcoyote, people like that blogger you linked to are the reason we crunchy folks are viewed as possibly not quite right in the head by the mainstream.

I like ToM mint toothpastes, all except the baking soda one.  Even their "sensitive teeth" toothpaste is less disgusting than Sensodyne.  I haven't had the nerve to try any of the non-mint flavors.  I wish they had sample-size tubes of those, because I don't want to waste an entire big tube if it turns out I hate it.  Of course, I could just stick with the ones I know I like (which is what I've been doing so far).On A family-friendly review of six eco-toothpastes posted 1 year, 8 months ago 20 Responses

Speed

My Prius gets about the same mileage at 60 and at 70.  Certainly it's not a difference equivalent to $0.20/gallon in gas price.  Just sayin'.On How to green your car posted 1 year, 8 months ago 5 Responses

You missed the best one

Sun & Earth detergent blows 7th Gen out of the water.  It cleans better, smells better (pleasantly citrusy), comes in 5-gallon buckets (as well as "normal" sizes), and best of all doesn't build up a residue over time.  When I used to use 7th Gen, I found that after a few months my clothes looked dull and had a permanent off-scent, as if they weren't really clean.  I think it's the fabric-softening stuff in it that's the problem.

I also use vinegar, though I skip the Downy ball.  I just pour a half cup or so into the fabric softener receptacle in my washer.  It boosts the pleasant fresh smell, and I think it also helps get stains out.  The main reason I use it, though, is that if I forget to hang stuff up right away, the vinegar keeps it from getting mildewed as quickly.  I've left wet laundry in for up to 24 hours and had it be fine without re-washing when I used vinegar, where without it I don't think it would last half that long.  Of course, not forgetting about the laundry in the first place would be optimal, but I do what I can...On A review of six green laundry detergents posted 1 year, 9 months ago 21 Responses

Names

If I hear "McCain vs Hillary" or "Obama vs Hillary" one more freaking time...

She has a last name too, y'all.On What makes a good climate change plan? posted 1 year, 9 months ago 3 Responses

yeah, but...

No one throws out perfectly good jeans, do they?  I mean, I guess some people must, but selling them or giving them away seems more likely.  I personally wear mine till they wear out unfixably (though that tends not to be very long).  I'm not sure what message it send to give people a discount for buying more stuff when they've just demonstrated that they already have stuff.

But hey, they're trying...On Recycle your jeans at Aéropostale posted 1 year, 9 months ago 4 Responses

Wrong about horse slaughter, too, Sam

I know hardly anyone will read this now because it took me three days to get around to replying, but I need to correct this falsehood anyway.

First of all, rendering dead horses isn't illegal, there just isn't much demand for it.  There are a limited number of things you can make from carcasses (that is, not-freshly-slaughtered ones), but in reality most of the things we make from dead animals need to be made of freshly-dead ones.  If I euthanize my horse and have the knacker come the next day and pick up the body, it won't be good for a whole lot, especially if it was euthed chemically rather than with a bullet (though the latter is also a totally humane and fine way to do it if you know how).  Barbiturate-laced tissues aren't very useful.

Second, horse slaughter is currently not going on in this country, it's true.  However, truckloads of horses go to Canada and Mexico every day.  We need better laws to close that loophole (conditions in the Mexican slaughterhouses are horrible beyond conception), but in the meantime we are in a crunch. Between the overbreeding of racehorses for short, all-too-often-useless careers, the overbreeding of other purebred horses because people think they can make money (they can't, and once they figure that out they dump the horses), the overbreeding of useless backyard horses because people are just dumb...and then on top of it all we're in a serious hay shortage right now, thanks to global warming (the drought in the southeast US) and ethanol production stealing our hay fields...so right now there are a LOT of unwanted horses, and therefore a lot of outcry that we need equine slaughter, which is ridiculous.  What we need is to stop breeding so many damn worthless horses that only the killer buyers want.  

None of this has anything to do with rendering euthanized horses.  Most of the horses who go to slaughter are young and able-bodied and just plain not wanted.  As for the ones who are old and decrepit, it's hardly a fitting end for them to travel crammed in on trucks designed for cattle, deprived of food and water for days sometimes during the trip, packed in with larger and more aggressive horses who may hurt the old and lame ones.  There's nothing good about the idea of re-legalizing the operation of horse slaughter plants in the US, except from the point of view of the selfish, greedy owners who feel the need to milk those last few dollars from horses rather than have the decency to take care of them in their retirement.On New NYT pundit bravely defends GMOs, cloning posted 1 year, 9 months ago 12 Responses

"of course, everyone agrees..."

No, Max, everyone doesn't agree.  Obesity isn't actually correlated with a shorter life span.

And reducing caloric intake doesn't necessarily lead to reduced weight, at least not within nutritionally sound, non-disordered-eating parameters.  Plenty of fat people have tried dieting, I assure you, and the reason we're all still fat is not that we cheated on our diets or were somehow too dumb to make them work--it's that, short of creating an eating disorder, short of cutting down to fewer calories than were given to concentration camp victims, it is well-nigh impossible to get and stay much below your natural set point.  I personally can eat 2K calories/day or 1K and maintain the same (fairly high) activity level and not gain or lose an ounce.

Incidentally, there's some evidence that mothers who try to lose weight before becoming pregnant just end up slowing their metabolisms, since their bodies are trying to fight back against the withdrawal of resources by conserving more aggressively, and that this slowed metabolism is  then passed on to the fetus, leading to a higher set point for the resulting child throughout life.   I'm pretty sure the environment doesn't have any mechanism to be more efficient with heat or CO2, thus making our efforts at conservation hopeless, although it certainly did have a setpoint before we screwed with it.  I think the analogy here is more to binge eating (which can screw up a person's set point) than to being fat.On The parallels between accepting obesity and ignoring global warming posted 1 year, 10 months ago 71 Responses

Speaking of missing the point...

I know you have seen the person with the piled up plate that is very heavy. They are obviously not expending the calories they are consuming.

The fact that someone may look a certain way doesn't give you the right to make assumptions about what that person is entitled to eat.  As someone with a history of diordered eating, I would think you of all people would understand that.

I am truly happy how I am and I must exercise and honor my body if I want it to slim down and I realize that may be difficult for some people, but come on! take baby steps. Everyone should be able to walk, unless they physically are unable to do so. Few obese people fall into this category.

And yeah, all us fat people eat and eat and eat and never exercise.  I just came from riding my ex-racehorse, who tried several times to launch me ten feet in the air, and tried several more times to pull me over his head and send me flying.  While it's true that some of the reason I get through that kind of adventure every day is because of learned skill and finesse, a good deal of it is sheer physical strength and balance.  I assure you I do not sit on the couch eating bonbons.  Most of the fat people I know are similarly active and fit, although since they're still fat I understand that it "doesn't count".

Try this analogy on for size:  Being fat is like having a comfortable lifestyle, like living in a house that's warm in the winter and cool in the summer.  There are many ways of achieving such a state, from mindless consumption of fossil fuels all the way to careful siting and use of passive solar or geothermal technologies.  The end result is the same; some houses are always comfortable and some are always the wrong temperature, but without actually considering the individual situation, the climate in the house tells you little to nothing about how it got that way.

Being thin is no more virtuous than living in a frigid, uninsulated house in Minnesota in the winter and thinking you're environmentally friendly because you don't crank the oil heat up to 75 degrees.On The parallels between accepting obesity and ignoring global warming posted 1 year, 10 months ago 71 Responses

yes, bad joke

I'm not actually angry.  I just think it's worth pointing out when these sorts of things are tossed out as throwaway jokes no one even thinks about.  The fact that no one thinks about them, or is very upset about them, is the problem.  I'm sorry to have made you uncomfortable when it's just one example of something I hate in society as a whole.On Vegan vixen designs shoe collection posted 1 year, 10 months ago 24 Responses

Something to it, indeed.

Great point, Mark!

And I would go further and say that, while nagging is clearly not the answer in either case, one can also say that the answer to the problem isn't really known in either case.  Of course, the analogy breaks down when you get to the part where global warming is an actual, serious problem that is likely to actively kill lots and lots and lots of people, but still.

The people who think that they can "fix" the problem by "encouraging" us fatties (or people with eating disorders) to simply eat healthily and exercise a reasonable amount...don't live in the same reality as any fat person I know.  I eat just about the healthiest diet of anyone I know, I exercise daily, I am healthier and stronger and more fit than most thin people I know, but I guess none of it matters because I'm still fat.  Eating my steamed veggies and having low blood pressure and cholesterol must all be figments of my imagination, because if I really ate that way and really had health stats like that, I'd be thin, EVERYONE knows THAT!On The parallels between accepting obesity and ignoring global warming posted 1 year, 10 months ago 71 Responses

NM Green party

The Green party in NM is alive and well--in Santa Fe.  The rest of the state is pretty much divided along an informal Mason-Dixon line that passes between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, with gringo Republicans dominating the discourse to the south and Hispanic "Democratic machine" politicos running things to the north.  

Santa fe is its own little island of crazy.  It's great, don't get me wrong, the diversity of people and opinions is stunning, people actually talk to people of other political persuasions, but reality it ain't.  That's the only reason we get things like Green City Council members.On What is the Green Party up to, exactly? posted 1 year, 10 months ago 23 Responses

Green or just lazy?

I have the worst lawn on my block, and I'm damn proud of it...no, wait...but not a single chemical or drop of petroleum has been spent on my lawn since I moved into this house two years ago.

I do various other green stuff, but not nearly enough.  I still haven't even replaced my basement door that has a big gap at the corners that's letting cold air in.  Sometimes lazy is green, but not always...

Canis, I beg you not to replace the original windows in your childhood home.  There's nothing ridiculous about old wooden windows; often, they are at the point of needing re-puttying and whatnot, but the Delaware valley is surely awash in preservation carpenters and such who could take care of that.  A decent storm window outside the original wood window and you're set.  Replace them with new windows and you are locking into a cycle of high-embodied-energy replacement-window replacement every couple of decades, where the original windows could last another hundred years with a little TLC, and in the meantime they're not just green, they're an aesthetically integral part of the house.

I put new Pella windows in my barn, and the damn things are a joke.  So poorly made, I wish I had found some salvaged wood windows and had them restored instead.  But at least they're energy efficient, until they start leaking like sieves...On How are you greening your suburban life? posted 1 year, 10 months ago 16 Responses

Burt's Bees

I like Burt's Milk & Honey the best, though I don't know if they're paraben free or not (too lazy to go upstairs and check).  For my hands and feet/ankles, their little glass jars of hand cream are great--regular liquidy lotions just aren't moisturizing enough to prevent cracks.

That said, Burt's products are clearly not vegan; whether or not one is vegan, there's a certain logic to choosing products without milk in them just from an embodied-energy standpoint.On A review of six hand and body lotions posted 1 year, 10 months ago 16 Responses

Ah, Pete.

But didn't I hear that he's retiring?

I am embarrassed and irritated to have him representing my state.On Press peddles Republican talking points on energy bill posted 1 year, 11 months ago 4 Responses

I guess the irony was lost?

"...decides to follow St. Francis' Yule tradition of wandering the park and throwing seed so that the birds too could celebrate, or makes it an annual custom to serve turkey dinner at the homeless shelter..."

Well, I guess it can't be a merry Christmas for all after all, then...

And as for the purchasing of livestock for the poor:  If they're so poor, how will they feed that poor cow?  What will they do when she is sick?  When she has trouble calving, will there be a veterinarian available, or will she die a slow, agonizing death while they try to save the baby, hoping it will be a heifer so they can subject it to the whole cycle again?  Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the keeping of livestock--I do it myself--but I do have a whole lot against the keeping of livestock when funds aren't sufficient to provide a basic standard of care.

I'm sorry to be so cynical, but for me this has reinforced the connection between Christianity and myopia, cruelty, and hypocrisy.On Are you brave enough to say no to a high-stress holiday? posted 2 years ago 51 Responses

We need both, though.

I think in a way the outcome of the Civil Rights Act might have been better if the movement had achieved more lightbulb-level voluntary compliance.  If there had been more focus on what each individual can do--evaluate each person as a person not a color, avoid racial stereotypes, encourage your children to make friends who are different than they are, etc--we wouldn't be in the sad situation we're in now regarding racial justice.  Racial discrimination is alive and well in America today; how many white people would you expect to see in the bad neighborhoods in any large American city, and how many black people would you expect to see in the tonier neighborhoods of that same city?  It's just that the status quo can't legally be actively enforced anymore...but it doesn't need to be, because larger forces related to our habits as a society are doing such a fantastic job of status-quo preservation on their own.

So while I'd love to see major laws passed to curtail the destructive practices of corporations, I'd also like to see individuals encouraged to do things that matter.  And, yes, changing lightbulbs does matter, though of course I'd prefer to see the list be more like, "live in a smaller house, drive less, and if you can't start on either of those right away, at least eat local and cut your use of electricity in the house you already have." (or something like that).On Voluntary actions didn't get us civil rights, and they won't fix the climate posted 2 years, 2 months ago 61 Responses

Wow.

Just, wow.  I thought I'd come back and see if anyone ever had anything more to say about this, and I see that the environmental movement really is still chock-full of men who just don't get how to coexist with the other half of the species.

So, women do all the shopping?  Um, wait, was that a filthy two-stroke engine I just heard?  As if men don't do their share of buying environmentally horrible "toys".  If women buy more stuff, it's only because still, in the 21st century, women are relegated to the repetitive, boring, "unimportant" tasks of caring for families, while men content themselves with a little light weedwhacking on the weekends.  Make no mistake, women still do the domestic heavy lifting, but it isn't necessarily their environmental sensitivities or lack thereof driving the buying.  They are just buying for more than just themselves.

And if women don't concern themselves with the big issues...well, do you think that's because women are not heard when they try?  Do you think that might be because assertive women are still punished in the workplace, while assertive men are rewarded?  Of course women think and act locally, when society punishes them for doing otherwise!

I can't make anyone read the studies, but if you'd read the news, fercrissake, you'd see that it's just been shown that the same agressive leadership--the very same words!--coming out of the mouths of male vs. female participants created completely opposite sentiments, the man being viewed as a good leader and the women being viewed as rude.

Oh, and kids on the playground are not unspoiled little paradigms of the naturally masculine/feminine.  When little boys attack little girls (or their ideas) on the playground or in the classroom, THAT'S NOT NATURAL!  That's a sign that little boys have already seen that successful men are bullies, and little girls have already seen that successful women negotiate.On Is the environmental movement losing touch with its feminine side? posted 2 years, 3 months ago 17 Responses

yeah.

"I've worked with mostly women my whole career, and find that I have tried to hide aspects of my personality because they can make some women uncomfortable. That's a lot of energy that could have beeen directed at making our lives better."

Welcome to our world, Jim.On Is the environmental movement losing touch with its feminine side? posted 2 years, 4 months ago 17 Responses

Kit?

Why not start selling kits to do this conversion?  That is, technically-inept person (and I hold myself forward as a great example) buys cheap bike, buys kit from you including all necessary parts and drawings of what wire to connect to what, and suddenly lots more people have electric bikes?  You could even just sell the drawings and instructions, leaving people to buy the specified parts on their own, though that would put it on the edge of too-daunting for those of us without much confidence in our technical skillz (what if we bought the wrong part and then the whole thing didn't work? etc).

Just a thought.On Dumb and not so dumb questions answered posted 2 years, 5 months ago 51 Responses

Argh. Can't trust any of 'em, I guess.

One thing occurs to me, though:  how significant is $100K?  I have no idea how much Reid raised total, but I can imagine that amount not being as big as it sounds, in context.

So if it's not, then I guess in a way that makes it even worse--he's willing to sell out cheap.  If my politicians are for sale, I at least want them to have some standards. :)On Sigh posted 2 years, 6 months ago 4 Responses

efficient implies well-cared-for

Canis,
Rest assured I include Frank Lloyd Wrong's work in the "crappy cycle of crap." :)

Building to last, of course, is all well and good but is only as good as the society's desire to care for and continue to use old buildings.  Demolishing perfectly usable structures needs to be stopped, I say as I stack my preservation-grad-student hat atop my environmentalist hat.  People, however, have a way of wanting exactly what they want, and feeling that it's easier to get that by starting over and build new than by restoring something old.  This has ever been the case--in 19th-century Boston, for instance, there were at least a few people who regarded the inevitability of that era's great fires as an opportunity for regrowth, rather than any kind of tragic loss! (and so Boston lost almost every single one of its pre-19th-c. houses and shops, preserving only things like Faneuil Hall and Old South Meetinghouse, and those only by the skin of their teeth).

Stewart Brand is indeed an interesting fellow, and I highly recommend How Buildings Learn. Be forewarned, though--most people find themselves very angry at him at least once in the course of reading it! :)  I personally found it eloquent and enlightening, except the bit where he called a drippingly Italianate house (that had been converted to a McDonald's, of all things) "Georgian" (the Georgian style came more than a century earlier than that house was built, and was for a the most part a fairly austere style, though it shared with Italianate a certain fondness for classical detailing).  Not that that's anything to do with the environment, natch.On Indirect greenhouse-gas savings posted 2 years, 7 months ago 41 Responses

one thing you can do is:

Ignore Sarah Susanka.  The whole "not so big" thing is a total sham.

Personally, as many of y'all know, I'm more interested in preserving existing houses than building new ones--partly because I like old houses better than new ones, and partly because the greenest building is the one that isn't built (or, by extension, is already built).  

I think it would help, too, if the aesthetic of green architecture were to shift to something a little less out-there.  No one in the real world really likes cutting-edge architecture at the time that it's cutting-edge (although some of it--Art Deco, for instance--later becomes quite popular, despite having been reviled by the average non-architect when it was regarded as state-of-the-art).  So the only way to make green architecture more popular  in terms of actual implementation by large numbers of architecturally ignorant consumers is to make it less hip, slick, and cool.  People want their cookie-cutter houses, so we should be giving them green cookie-cutter houses, if they're going to insist on new houses.  Better yet, we should be rehabbing older houses to make them appealing to people who would otherwise buy new houses.  That's hard work, though, which will never fly as long as people can do what GreenEngineer is talking about where the visual design is basically overlaid on the engineering design with no communication between the architect an the engineer, and then the final design can be shipped off to a builder who has no idea why the design is the way it is and therefore can't treat it with sensitivity, even if it is a decent design.  If you give individual attention to new construction, or rehab of old buildings, you have to have an integrated team like GE was saying, and the bottom lime is apparently not there.  

So, by the time we come to our sense and get off our asses, the old buildings will mostly be gone, but maybe we can start building some new ones that suck less.  Boy, I'm cheerful tonight.

Oh, and GreenEngineer, I have yet to finish that preservation/sustainable design article you sent me, interesting though it is.  I will read it soon, really.  And then I can tell everyone else they should read it. :)On We're inside it posted 2 years, 7 months ago 27 Responses

the tricycle-bean

Bio-D, that is kind of cute. :)

I think the thing that many here are missing is this:  I fundamentally don't want to ride a bike, any more than I want to go to the gym and ride a stationary bike.  Today I rode my horse for 20 minutes with no stirrups, because it will improve my position, but tomorrow my inner thigh muscles, abs, and lower back will be screaming at me.  I will do this at least a couple of days a week, until I feel capable of doing about ten minutes of posting trot (where one rises off the horse's back every other step so as to make it easier on the horse's back--quite a feat when those inner thigh muscles are all that lifts you up).  I don't fall off my horse once I start shaking, though if he decided to turn me into a lawn dart I'd certainly have fewer resources with which to argue.

But the basic fact is, I want to get around, from my house to the barn, the train station, and the grocery store (all within five miles of my house) without either polluting or shaking.  I find the emphasis on "this is an adventure, only for the adventurous" extremely counterproductive, because believe me, I am a lot more willing to sacrifice my own ease and comfort than most people are.  If you think it's too hardcore for me, then you're giving up on practically everyone else.  I think that's dumb, if you want to save the world.  If you just want to thump your chest and admit that you're into doing manly things you would be scared to have your wife do, fine, but I don't really think that's what you're about.  I encourage you to explore other options.  I have already found a kit for an electric-assisted tricycle online, which is good news since I'm not going to be able to improvise this sort of thing on my own, with my meagre electrical skills.  While this whole tricycle thing is surely not the be-all, end-all solution, it does go far towards preventing one from unexpectedly falling into the path of a moving car, so if it can also be helped by electricity towards being a way that one can get from point A to point B without having spent all one's energy by the time one arrives, it might bear some investigation.  It seems impossible to me that there's not some system you could come up with that would have more than two wheels, be easy for a normal, average person to assemble and operate, and get that normal, average person to his or her normal, average destinations with a minimum of physical and mental effort.

Oh, and Mimi, yeah, our roads in Massachusetts are pretty rough in some places, especially in the winter, but the nasty crash actually happened in the Sangre de Cristo mountains above Santa Fe, New Mexico.  On a dirt road, which is what we have a lot of.  I will say when I lived in Ireland, I rode a bike everywhere (yes, including to the pub, occasionally riding home with a six-pack of Guinness in the basket :) ), and it certainly didn't seem all that unsafe or otherwise awful, except i was an idiot and didn't have appropriate lights and reflective gear for darkness, which in Ireland in the winter is most of the time.

I guess I ought to take my bike to a shop and have it checked out, make sure the brakes are in good shape and everything, and then try riding the places I normally drive and find out how terrifying it really is.  I may still buy a tricycle, partly just because it seems fun. :)On Bike commuting fashion tips posted 2 years, 8 months ago 52 Responses

old beans

Well, I've got a jar on my counter that's had the same lentils in it for the last...um...number of months.  Clearly I better cook those suckers up before they get fossilized!

I do wonder if, for longer-cooking beans, a pressure cooker not only speeds things along but also penetrates beans that would otherwise have been imperviously hard and never cooked?  I don't have a pressure cooker, though I do plan to get one this year (actually two, a big one for canning and a small one for cooking), so I cook my beans in an unglazed clay pot from South America (yes, lead-free and all) which, through some vitreous magic I don't really understand, manages not to fracture when used over a flame.On Beans, beans, good for your recipe posted 2 years, 8 months ago 14 Responses

Huh.

Hard water and high altitude.  That's funny, because I never had a problem, in Santa Fe at 7000', on well water that leaves calcium deposits on everything, getting beans to cook.  Good luck, I guess, especially since I frequently forget about dry beans and then cook them when I find them months or years later.

Of course, now that I know this, I'll start having problems.  Gee, thanks, Roz! :)On Beans, beans, good for your recipe posted 2 years, 8 months ago 14 Responses

See, like this:

http://cgi.ebay.com/New-Adult-Trike-Bike-Tricycle-Bicycle ...On Bike commuting fashion tips posted 2 years, 8 months ago 52 Responses

I'm not much of a biker, but I have a suggestion:

http://www.doversaddlery.com/mudruckers-tall-boot/p/X1-38 ...
These boots are da bomb.  They're warm, waterproof, comfy, have good traction on ice, etc (not so good on softer stuff like deep slush b/c they're not lug-soled, but since lug soles get caught on bike pedals anyway...).  The best part?  The tops are stretchy foam stuff, so that they stretch over your pants legs, even if you have freakishly large calves like I do.  If you fold your trouser leg relatively carefully by holding it at the crease and turning it back at an angle around your ankle as you slip the boot over it, I would think you could avoid much wrinkling, and you'd definitely avoid splatter and bike-chain issues.

As for skirts, suit skirts are definitely not an option on a bike, but they're also easy to change into.  Couldn't you just carefully fold it in your bag, then put pantyhose on underneath biking pants and change in the restroom?  I realize the idea is not to have to change, but if you did, it seems like the skirt is less of a problem than the jacket/blazer.  I think even most offices these days are ok with a suit-like skirt and a cardigan instead of a suit jacket, though, no?

Oh, and I have to say, the links above to women biking are pretty lame as far as actual practical considerations go.  One is wearing a fluffy white miniskirt--a no-no for me and my imperfect, blindingly-white legs in any circumstances, and a work no-no for any woman who doesn't work at the local Hooters knockoff--and the other doesn't appear to be wearing a skirt at all.  I can see the bike seat protruding, but the ruffle at the bottom of the garment is hanging straight, so i don't think she has a skirt tucked up and over (not to mention what a PITA it is to get a skirt tucked up like that for modesty's sake--also likely to rip the skirt).  I think she's wearing ruffled shorts.  But anyway.  The point is, for those of us who don't like to expose ourselves in public, don't have the legs of a teenage swimsuit model, and have to appear in public not looking like a cheerleader, skirts on bikes remain nearly as problematic as spandex.

Oh, and I have a super-dumb question:  Is there some reason why adult-sized tricycles are not the answer?  I get that they're completely uncool, but wouldn't they lessen your odds of falling over into traffic because of a pothole?  I've never ridden one, but I've seen them, and they seem a lot safer for the moderately unskilled rider, not to mention they'd make it way easier to carry a day's worth of clothing, shoes, lunch, books, laptop, etc, etc.  Or am I just too big a dork to see that this would be totally unacceptable?On Bike commuting fashion tips posted 2 years, 8 months ago 52 Responses

Old. Old, old, old. Yet not even 30!

Mihan,
It's cute until you realize that, to them, 30 probably is "old". :)

I used to use Dove moisturizing body wash (which I am pretty sure I wouldn't buy again, for various reasons, obviously including that I'm not really clear on what's in that crap).  It does work, though.  Now I use Whole Foods' store-brand 365 grapefruit shower gel, and slather on lotion after.  I wonder if you could get a "matching" lotion (the 365 line also includes lotions in the same scents, for example, so that would work) and just mix them, since Dove's whole thing is that their soaps and shower gels are part lotion? Then you could get lather and moisture.  I don't know if it would stay stable if mixed ahead of time, a bottle at a time, though.  You might have to squeeze a bit of each onto your shower pouf and mix on the spot.On The lazy girl's (and guy's) secret to toxin-free moisturizing posted 2 years, 8 months ago 16 Responses

conversion

I'm never sure how accurate it is to convert to "[insert anima] years", but I would say that when I first started riding over 20 years ago, a 30-y-o horse was almost unheard-of-ly old, but the advances in nutrition, dental care, arthritis management, etc, have made a world of difference, to the point where a lot of horses are now living at least to their late 20s, and 30 is no longer uncommon, although I think it's still not the norm even for well-cared-for horses.  At the other extreme, I've seen overworked carriage horses and riding-school horses who looked like death at 12 or 13.  My own horse is 26 and still quite fit, though I notice he gets cold more easily now.

Poor Barbaro, not even four years old...but he was only kept alive as long as he was for the potential earnings had he gotten well enough to breed.  If he'd been my horse he would have been euthanized on the spot based on what I know about the injury.  Of course, if he'd been my horse no one would have gotten on him until he was at least three, no one would have asked him to do any hard work until he was at least four, and he would never have come anywhere near a racetrack.  That's my personal bias, though.

Anyhow, I'm going to stop hijacking the thread and go make the damn spring rolls now...On Seriously, isn't it just gross? posted 2 years, 8 months ago 44 Responses

wait, I'm so confused!

You're not supposed to put soy sauce over veggies and rice?  I'd starve!

I second the recommendation for Veri Veri Teriyaki.  In spite of the silly name, it's quite tasty.

You can get Indian sauces in jars at the supermarket.  Totally cheating, of course, but whatever.  I really like the tomato-based ones, and find you can just heat some Quorn chicken tenders and/or veggies and/or tofu in a jar of sauce, serve it over rice, and call it a meal.

This isn't relevant to Asian cuisine, but there's also a jarred sauce called sofrito that my supermarket has in the Spanish/Mexican food aisle (I just gloss over the cognitive dissonance of having those two lumped together...).  It's also a tomato-based sauce, with with onions and garlic and bell peppers and spices.  I cooked some basmati rice with it the other night (substituting the sofrito for some of the water) and it made a good, if totally cheating and inauthentic, "Spanish rice".  We then made burritos with the rice and some refried beans, guacamole, and a little shredded cheese.  Sorta like Taco Bell's seven-layer burrito, but with food that didn't come out of a caulk gun. :)On Seriously, isn't it just gross? posted 2 years, 8 months ago 44 Responses

secondary heat

Yeah, Bio-D, it does seem that way.  Plus, I don't know about everyone else, but I rarely drink hot tea in the summer.  I don't care either way about caffeine, of course, so that's a factor, but I also don't really want hot stuff in hot weather. I just throw some mint or Red Zinger tea bags in a pitcher of cold water and leave it in the fridge, thus obviating kettles of any kind.  I think you can make pretty good caffeinated iced tea by putting the bags in a glass jar of water and leaving it in the sun, right?

When I do make hot tea (or hot cocoa made with dry milk and hot water), I am a fresh-water fanatic.  If the water hasn't just come out of the tap into the kettle, it doesn't have enough dissolved oxygen, and the resulting beverage tastes funny.  Although I've been told it's easy to get oxygen dissolved in water, that it's basically the mechanical action of splashing into the kettle that does it, not being in the pipe, so maybe just pouring the water out of the kettle and back in would do it? Not that I usually go to such lengths--I just keep the dog bowl full by emptying any cold water in the kettle into their dish and then putting fresh water in before heating.  I try not to put way too much in, but sometimes I do overshoot.  My tiny kettle only holds enough for about four mugs of tea, though, so if I fill it half full it's just right for two, which is easier than having a huge kettle.On Talk about calling the kettle green posted 2 years, 8 months ago 6 Responses

nothing to add...

...other than, TariffDude, your comment totally cracked me up!On Same as it ever was posted 2 years, 9 months ago 37 Responses

storm windows

Off the topc of cars...

Actually, interior storm windows are not a great idea.  They tend to cause the windows and their frames to rot, because you've created an adverse moisture-barrier situation.  It's not hard, though, to put them on the outside, if you live in a rented house as opposed to an apartment in a tall building.  Actually, I bet, depending on the way the windows open, you could possibly mount storm panels outside from inside your apartment, if it's high up.

As for insulation, yeah, the radiant stuff is apparently helpful, and I know you can get rolls of it fairly cheaply from Gaiam.com

And programmable thermostats are cheap and easy to install and unlikely to piss off your landlord.  Don't forget to recycle the old one (mercury)!On A sad realization posted 2 years, 9 months ago 11 Responses

line fishermen

Uh, yeah, because being pulled out of the water by a hook in the mouth is so much better than being pulled out in a net!

No, wait.

Minimizing eating these things--ADM products, fish, etc--is great.  If we're going to indulge from time to time, we shouldn't kid ourselves that it's actually a good thing if we just do it right.  I do bad stuff from time to time, and dammit, I enjoy it, but I don't pretend it's virtuous.

Thanks, Tom, for laying out the gigantic scale of the problem, and for giving us yet one more specific reason to to the right things.  It's easy to feel anxious and guilty about eating prepared foods, not as easy to remember the specific reasons we shouldn't, and the specific things we need to do instead.On Must one do business with ADM? posted 2 years, 9 months ago 6 Responses

how is it unfair?

Okay, where to start, Libertyvini...first of all, I'm not familiar enough with NYC to say for certain, but I somehow doubt that every person who benefits from the project you spoke of is an old Jewish lady who gets her hair done.  Second, if, as a society, we can't bring ourselves to shoulder the costs of essential transportation for the elderly, what kind of society are we really?  Third, the whiff of anti-Semitism (not to mention sexism and ageism) was unmistakable, and not only distasteful but wholly irrelevant.  

If you want to be an ignorant bigot, fine, whatever, just don't expect it to be a convincing argument.On More fun with analogies! posted 2 years, 9 months ago 32 Responses

Home

Canis, don't feel bad, Home is certainly easier to listen to than Taking the Long Way.  That said, it did grow on me after a while.  Also, Natalie's voice has changed, whether just because of age or because of all the crap I don't know, but she isn't a sweet-sounding country singer anymore (well, and if you were keeping track, she wasn't ever a country singer, which is fine--I kind of like the very country instruments with the kinda punk style she adds).

Actually, some of my favorite stuff is pre-Natalie, and thus disavowed by the record label, and, it would seem, by the girls themselves, but can still be found on eBay.  Their previous members (they lost Laura Lynch and Robin Lynn Macy and gained Natalie) were very, very different, much more kitschy-retro-country, but I liked that too.  They wore silly movie-star-cowgirl clothes and titled their albums things like "Thank Heavens for Dale Evans" and yodeled where appropriate.  It was great.  Not that I'm obsessed or anything...On And freedom of speech wins big posted 2 years, 9 months ago 4 Responses

Shhhhh...

Okay, so, when the Prius is really quiet is when it's creeping along, like in a parking lot or a traffic jam.  By the time it's going more than 15 mph, even if the gas engine hasn't come on yet, the road noise is enough that anyone should be able to notice it.  If people aren't paying attention, well, they could get run over by anything.  There are a lot of fairly quiet cars out there these days.  At low speeds, drivers should realize people may not be aware that the car is moving since it's silent, but at low speeds, and while driving around parking lots, one should be paying extra attention to possibly-oblivious pedestrians anyway.

My other car is an ancient Ford truck you can hear from a mile away (no, not literally).  I haven't noticed more people obliviously stepping out in front of the Prius in the supermarket parking lot.

Besides, if people can't remember to look both ways before crossing the street, aren't those people in contention for Darwin awards already regardless of my Prius? On Hybrid cars dangerously quiet for pedestrians posted 2 years, 9 months ago 4 Responses

Well, and let's not forget...

Taxes on passenger rail tickets paid for the construction of the interstate highway system.  So there's no inherent reason the playing field can't be levelled.  I'm not sure where to start, though, personally.

Oh, and David, I would like to point out that your title is sexist and heteronormative and reinforcing of cliches that damage the self-esteem of geeky girls.  Not that I expect you to care.

And yeah, I think Libertivini's assumption that "old  Jewish ladies" are somehow the only ones who will benefit from the NYC project--and that that's an unacceptable thing for taxpayers to subsidize--is also totally out of line.On More fun with analogies! posted 2 years, 9 months ago 32 Responses

on-topic, sorta

While it doesn't answer the big (and important) question people are discussing here, you can solve the small question of washing with eco-friendly dish and laundry detergent without personal sacrifice by switching from 7th Gen, which doesn't work, to Sun & Earth products, which do.  And smell lovely.

Actually, I think this may play into the bigger question, and here's how:  I find that I spend a lot of time being a sort of ridiculous product connoisseur, which is partly my OCD getting away from me, partly my inner non-enviro loving to shop, but also partly a way of learning what environmentally friendly things I can try to turn others on to  without seeming like a dirty hippie and ending up turning non-dirty hippies off.  I could give a crap if I'm actually a dirty hippie--if I don't have to see anyone, I don't shower until I smell or my head itches, cause, you know, saving water--but given the bad rap we have, I'd rather go out in public looking fresh and clean and non-hippie-ish so that when I recommend a laundry detergent, people won't think "Good, well, now we know what to avoid like the plague!"  So, yeah, see, there is some merit in being an obsessive product snob.

Oh, and Sun & Earth laundry detergent comes in a 5-gallon bucket as well as the regular bottles, which is the awesomest thing ever, since it lets me buy laundry detergent once every year or two, which is good, because while I like to shop, once I've decided what I want, I don't like to have to remeber to shop for it again.  What, you say lazy like it's a bad thing!  I also buy toilet paper, tissues, and paper towels by the case, although a single case of paper towels lasts me, I don't know, two years?On Salon dishes out Grist-like advice posted 2 years, 9 months ago 14 Responses

Hey, we aren't all scientists!

What about some advice for the non-scientist types?  I didn't know environmentalism was only a career path for biologists and chemists!  I guess it's supposed to be obvious--the only non-science career paths that have to do with environmentalism are nonprofit-management things, or else working for companies that produce green products in their marketing/PR/etc departments, but still.

As for specialization in school, it seems to me that there are no good answers.  Don't specialize, in the interests of becoming a well-rounded, well-educated person, and you'll quickly discover that you can't, in fact, put "give me a problem, and I'll solve it!" on your resume.  Specialize, and you'll invariably find that the field has either dried up and blown away or else moved ahead so fast your education is useless by the time you actually get a degree.  Some people are successful of course--as evidenced by the people who've said here that they're happy with their jobs--but it seems more a stroke of luck than anything.  Knowing the right people, and being the right person in the right place at the right time, and being interested in something in which there are some jobs...all these things help, but there is apparently no way to know how any of them will play out until afterwards.  You can be brilliant and well-educated and have lots of friends in the field you think you want to go into, and still never be in the right place at the right time.

Not that I'm bitter.On I thought the green job market was hot! posted 2 years, 9 months ago 31 Responses

Electability

Let's not forget that talking about "electability" is something of a self-fulfilling prophesy.  I think the media hype about what the voters think has a much bigger effect on what the voters think than is usually supposed.

If played extremely well, Obama's blackness might even be an advantage with the kind of people who are viscerally racist enough to be unsure whether they're ready to vote for a black person.  Those kinds of people usually want to think of themselves as totally unprejudiced, and what better way to show it than by voting for a black man?  Unfortunately for Hillary, women have come so far that viewing women as inferior is now sneakily more acceptable.  We all know that racial equality hasn't ever been achieved, but I'm afraid there are still an awful lot of people who think the fight for equality is over for women, that it's a done deal, even when sexism is nearly as rampant as ever.  

Heck, I even know a woman who says she'd never vote for a woman for president because women are too emotional and can't make decisions when they have PMS!  I'm not sure what to say to something like that, you know?On Watch Obama's video posted 2 years, 9 months ago 13 Responses

good info

I have one .... question?  Complaint?  Something.  The website you pointed us to a couple of days ago, http://www.ewg.org/reports/skindeep2/ , is a fantastically user-friendly site packed with searchable information...but....they are "moderately concerned" about ingredients like peppermint and rosemary extracts (in Burt's Bees lotions and lip glosses).  I feel like I can't take them quite as seriously now, because, well, if Burt's Bees uses ingredients that cause these folks "moderate concern", what the heck are they not concerned about?  What products could possibly contain only totally benign ingredients?

But, yeah, carcinogenic crap added to shower gel to make it smell pretty=not so cool.On Rub-a-dub-dub, there are toxins in my tub posted 2 years, 9 months ago 2 Responses

mmm, dirt.

Well, the way some of us keep house, it would hardly matter. :)

But more seriously, I can't imagine this is a good idea.  Historically, adobe houses in the southwest had dirt floors for the same reason they had dirt walls--it's the most available building material, and that way you can save the wood for the roof beams where nothing else will really work--but, of course, people had much less furniture (and in some cases none at all), and went barefoot or wore leather-soled shoes without dramatic heels.  They also were unlikely to spill anything worse than a pot of soup on the floor.  

Given our modern lifestyles, furnishings, cleaning products, etc, I think the environmental costs of flooring are well worth it.  Also, historically dirt floors were bound with ox blood, which allowed them to be polished fairly smooth and hard, and that's hardly environmentally fabulous, not to mention the ethical issues for those of us who believe there are ethical issues with that sort of thing.

One thing I'd easily believe is that dirt floors are pleasant to walk on barefoot, so I guess they might be appropriate for, say, a bedroom.  Still, they sound awfully high-maintenance with the wax and everything, so I'm guessing it won't be long before people are covering them up with rugs and mats, which kind of defeats the purpose, not to mention seems likely to encourage mold.

I've thought for a long time that floors can/should be easier than they are to reconfigure and replace parts of.  Specifically, since radiant floor heat (solar, natch) is such a great thing, but the tubing doesn't last forever, I've wondered if you couldn't just compact a layer of crushed gravel, put down the foamboard foundation insulation, lay the PEX tubing in a layer of sand, and put a sanded-brick floor down, without fixing the bricks in place in any way.  I guess you'd want to put a barrier of some sort between the PEX and the brick in case you spilled something on the floor, but then you'd have the problem of condensation caused by the barrier...it's a far-from-complete idea, but I like the concept of being able to take individual bricks out and put them back, no sawing of grout needed.On With eco-friendly earthen floors posted 2 years, 9 months ago 9 Responses

legitimate questions, sure.

I believe the film is serious, but I also believe it's seriously misguided.  I absolutely agree that it's hard to convince anyone of a lie that doesn't contain a germ of truth, but in this case...well, for one, I think this lie has an attractive germ of truth in that it takes the truth of poor people's need for jobs and turns that into a lie that allows rich people to feel okay about benefiting from extractive operations, etc, in poor areas.  We can have our cake and eat it too!  It's okay if we destroy people's environments and ways of life, because look, they need jobs!  They want to sell us stuff!  And in the short term, of course, that's true.  That Russian woman who was talking about needing jobs would almost surely be better off of a sustainable, non-extractive, non-exploitative industry could be developed, though it might pay less to begin with, because it could still be around and still be paying workers decades after the mine had finished mining all the resources that were there.

Speaking of Russian mines:
http://www.slate.com/id/32254/entry/32256/
Apparently a lot of the people in Russian mining towns, or ex-mining towns, are there because of Soviet forced-labor operations that stopped being supplied or supported in any way, leaving the residents destitute and unable to get out.  Yeah, opening a new mine, definitely the way to create healthy economies...

And i don't know about other environmentalists, but I personally do not romanticise poverty, although, having tried both, I prefer it to the way the average American lives, with the (admittedly huge) exception of access to medical care.  If I knew I could see a doctor or a dentist any time I needed to, I'd happily be a subsistence farmer living in a mud hut.  But I'm weird like that. :)On Mine Your Own Business posted 2 years, 9 months ago 16 Responses

dog food

You know, dogs may lick their butts, but if you have a dog, you should be responsible enough to care what your dog eats.  They are still affected by pesticides, and by hormones and whatnot in meat.  Regular supermarket brands of dog foods can have diseased animals' flesh and unhealthy, non-nutritious animal parts that are not digestible enough for human food.  Do you really want your dog eating food whosemain ingredient is "chicken meal" when you know that means the ground-up carcasses of chickens who were so diseased even constant antibiotic-pumping couldn't keep them alive?  

Also, what about the animals who go into the dog food?  Don't we still care about them, and want to know they had decent lives?

Just my $0.02, but this isn't where I would choose to save money.  I buy bread off the day-old rack, I stock up when things go on sale (I recently bought twelve containers of raisins because they were less than half price, and, hey, raisins keep), I eat in season and eat lots of squash and cabbage...but I buy my dogs the best food I can get.

Other than that, though, great column!On Popping your (organic) cherry posted 2 years, 9 months ago 21 Responses

Butt out!

It's a sad, sad world we live in when people think they deserve to have me pay for their health insurance just because they happen to have a lower BMI than I do.  Will you pay mine because I'm a nonsmoking, exercising vegetarian?  Leaving aside the fact that the connection between fat and disease is far from a closed case (bad diets can lead to both, but the evidence of a causal connection between fat and disease isn't anything like proven, despite what everyone seems to think), I really don't think we want to go down the road of charging people for every habit they have that we don't like.  That way lies even greater punishment for the poor than what we can already see in society today, and I don't think we really want the poor living in a fascist state that tells them what they can eat, drink, and do for fun, while the rich continue to do whatever the hell they want, do we?On There's nothing healthy about the American Dietary Association's addiction to corporate cash. posted 2 years, 9 months ago 60 Responses

Communicating risk

I've been meaning to link to this for a while, and this seems like as good a place as any:

Peter Sandman on communicating risk.

It's an interesting website, and I guess a good place for us all to start if we think the risk can maybe now be communicated to others (I'm skeptical, myself, that the climate skeptics are no longer relevant, but it's worth finding out how generally to go about convincing people anyway).On Opinions on the Fourth Assessment Report posted 2 years, 9 months ago 14 Responses

not really funny

I don't think NuBuddy is funny, and I don't think Christopher Hitchens is funny.  I guess the sarcasm wasn't clear.  I am, of course, no Molly Ivins.

I won't start on Hitchens here, except to say that his attitude towards women as baby factories who also do double-duty as arbiters of social performance is appalling, and reflects an array of appalling tropes about gender in general.  Oh, and I should add that all those straight guys trying to be really funny would get a whole lot more play if they would do their share of the housework with all that energy instead of pouring it into offensive jokes about how women can't make jokes about their bodies.

Oh, and you know why women are so bad at math?  'Cause men keep telling us this [picture my hands held a playing-card's width apart] is six inches.On There's nothing healthy about the American Dietary Association's addiction to corporate cash. posted 2 years, 9 months ago 60 Responses

Frightened of Food?

That's very sad, that some of your clients are so unable to just eat food.  Interesting to hear about!  Since I'm the one who said I never got into the habit of eating fast food, I should say that I also have a little bit of the other thing going on--I was never allowed to eat more than a bite or two of a candy bar as a kid, so now I'm the kind of person who will ocassionally have a pint of Ben and Jerry's as my dinner, because I'm a grownup and no one can stop me.  I say this lest anyone think I'm some kind of food purist. :)

Interesting to hear about the staff/volunteer issue; I think this is one faced by more or less all organizations, that the paid staff have more day-to-day responsibility and professionalism about operating the offices and programs, and perhaps more knowledge of the organization's needs, but less clout as far as big decisions and less involvement/awareness/professionalism WRT the field in general.  It has both plusses and minuses, and it sounds like in the ADA's case it isn't working as well as it might.

Oh, and NucBuddy, I suggest you clarify the joke if you were joking, because, well, it'd be too bad if you were to let down your gender's reputation for being funnier than ours (see Christopher Hitchens' hilarious thoughts on the subject...okay, moving on...).On There's nothing healthy about the American Dietary Association's addiction to corporate cash. posted 2 years, 10 months ago 60 Responses

I don't want to fill this in

I do sometimes use part of the body as the subject, but it feels wrong.  Occasionally I use another poster's ID, and sometimes I have an actual topic that can be titled.  But no matter what, it's an annoying feature I'd just as soon be rid of (and haven't seen on many other blogs/forums/etc).

Of course, everyone else may feel totally differently.  But since David actually asked what things could use a change, I thought I'd mention it.On Too much blog to handle? posted 2 years, 10 months ago 39 Responses

misconceptions

It's a little disturbing coming from someone who's supposed to be an expert, but he's far from the only person whose ideas about cows are, um, not quite correct.  When I was about ten, a friend tried to tell me only black and white cows gave milk.  Having been around a few more animals than she had--no cows, but I'd had horses for years--I tried to explain to her that if a mammal didn't give milk, its babies would starve, and that brown cows are mammals just like black and white ones, but she was having none of it.  

Of course, in that case it was funny, because of course we were just kids, whereas in this case it's sufficiently horrifying that I can't really find it funny (well, especially given the chicken-manure business).On It's only natural posted 2 years, 10 months ago 32 Responses

It's amazing...

...how easily humans can be blindsided despite the best efforts of other humans to let them know what's happening.  Personally, I am surprised every time this happens to me (like, a friendship suffers because my friend was trying and trying to tell me something for months on end and I thought I was listening but I really didn't get it), so while it saddens me that we have blown several decades' worth of chances to fix things, it doesn't really surprise me that it could happen.

Of course, I never remember a time when global warming wasn't regarded by almost everyone I knew as a virtual certainty, which reflects both my youth and my dirty-hippie family and friends.

My mother always belonged to lots of environmental groups, and she also used to tell me she thought it was already too late (this is as of about 20 years ago).  She thought it was the moral thing to do, continuing to do what she thought was right even if she also thought it was useless.  I feel that way even more strongly now, since it's now even more clear that, yes, it's already too late.On It dates back to the mid-20th century posted 2 years, 10 months ago 4 Responses

tubes

My feeling--not experience, just my feeling--is, you're still making holes in the roof, and they're still going to leak.  As Sunflower says, glass, overlapped like shingles, is more or less the only way.  Sealants are great, but eventually they all break down.On It's time for enviros to adjust to winning posted 2 years, 10 months ago 59 Responses

skylights

...were just an example.  That said, I think it's simply not true that it's the implementation that's flawed, or that cost is the dealbreaker.  Make a hole in your roof, see what happens.  Eventually, it will leak.  Skylights in, say, barn roofs, where you can use translucent fiberglass panels that are the same profile as the roofing almost always work fine, and they're the absolute cheapest way of doing it.  They have no insulative properties, and they're translucent and not clear, but they work.  Skylights that you can see out of, and that you can use in heated spaces, generally require making a hole in the roof and then sealing around it, and eventually the sealant fails no matter what you spent on it.  The only transparent, heated-space-usable sylights I've ever seen that don't leak are the kind that are basically glass dormer roofs with another pane of glass on the inside to increase R-value, and the only place I've seen them is in a refurbished warehouse space.  

This is way OT, though.  I really just meant it as an example.  If we've been doing something for hundreds of years and there are still buildings around using the technique from hundreds of years ago, we can safely assume it's a technique that lasts hundreds of years (with appropriate maintenance, natch).  If something comes along that's newly possible because of technology, as environmentalists we need to have a good hard look at how it's better than things that are already proven to have lifespans of hundreds of years, because building new stuff is environmentally costly.  That's all.On It's time for enviros to adjust to winning posted 2 years, 10 months ago 59 Responses

food issues

I feel like I've said this a million times, but: Quorn chicken products (not quite vegan, I realize, but nearly) kick ass!  Also Morningstar Farms' bacon (and yeah, it's a Kellogg brand, but whatever, it's better than eating pigs, and I love bacon), and Gardenburger Riblets.  

There are some really good canned veggie chilis (that is, tex-mex "chili", which is different from actual chile :) ) out there.

Short-grain brown rice, cooked to be just chewy, with kidney beans.  Yum.  Better w/cheese, of course, but you can put some nutritional yeast and only a little cheese for texture.

Soup.  Mmm, soup.  Start by sauteeing onions and/or garlic in plenty of olive oil. My two favorite soups are green chile and butternut squash.  For the chile, I add the (roasted, chopped) chile to the onions and sautee a bit longer, then add water, salt, pepper, and cubed potatoes, cook till the potatoes are almost done, then add corn, tomatoes, and Quorn chicken tenders.  

For the squash soup, I start with the onions, and once they're partly cooked, add the squash (and fennel, sometimes--it's great with fennel [bulbs only--save the tops for garnish]), cooking until the squash is slightly tender.  Then I add water, salt, pepper, a potato or two (helps make it thick and creamy), and whatever spices I deem necessary. You can also add the spices to the onions and oil as they cook, which works especially well if you're using red chile powder (yes, chile, it's an obsession.   I miss home.).  I then cook everything till it's tender, and puree it.  I have a stick blender--a blender on a stick, really, which sounds weird, but is incredibly useful, and everyone who makes creamed soups should have one--so I puree it right in the pot.  I add a little milk, because I can't stand soy or rice milk, and I think almond milk would taste weird in soup, but of course YMMV.

Creamed soups are wonderful served with Frontier veggie bacon bits, and/or nutritional yeast, and/or chopped herbs (and fennel tops!) and/or a sprinkle of real, dairy parmesan.

And fwiw, I have tried some of the other stuff people recommended, and some of it's good, but some of it's gross (to me, that is).  The non-trans-fat margarine I found weirdly gelatinous and not at all buttery.  The soy mayo, however, has convinced me to give mayonnaise, which I've always loathed, another try.  The morningstar chicken strips did nothing for me, especially compared to Quorn products.  So, all I'm saying is, it takes some experimenting; don't give up on an entire family of vegan (or nearly vegan) products just because one brand is gross.  Clearly we all have strong preferences, which is why there are so many brands, and you may find the stuff I like gross and the stuff someone else recommeded quite yummy.On Why the vegetarian critique of meat-eating should make meat-eaters squirm posted 2 years, 10 months ago 103 Responses

frustrating by design?

Canis, I wonder if the overlap isn't intentional?  It seems like maybe the point is for the films to compete, so that ones that draw viewers can be the "cool kids" and generate buzz at the expense of the conflicting and less-well-attended? Maybe I'm too cynical, but it seems like if people could watch every film at an alternate time, the resulting decrease in visible and excited crowds at the main showings would hurt the popular films' image of popularity.

It does seem like every film festival I've heard anything about has been set up this way, so there must be an actual reason, because it certainly wouldn't be hard to do what you suggest.On Good stuff I saw, good stuff I missed posted 2 years, 10 months ago 6 Responses

consciousness-raising

As you see, I still think you're an ass but I'm more than willing to defend your right to be an ass and not get called anything worse than that.  I think what really got people going, which you don't seem to have fully understood, is that you weren't just ranting about various "types" in the movement--you were clearly talking about individual people who had posted things that individually annoyed you.  I just think we should be upfront about that, you know?

Anyhow.

Yeah, it's great to let everyone know what carbon emissions are...but let's remember, everyone knows now what "organic" means (well, everyone knows there is such a thing--I'm far from certain that most people have any idea what it does and doesn't mean), everyone has known for a long time about issues that were the province of chess-club environmentalists in the 60s...and yet, we're not getting greener as a nation.  Last I checked, a graph of our national record on emissions and other related issues was still curving the wrong way.  Earth Day notwithstanding.

Let's not have our own voices sound too loud to us--I don't know about you, but I don't spend as much time out in the "real world" as I like to tell myself I do, as I find out from time to time when I talk to someone I think is normal who turns out not to know or care that polar ice is melting.  I'm not interested in looking like an idiot when I try to talk to those people about living greener lives, so I'm not going to jump on every bandwagon that comes along.On It's time for enviros to adjust to winning posted 2 years, 10 months ago 59 Responses

health, schmealth

I will readily admit it:  I don't really give a crap about eating right for my health.  If something makes me happy but might contribute to my premature death, I'm likely to eat it anyway, assuming we're talking about premature death that's still a ways away (and yes, I will regret this cavalier attitude when I am 60, but since women in my family appear to die of cancer at 60 or before regardless of virtuous lifestyle, I might as well enjoy life until then).

Ironically, I think this ends up meaning my diet is healthier than most, even leaving the vegetarian/omnivore issue aside.  I tend to like things that are healthy, although I do like the sloppy joe mix (and Gardenburger Riblets, and Quorn "chicken"--man, I'd die without those things!).  For the most part, I eat more "real" food than I would if I were counting calories or fat grams or carbs or whatever stupid thing.

So, i'm rambling, but I do have a point, which is that you shouldn't have too much respect for vegetarians, at least until you know what their strategy and reasoning is. :)On Why the vegetarian critique of meat-eating should make meat-eaters squirm posted 2 years, 10 months ago 103 Responses

No, thank YOU

Look, I wasn't being snide when I said I'm sure your situation is different.  You just have to stop thinking environmentalists are all unaware of the reality of the situation.  Sure, overly enthusiastic preservationists sometimes lose it all by biting off more than they know how to chew--it happens in my other world of preservation (architecture) too, and it's too bad, but it does not make forest preservationists or historic preservationists all stupid or ignorant.  We fail sometimes.  I imagine you understand?

What I'm saying is, in the Southwest, we do not have enough big trees to be able to afford salvage logging and thinning as they've been practiced (and I'm talking about ancient history, sure, but also things that have happened in my own lifetime, and I'm not that old).  The Forest Service (Freddies, eh?  Where I'm from the only nickname I'm aware of is Floresta) is certainly not 100% bad, but it is certainly not entirely on the environment's side, either.  And, yes, good question, why do the revenues from timber production not go 100% to protecting the forest?  I know it's not just the FS that created the situation where private companies get to cut and mine and otherwise extract public natural resources virtually for free (or even, in some cases, with the government paying them to do it), but it's ridiculous and it has to stop.

I understand intellectually why people expect badly damaged forests to pay their own way to restoration, but it's total bs if you ask me; I could name a zillion worse things my taxes pay for, so it's not clear to me why the forests can't just be preserved and restored with tax dollars, whether or not they're producing anything financially valuable.  But I'll stop preaching to the choir now...On Yes posted 2 years, 10 months ago 36 Responses

big trees

Backcut,
I'm sure the situation is different where you are (and maybe you're different than the Forest Service folks I grew up dealing with), but in the mountains of northern New Mexico, there's not much in the way of timber larger than what you mark.  It's not that the environment won't support it, it's that it's all been cut.  How do you explain the vast areas in northern NM and southern CO where there are random bald patches, where the forests fade into scrub just where you would think trees would be the biggest and healthiest?  They've long since been cut, and in a dry climate a forest has a hard time regenerating itself.  It's sort of like a rainforest, in that the land that remains when you cut the big trees is surprisingly useless and surprisingly unable to regenerate forest, or really anything but sagebrush.  

And yet, people still want to cut the few remaining big, healthy trees and call it "thinning."  A few years ago, there was a huge to-do when environmentalists finally got the last old-growth harvesting stopped.

I'm not against harvesting timber.  I'm against doing it in a way that prevents healthy forests from continuing to exist, especially when--as so often in the Southwest--it's billed as thinning necessary to forest health.  I'm suspicious when the only measures taken to improve forest health are the ones that also produce a salable product.On Yes posted 2 years, 10 months ago 36 Responses

not disagreeing,

I just think the rape analogy is a little--no, wait a whole lot--out of line.  Not to mention how it trivializes the real, often terrifying and excruciating, always very upsetting experiences of real rape victims.On Everything is lame posted 2 years, 10 months ago 68 Responses

thinning

Okay, sure, thinning isn't necessarily so bad...

Except that in every case I know of, the environmental benefit is subservient to the financial one.  

The thought is that both the forest and the loggers can benefit from thinning, and they can, but rarely at the same time.  The trees that should stay, if the forest is the concern, are precisely the trees that make the enterprise worth it to the loggers.  The forest and the loggers are still competing for the same resource--the biggest, healthiest trees.On Yes posted 2 years, 10 months ago 36 Responses

white dog

Canis, I must tell you--this is the first time it's been remotely relevant--that when I hear "candida", I think "yeast infection."  Sorry about that! :)

I am a total failure at Latin, though.  Greek, too.  I thought it would make me feel smarter to read Plato in Greek, but all it did was make me stay up till 4AM studying every single night my freshman year...On Mmm ... oranges posted 2 years, 10 months ago 21 Responses

corn

Probably not the right thread for this, really, but I have a question:  Is sweet corn different?  That is, do I, on the basis of these arguments and the health-based anti-corn-syrup arguments, have to avoid eating actual corn, as opposed to corn syrup?It seems like there wouldn't be much connection, but next summer when sweet corn starts appearing at the local farm again, I want to be able to buy some with a clear conscience.

Of course, even if some of the other issues were the same, I'd probably still think buying more local produce is a good thing, and corn is one of the few locally-grown things that is really filling (I hate when I end up buying basically all of the substance of the meal from the regular grocery store and trying to feel like I'm "eating locally" just because the salad and the herbs are local).On Why federal farm support deserves a fresh look posted 2 years, 10 months ago 42 Responses

mulching/shredding

If the stems are fine enough, an electric leaf blower with a vaccuum/mulcher attachment might reduce the stems to a manageable, compostable volume.  Otherwise, there are small wood chippers you can rent and use yourself.  Neither of these solves the "what to do with the resulting mulch" problem, but they do provide relatively low-fossil-fuel ways to make the volume smaller, which is a plus whether you're composting or paying someone to use fossil fuels to haul the stuff away.On Umbra on burning yard waste posted 2 years, 10 months ago 12 Responses

the so-big house

WiscIdea, yeah, totally, Susanka's a nutcase.  Plus, she's enamored of concepts like the "great room" (basically, living/dining area are one huge room, often a double-volume [ceiling height is twice the normal height--what a savings, making one room take up two whole floors!]) that make no sense in most cases.  She does push the SIP (structural insulated panel) idea, though, which does cut waste and add R-value.  SIPs are expensive and can contain formaldehyde and non-sustainable wood products, but they're still better in many ways than conventional framing, which has many of the same problems without any advantage but low cost.

David, I'm sorry, but I spend most of my life wondering how the architectural profession lost its marbles so totally.  I mean no offense to these particular individuals, but a system where an aesthetically frigid, oversized house like this can be LEED platinum while, for example, a beautiful, cozy, friendly 1200 s.f. passive solar adobe house that requires zero A/C and little heat gets absolutely nothing?

I favor the KISS principle; since we know what works in certain climates, it's inexcusable to keep building glass boxes just because someone thinks they're pretty.  We've known for thousands of years what works, so the fact that we still build anything else says to me that we care about image and status and some jerk's artistic jerking off more than we care about anything else.  I'm not obligated to celebrate the pissing contest that is contemporary award-winning architecture just because they worked really hard on it.

Also, to celebrate this while we denigrate the achievements of, for instance, my 1937 cape with its spot-on orientation to prevailing seasonal winds and its south-facing sun room that heats the whole house on sunny days?  That's not just dumb, David, that's classist.  I'll take the totally-paid-off (energy-wise, that is) old house that works in its location over something showy and modern any day, and you know why?  Because it's a reality for people like me and WiscIdea, and it's a reality that helps rather than hurting the environment.  If I were to bulldoze this house and install one of your precious glass boxes (which cost more, without "design fees, transport or install or foundation costs" than my existing house with two acres), how exactly would that help the environment?  Saving old houses is a big part of the picture, and building glass boxes is a major obstacle to saving old houses.

So, my apologies if we embarrass you, but I for one am not stupid enough to kowtow to a glass box.On Pretty houses posted 2 years, 10 months ago 19 Responses

designgrizzly,

So totally with you on the size thing.  This freakin house is, what, 3K+ sq.ft.?  One of the houses they show elsewhere on the website is over 5K.  With, I think, 6 bedrooms and five baths.  Now, do you suppose all of those bedrooms will be occupied?  I don't.  I think they're designing for people who either want home offices or have lots of houseguests, not for big families (because peope who like houses like these are rarely the big-family type in my experience, and ok, so that is actually an environmental benefit, but still).

The pueblo indians had this shit figured out centuries ago, with apartment-house complexes that stepped back on the south and east sides to soak up the winter sun, were sheltered from winter winds and exposed to summer ones, etc.  They acheived a level of efficiency we can't seem to come close to today...with dirt and sticks!

Architects make me so mad! (I say, intending to spend the rest of my life married to one...)

I will say this is probably an ok design for SoCal, assuming the glazing faces the right way and the overhangs are right.  If there's a non-glass wall to the north, and maybe to the west as well, and it's in a climate where heat is less of an issue than A/C, and the people actually use it right (open up all the windows on summer nights, close them and cover then with blinds on hot summer days, etc), it could be non-awful.  It still uses a lot of high-embodied-energy materials, I suspect.

Oh, and personally?  I think it's ugly.  My fiance thinks it's beautiful, though, so clearly YMMV.  The only part I really like is the bathrooms, which he doesn't like, for further proof of variance. :)On Pretty houses posted 2 years, 10 months ago 19 Responses

links

I just wanted to say thanks for the links, BioD, Sunflower, etc.  I am going to read them, you know, when I have some spare time.  No, probably before that, because I do want to read them, and it could be forever if I wait to have the time... :)On You may be surprised posted 2 years, 10 months ago 56 Responses

airtight

Okay, I guess maybe with hickory an airtight stove burns most efficiently, but my experience--growing up in New Mexico with only a woodstove for heat and only softwoods to burn--was that when we got an airtight stove, we were never able to get the fires as hot or as clean except by leaving the door open, thus nullifying the "efficiency" vs. our old, drafty stove.

Softwoods only gum up your chimney (and your atmosphere) if you let them smolder.On Umbra on which wood to burn posted 2 years, 10 months ago 8 Responses

fossil fuels

I hate to feed the troll, but I have to clarify a fact here:  Both Mark and David are wrong, although David is certainly closer.  Fossil fuels--coal, for the longest time, and obviously others only more recently--have been in use by humanity for at least 4,000 years.  Again I am left wondering how I ever found anything out before the internet....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal On Best movie of the year, hands down posted 2 years, 10 months ago 81 Responses

Real men...

...don't assume that "people" = men, d4.

If we leave it up to y'all y-chromosome-afflicted chest-thumpers, we'll just keep on down the road we're on; we've had millenia of patriarchy, and yet, strangely, we're not living in a utopia of "real men" yet.

Here's my prediction, d4:  You're a real man of destiny, where "destiny" includes being the recipient of a Darwin Award.  
On Rising tortilla prices in Mexico point to a usual suspect posted 2 years, 10 months ago 23 Responses

Money

Yep, Backcut, money, and lots of it.  That's why they "thin" by cutting th biggest, healthiest, most commerically valuable trees, leaving behind only the fire-prone scrub.  You know perfectly well that the fires and the bark beetles are a result of the destruction of the mature trees that shade the forest and keep things damp and cool on the ground.  For shame!On Depressing posted 2 years, 10 months ago 28 Responses

on the roof

Well, our panels in Santa Fe, as I've mentioned, are on tracker racks on the hill beside the house.  The situation here, though, is somewhat different.  
1 -  space at a premium, only 2 acres for house, fenced back yard for dogs, horse barn and paddock, riding arena, and I hope a little scrap of pasture for them to go out in for an hour a day.  
2 -  Height at a premium, competing for light with the remaining (very large) oak trees still standing all over the property.  Massachusetts, while better than Seattle, is not as ideal a climate for solar as New Mexico, so I need all the help I can get, and an extra 12'+ of height will help avoid shadows.  The roof of the barn isn't all that unaccessible, anyway.
3 - tracker racks on the ground near my horses--Right Out.  At home they're in a place the horses wouldn't normally go, but here, if the horses got out, they'd be right in the same area, and I like solar panels, but what I like evenmore is horses with heads.

All that said, this is far from a done deal.On Not every 'environmental' action makes sense posted 2 years, 10 months ago 26 Responses

regulatory hassle

Sadly, there's still a lot of resistance to environmentally-friendly stuff, be it greywater or solar (though the former more than the latter, of course).  It really depends on where you are; Massachusetts has a town-by-town system where there's basically no county gov't because there's no unincorporated land--everything is part of a town (like a "township" elsewhere), so that no matter how rural a place is, it's part of a town.  The towns are mostly small, and they're mostly run by the kinds of people who run small towns, and my lord are New Englanders nosy!

I am building a small barn (out of the trees I had to cut down to build it--and yeah, I felt horribly guilty, but I went through the options and decided it was for the best in every way, and will plant more trees in the parts of the property where the barn isn't, and in any case some of the trees we cut were starting to get hollow anyway, so they weren't going to live much longer regardless).  The number of hoops I have had to jump through to put in a lousy 20'x20' barn--a shed, really, with a hay-storage lean-to in back--with a water line and an electric light on one side...the mind boggles.  When I go to put solar panels on the roof of that sucker next year, the town is going to have a FIT.  I guarantee it.  Hell, yesterday the excavator who's putting the gravel in for the driveway started his machine at 6:55, and later discovered he'd received a message from my neighbor (who didn't identify herself on the message, but I know who it was) saying that if he started the machine before 7 AM again, she'd call the police (noise ordinance).

The building inspector has tried repeatedly to tell me I don't understand New England weather, and that I don't know how much the snow will weigh, etc--mind you, at the house where I grew up in Santa Fe we currently have a foot of snow, whereas here in MA we have none--so I'm sure the solar panels, in his mind, will prevent the roof from shedding snow and therefore be out of the question.

I wonder how many green projects we'd have if we had ever really made an effort to encourage them rather than discourage them with the regulatory stuff.On Not every 'environmental' action makes sense posted 2 years, 10 months ago 26 Responses

JMG,

Does this sound like Jason?

Compared to all of history, our lives are nearly magical, and only getting more so.

I haven't known Jason to say that everything's wonderful and rosy now and that we have the economy to thank--only that economics is too important to overlook, which is most likely true even if I personally do not understand and therefore frequently overlook economics...On Best movie of the year, hands down posted 2 years, 10 months ago 81 Responses

tesla

I'm just sticking this comment here because it's the most recent post I saw that was remotely relevant.  Sorry about that.

[Tesla] chairman, Elon Musk, writes, "Almost any new technology
initially has high unit cost before it can be optimized and this is no
less true for electric cars. The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the
high end of the market [with the roadster], where customers are prepared
to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible [...]
Without giving away too much, I can say that the second model [code
name: White Star, scheduled for 2008] will be a sporty four door family
car at roughly half the $89k price point of the Tesla Roadster and the
third model will be even more affordable [...] all free cash flow is
plowed back into R&D to drive down the costs and bring the follow on
products to market as fast as possible. When someone buys the Tesla
Roadster sports car, they are actually helping pay for development of
the low cost family car."

Again, sorry to hijack the post, just thought comments on it might actually still get read.On Chinese company to make plug-in hybrid posted 2 years, 10 months ago 2 Responses

Wait, am I reindeer or yeast? :)

JackH, GliderGuider,
One thing about the simplistic solutions offered by otherwise thought-provoking environmental authors:  authors in every other field have this problem too.  It doesn't help, of course--it's still a problem--but at least it's not just environmentalists.  I noticed this most recently when I read Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she provides an insightful critique of the problems in 1960s American cities, including spending rather a lot of time beating to a pulp every "garden city" or "city of tomorrow" theory out there, especially as those theories were used in "slum clearance"/housing projects of that era.  She then proceeds, at the end of the book, to come up with a series of suggestions every bit as ridiculous as the existing housing-project model.

Point being, it's astonishingly much easier to modify existing ideas--ie, to criticise, even if the modifications you suggest will never be put into effect--than it is to come up with new ones out of whole cloth.  

The types of change people tend to propose in the last chapters of books that critique widespread political/social phenomena are perforce the work of a single mind (albeit influenced broadly by many others), while the actual solutions tend to be more general trends started by many, many people acting together, which is far too complex an occurrence for any one author to be able to accurately predict or model.

It'd be nice if someone could propose a solution and have it actually work, but I'm afraid that's not the nature of the beast.On A review of Joe Romm's new book posted 2 years, 10 months ago 34 Responses

ways to make a small fortune...

...but only if you start with a large one:

#1: Train horses, especially ones that cost a fabulous amount of money (because they're always the ones who require the most expensive special treatment).

Of course, screenwriting (well, writing in general) and training horses are the pursuits of a relatively leisured society, while farming, well, isn't.  I think farming still "wins".On Thoughts from a small farm during the midwinter lull posted 2 years, 10 months ago 9 Responses

longevity

BioD, why the heck would anyone assume a Hummer will be on the road for twice as long as a Prius?  Last I heard, Toyota made some of the longest-lasting cars on the road.

Also, assuming the Prius' battery won't be recycled seems kind of ridiculous.  Even if they assumed it would only be recycled half the time, it seems likely that they'd be being unfair to the Prius, given that the kinds of people who are likely to own a Prius are likely to recycle (which wouldn't help if everyone had a Prius, of course, since then the self-selected-recycling-types effect would go away, but anyhow...).On Not every 'environmental' action makes sense posted 2 years, 10 months ago 26 Responses

I know you said this, but:

I'd like to re-emphasize the "in this part of the country" bit.

Solar may be clunky and whatever else you dislike, but...well, it's kept my house in Santa Fe from ever using a single kilowatt-hour of grid power, and the payback time on the materials (environmentally, that is) was only about five years, for a system that's been running like a charm for over 20 years.  Solar power for homeowners isn't stupid, unless you happen to live in Seattle (or equivalent).On Not every 'environmental' action makes sense posted 2 years, 10 months ago 26 Responses

And what about making that living?

One thing I really identify with about my generation:  We all seem to have a lot of trouble figuring out how to make a living, relative to people both older and younger.  I feel like the only people my age who aren't having this problem are in very specific, technical industries.  It doesn't seem to be possible to be just a generally well-educated person and have a good job anymore; all those jobs, I guess, are taken by Boomers who refuse to retire. :)

They tell us there are more different careers than ever, but if you aren't a doctor (or other scientist) or a lawyer, and also aren't willing to get an MBA and take a soul-sucking corporate job, I'm not sure what the options are, exactly. Be brilliant and get paid to be a writer or an artist or something, although that's not something one can choose to do, really.

This all leaves one very obvious general field that would be a good use of a solid liberal-arts education: teaching.  I enjoy teaching, but I don't enjoy the stories I hear from people my age looking for academic jobs; the market seems to be pretty saturated with bright, capable people who will never be brilliant researchers or consultants or authors (so are unemployable by big universities) but would be good teachers at small liberal arts colleges.  Teaching below the college level requires a higher tolerance for children, and for crappy working conditions, than many people (including me) seem to have.

We were all told, when we were encouraged to pursue a balance between work and life, that we didn't need to know what we were going to do when we grew up, that we could get a degree from a good college and then write our own tickets.  That's just.not.true.  The jobs I've had since graduating from one of the nation's top colleges:  barn manager/"working student" (ie, apprentice) to various horse trainers (including some very, very good ones, but still not much of a career); retail employee for a Mexican tile importer; and executive director/maid of all work for a nonprofit organization.  The last one seems like it'd be a career option, but the "maid of all work" thing isn't really as sarcastic as it might seem; working for a nonprofit should be rewarding, and sometimes is, but it's also backbreaking and soul-sucking a lot of the time.  So I'm in grad school, and it is interesting, but mostly because I'm a big nerd and I love school, and not as much because I actually sense that I'm becoming more employable.

So, is it just me (and everyone I know)?  Or is this general gen-X malaise actually general?On Dealing with the generation gap in the eco-workplace posted 2 years, 10 months ago 10 Responses

people keep suggesting I write books...

...and I'm starting to think that may mean I talk too much. :)

I'd say I'd write it when I get too old and decrepit to do the other things I'm doing now, but then, my mother said that about quilting, that she'd take it up when she was too old to build houses and found horse rescues and whatnot, and she never got that old. :(  So for now I'll settle for inflicting chunks of the story on unsuspecting blog commenters...On One woman's eco-evolution, from off the grid to on the clock posted 2 years, 10 months ago 19 Responses

Choices, etc.

Canis, no, our PO box was (and is) in Tesuque.  Why drive all the way into town?  Getting the mail was hardly a daily event for us, though--my mom would wait so long between trips that we usually had a crate of mail waiting for us.  Part of the whole thing for her was that the world would communicate with her when she felt like it, and no one could pester her otherwise.

And we did scavenge the odd item of building material, just never when "scavenge" was the polite term for "steal".  A couple of things in our house came from the county landfill back before they started looming over everyone with earthmovers and burying the trash instantly as you finished dumping it (I guess the liability for the county must have been outrageous), and occasionally builders would give us scrap that they would otherwise have paid to haul off.

The thing is, when you build with adobe, there's not much to scavenge.  We did reuse the bricks from the south wall (which is now all glass) in rebuilding some of the other walls, and we dug the dirt for the mortar from a bank near the house, but the additional adobes had to be bought (we didn't have the energy or the space to make our own).  The roofing materials also had to be bought new, as did the windows and exterior doors.  Interior doors, the tub, the sinks, and the cabinets and stuff mostly came from thrift stores (Salvation Army used to have a big outdoor yard where they sold all that kind of stuff).  

It wasn't until I had lived a few other places and moved back home that I really realized just how, um, "special" my house really is.  I mean, I love it, but...to anyone who didn't know my mom, it must seem like she was a seriously stoned hippie-type.  Not that there's anything wrong with that--just that my mom was actually a rather proper sort of person, a nice Jewish girl from New York, who just kind of blew a gasket and decided it wasn't worth putting up with her nice Jewish lawyer husband just to have a nice house and a nice car.On One woman's eco-evolution, from off the grid to on the clock posted 2 years, 10 months ago 19 Responses

not in Iowa, but...

At home where there are actual mountains, I turn the engine off in my '69 Ford when I go down a big hill (no power steering or brakes, you see, so it doesn't affect those).  Then I turn the key back to "on" so if I need to accelerate for some reason, I just shift into third (the highest gear it has) and "roll start" it.  They really screwed me up, though, when they put a stop sign at the bottom of the exit ramp I take on my way home.  Sometimes I roll through the stop sign and just deal with going 15-20 mph the rest of the way (~3 miles) down the hill, but if there's someone behind me, I usually have mercy on them and start it up again, although once I get to the speed limit I can turn it back off.

One thing I'm not sure about: How much does avoiding braking help in a hybrid?  My Prius tells me it's regenerated lots of energy every time I have to brake a lot, theoretically charging the battery so it can run off the electric motor more.  I'm assuming there's some loss due to inefficient transfer of that recovered energy, but nothing like in a regular car.On Saving gas the non-hybrid way posted 2 years, 10 months ago 6 Responses

Well, at least we're all dirty together...

What liberal media?  They tell me there's a liberal media, but it sure doesn't seem like it to me.

I love this post, David.  I hope it makes you feel at least a little better to have written it. :)On Wherein I finally get it all out posted 2 years, 10 months ago 22 Responses

mistaken identity

Sorry, BioD, and Samuel Fromartz....

I didn't scroll back up and look at it, and, well, like you said, it seemed like something you would say. :)On One woman's eco-evolution, from off the grid to on the clock posted 2 years, 10 months ago 19 Responses

Too good to be true?

This can't be for real, can it?
On What is this 'good news' you speak of? posted 2 years, 10 months ago 10 Responses

the real story?

BioD:
Well, maybe she's not giving us the whole truth on her decision to move, and indeed why should she?  The story isn't really about that.  It might be more personal than you'd really want to get on the internet.

My sense is that it is more or less the whole story, though.  As someone who's also spent life vacillating between the boonies and various "more-sophisticated" worlds, albeit not quite this dramatically, I can say that sometimes you need one, sometimes you need the other.  At heart I will always prefer the boonies, always be unhappy if I have be surrounded by too many people too much of the time, but I'd be even more unhappy if I hadn't had the chance to get the kind of education you can only get in places where there are too many people for my taste.  There are things I like, and occasionally even crave, about society, but that doesn't mean I don't "really" love the boonies.

Of course, I only speak for myself, but I do identify with her somewhat, at least based on this story.On One woman's eco-evolution, from off the grid to on the clock posted 2 years, 10 months ago 19 Responses

SOS from Texas

I know this thread is so old it's unlikely that many people will read this comment, but fyi:  I ordered some t-shirts and a pair of socks from SOS from Texas, following kinz1j's link above, and I love them!  I thought I'd check out the site, and I saw a shirt I absolutely had to get for a friend--the one that says "toadal chaos" for a friend of mine whose name is Chaos (a long story)--so I thought I'd give their stuff a try for myself, too.  I now have a new favorite long-sleeve t (the women's scoopneck), and a new favorite short-sleeve version of the same as well.  So soft and comfy!  So actually cut to fit me!  Well, I had to roll up the long sleeves a slight bit, but other than that...I always have a problem with t-shirts having too-large armholes and yet somehow still having too-small sleeves, and these have neither--the armhole fits perfectly, and the sleeve is still appropriately loose.

And hey, Kaela, if you read this--it's possible their long sleeves might actually be long enough got you.

Oh yeah, and their stuff won't break the bank.

I like these shirts enough I can almost forgive them for being from Texas (it's a New Mexico thing, not associating with Texans, kinda like Oregonians and Californians). :)On The U.S. organic cotton industry has a tough row to hoe posted 2 years, 10 months ago 12 Responses

Bob,

You might want to answer your own questions by reading some of the other recent posts here about ethanol.  Just for starters, it takes so much petroleum to grow corn that ethanol isn't really much (if any) greener than just burning the petroleum directly.

Also, what he's saying about the 15% is that the truck uses so much more fuel than the car that even at 15% gasoline, the truck uses 61% of the gasoline the car would use, plus all the ethanol, and given how much gas you could have made from the petroleum used to grow the corn, it's really a lot worse than that.  

I get that people need trucks (I do--I have horses, and the Prius won't haul the horse trailer).  But no one needs to drive around town in a truck, or an SUV, all the time.  If you need a truck, it seems like it's better to drive it only when you actually do need it, and drive something else (or better yet, not drive) the rest of the time.On Next year's prize, a flex-fuel Hummer? posted 2 years, 11 months ago 7 Responses

climate change _partly_ normal?

One thing that was said a lot in environmentalist circles in Santa Fe when it first started getting so dry was, "It's not a drought, it's a desert."  Which is to say, it's still freaky that it's too warm in the winter to snow much, but the fact that it's too dry all year round to rain or snow as much as people expect isn't entirely shocking.  It is speculated, based on tree rings and whatnot, that the last 60 to 80 years were the wettest years in NM in, I believe, 500 years.  Back in the 1940s, there was a lake with swimming areas and a diving board in the valley of what is now the entirely underground Galisteo River (it still runs when there's rain, but mostly it just keeps the ground wet for miles and miles of riverbed), and they say the grass was green and lush all the way from Santa Fe to Albuquerque along I-25 where now it's brown and dry and bare, with sparse tufts of half-alive grass.

So, I'm also keenly aware that what I see as "normal," and what seems so within living memory, has to be compared to the geological record.  

I still think several feet of snow is the default for this time of year, though...On Vancouver's submerged seawall posted 2 years, 11 months ago 31 Responses

construction, again

Skipping the trolling and back to your reply to my previous post, BioD, I should add that I am not saying new houses are better built.  In fact, any 100-year-old house that's still around is likely better built than the vast majority of what's being built today; in theory, the houses being built today that are still going to be around in 100 years are going to be the best houses we're building now, just like only the best 100-year-old houses are around now.  If that made any sense.  Boy, I need editing tonight--or sleep, one of the two.

I hate sheetrock with an unholy passion.  Lath and plaster kicks ass.  Likewise plywood vs t&g.  So you won't get me to agree with you on that  Houses need to move and breathe and be repairable, rather than having to have entire sections replaced at once.

But it should be illegal to build Mediterranean-style houses in the Apcific Northwest.  It should be illegal to build frame houses in the desert.  Etc, etc.  'Course, it should also be illegal to put vinyl siding on a perfectly intact clapboard house that just needs paint, given how vinyl does nothing to insulate, rots the wood, and can actually take away the wood siding's natural r-value by keeping it damp.  No, I'm not one for modern materials.

You might enjoy reading some preservation literature, and some related architecture stuff.  The National Park Service has some great Preservation Briefs, some of which go into energy issues in old buildings.  I also highly recommend Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, which is mostly a sort of iconoclastic look at how architects can be dumb, and how buildings can succeed anyway.  He was a Whole-Earth-Catalog person, so that tells you a bit about him--and he is a little nutty, but in a good way.  That book had some of my preservation classmates pretty steamed, but I enjoyed it!On Every one destined to be 100% correct posted 2 years, 11 months ago 25 Responses

snow

Kathy,
I used to go to races at Sandia every year.  I'm 27 now and was on the Santa Fe ski team starting when I was 6 and ending when I was 18; we used to have no problem with having enough snow throughout NM, and in my early teens I remember training with the Sandia kids who had to come up to Santa Fe because Sandia never opened.  It was only in my late teens that I started having to do crazy shit like driving to Steamboat to train for two weeks because Santa Fe and Sandia were both closed.  

Canis,
Anyone who told you the city of Santa Fe doesn't normally get more than a dusting was either crazy or lying.  Where I grew up in Tesuque is a few miles north of the city but at about the same elevation as the northeast side of town, and I have many pictures of myself sledding, of the trees and trucks and houses buried under more than a foot of snow, of the horses with thick blankets of snow on their backs (they love it!), etc.  It's been a while, but I ask the older folks I know who have been around SF longer than I have, and they all tell me the 80's and early 90's were more "normal" to them than the last ten years have been.On Vancouver's submerged seawall posted 2 years, 11 months ago 31 Responses

Annoying people unite!

WiscIdea,
I hope you're still hanging around enough to read this.  From one frequently annoying person to another, the internet needs more of our kind. :)

No, but seriously, I'm way more annoying than you are, and you don't see David getting me banned yet, do you?

Btw, David, I guess I should be more careful in the future before I decide to annoy you again! (kidding!)On Ignore them posted 2 years, 11 months ago 21 Responses

2' in ABQ

Well, the people who built a ski area at Sandia Peak obviously thought Albuquerque got snow.  I mean, I get that 2' in one storm is somewhat unusual, I just don't think--based on my memory of 25 years of skiing in New Mexico--that it's the biggest climate-weirdness news, so I'm somewhat perplexed when it's treated that way.

I must also say I despise the weather we're having here in the Boston area today--wet and chilly and rainy, too warm to really put my horses' winter blankets on but too cold and wet to leave them "naked".  If it would just get cold, they'd actually be able to stay much warmer, because the snow doesn't soak them like rain does.  How anyone--even someone who doesn't understand climate change--can think this is better than multiple feet of snow is completely beyond me...On Vancouver's submerged seawall posted 2 years, 11 months ago 31 Responses

big houses

Actually, BioD, house size is somewhat cyclical.  The small houses of the early to mid 20th century were neither anomalous nor more normal than today's larger houses.  In the late 19th century, particularly, middle-class houses were upwards of 2000 square feet, just as they are now, although admittedly the number of residents tended to be larger, since to be middle-class in 1880 you had to be able to afford "help", often of the live-in variety.

It also isn't really true that houses used to be built better or worse than they are now.  The houses that are still around from previous periods tend to be better built than the average new house; that's why they're still here.  In fact, a great many houses were and are constructed shoddily to satisfy customers who want more than they can afford, and those houses aren't around for long in any era.  

One thing that's going to limit the longevity of both the McMansions themselves and of the fad making such things desirable will be the technological overconfidence that goes into such a  project.  Rich people, and wannabe-rich people, may not care when they buy a new house what it will look like in 20 years, but they will sure care 20 years later.  Bad designs only continue to be desirable until their obvious and disastrous flaws become apparent and sufficient to overwhelm the perceived advantages, which is why you don't see a lot of bubble skylights anymore.  When the big ugly houses built in the last ten years start to decay, people will look at even well-maintained examples and see decay.  Only when the tackiness of the decay exceeds the status conveyed by the size and the "village" effect of the interminable collections of pointless extra roof pitches will people really want something else.On Every one destined to be 100% correct posted 2 years, 11 months ago 25 Responses

crossover

Sure, I mean, the best feminism is that which doesn't have to yell about it.  I'd rather see women's opinions truly respected in the same light as men's opinions--as opposed to the all too frequent "There are people's opinions and then there are women's opinions" paradigm, which only reflects the general supposition that women are not people--than hear people natter on about feminism.  If we're talking about it, that's better than having unexamined inequality, but not as good as unexamined equality.  

I think we still live in a society where talking about it is better than the alternative.  Grist may be different; having female scientists around participating in conversations helps everyone form a healthier background assumption about gender than the general one prevalent in American society.  But in the real world, in life in general, I still need to be reminded to remind people that we still need equality.  By the same token, I need to be reminded to remind people about environmental issues, because it's so easy to go along with society in general and not protest when people do dumb, wasteful things.  

So, I read Bitch PhD to remind me to notice when people are sexist, and I read Grist to remind me to notice when people are stupid about the environment, and I read Animal People News and whatnot to remind me that not everyone gets it about animals (since in my personal life these days I only see happy critters, so it's easy to forget that, in fact, nothing has changed in the world in general).  It seems like I'd have no trouble remembering these things, but somehow I still find it very easy to become a sheep like everyone else.  Short attention span, I guess.On Bitch's green issue is definately worth killing trees for posted 2 years, 11 months ago 7 Responses

yay vs yeah

I think maybe the confusion comes from "yea vs nay" where it is pronounced like "yay"?  I'm guessing, though I'm too lazy to research it right now, that both modern words come from "yea", but that's no excuse, given that they're clearly distinct now.

Spelling these days, to use a true internet-ism, is teh suck. :)On Working less saves the earth posted 2 years, 11 months ago 10 Responses

wilfully misunderstanding?

Wiscidea, you said:

This is an absurd proposition. Humans are as natural as any other creature on Earth and it would make no sense for the species to commit mass suicide. But to work with this for a moment... if environmentalists avoided having children, the remaining human gene pool would lose interest in caring for the biosphere and, therefore, such self sacrifice would not be helpful. Even if some charasmatic environmentalist persuaded 99.9% of humans to stop reproducing, the remaining 6 million people would eventually repopulate Earth and inflict the same damage we are doing now. So I reject the notion based on absurdity and as impractical.

The argument that we responsible people should have kids because otherwise the world will be overrun with irresponsible people and their kids is an old, tired, amply-disproven one.  Oh, and it smacks of eugenics, but that aside.... What evidence do you see that people with superior intellectual or moral qualities pass those on to their children?  I know some people whose children, for better or for worse, are exactly like them, but I also know plenty of people whose children are their polar opposites.  The only factor that makes it seem otherwise is that children inherit their economic status, educational advantages, etc, largely from their parents, and those factors can create some similarities.  

Also, have you so little faith in humanity that you think people wouldn't understand, in the future, how necessary it is for us to never again come this close to the brink?  If we could somehow take the steps, including population reduction, necessary for the continued survival of the maximum number of earth's species, I think it would mean that we had learned the lesson and figured out how to control our destructiveness.  And if, in another millenium or more, population again became a problem...well, we still would have given all the other species in the world a thousand years of not being extinct.  I guess that's not worth the effort, though, according to you.

It makes me wonder why you care at all, if that's how you feel.

BioD:
Sure, a dog in the back of a pickup is enslaved and abused.  Plenty of "pets" are.  Most animals of species commonly kept as pets, though, are kept as pets because there's a mutual benefit.  You could say we've bred dogs to be good pets, or you could say dogs have adapted in ways that make them able to keep us trained to feed them.  It doesn't really matter.  

The point is, if you truly think that the average dog doesn't want to be a pet, you don't know dogs very well.  Sure, there are some who are not completely enthralled with their lives all the time, who need more mental and physical exercise...but the fact that a dog wants to play with you doesn't mean the dog has a miserable life, any more than it would mean that your friends' kids had miserable lives if they did likewise.  If you don't understand animals, you can't know whether they're happy or not.  

When you really pay attention, take the time to get to know individual animals, they will tell you when they're happy and when they're not, and for goofy active types like Golden Retrievers, wanting to play is hardly a usual not-happy sign.On Livestock's long shadow posted 2 years, 11 months ago 42 Responses

No comment on the actual science,

just thought I'd tell everyone that, today, one week after the winter solstice, in Massachusetts, my quince tree is flowering.

I don't even know what to think.

Sometimes, as I try to figure out what I'm going to do when I grow up (that is, when I finish grad school), I wonder if there will even be a job market that at all resembles today's?  

I do try to limit my consumption, and I do give to organizations I think will help, but other than that I fundamentally live my life in a "business as usual" way, and I think of my future, usually, in a business-as-usual way.  It isn't so much that I don't care--obviously I do, I'm here--but more that I don't really know what I can do, other than conserve everywhere I can.

I tend to assume that the world will be about the same in ten years as it is now, as it was ten years ago--everything changes, of course, but I tend to think that the same general options will be available in the future as have been available in my lifetime so far.  Is that crazy?  How does one prepare for what's coming?

I'm not sure this is the place for this comment, but I'm too tired to figure it out right now.  This is sort of a background state of anxiety for me, and this thread, with its this-may-be-much-worse-than-we-thought slant, brought it to the foreground.On What do the climate scientists think? posted 2 years, 11 months ago 24 Responses

spelling nitpick

I have no comment on this other than "Yeah, we should all take more vacation," but I have to tell you, David, the word is "whoa," not "woah".  This is, in the relatively short time I've been hanging out here, something like the third time I've seen you write this, so I'm guessing it's not a typo, and yes, I'm obnoxious, but it bugs me so I thought I'd tell you.  Well, I feel better now....On Working less saves the earth posted 2 years, 11 months ago 10 Responses

vegetarian lobster

I take the easy way out and just order the May-Wah fake lobster.  The shipping is ridiculous because it has to be shipped frozen and isn't available in any stores anywhere, so far as I know, and compared to my recollection of real lobster (which I remember really loving, btw), it's only passable, but dip anything in enough butter, it's bound to taste good. :)On A holiday meal inspired by New Orleans posted 2 years, 11 months ago 6 Responses

lobster

Just fyi, there's no known humane way to kill a lobster.  I'd sooner eat factory-farmed chicken, beef, or pork than any kind of lobster, and y'all know how I feel about that.

That said, the other dishes here sound pretty damn good, even if some of them will never be possible to make veggie....On A holiday meal inspired by New Orleans posted 2 years, 11 months ago 6 Responses

political

Well, I'd sooner see the soldiers doing good stuff that would make people like us--handing out food and water, helping people rebuild, helping doctors at public clinics, making life better for people, generally being seen doing all these things without taking any sides at all--but I don't know if that's possible.  I suspect that the soldiers spend so much time covering their own asses that they can't ever do the things that would really stop the violence.  It seems like having enough people there would let some of them do good stuff while others kept their collective asses covered.

This may all be hopelessly naive, but the sense I've gotten from reading various things written by soldiers over there is that they'd rather be doing humanitarian stuff and can't, and that they think they don't have enough people to do it.  Of course, the fact that they're there doesn't mean they know for sure how various tactics might turn out, and of course I may be misinterpreting or overgeneralizing because I haven't heard enough--it's amazingly difficult, in this age of instant transfer of information around the world, to get a sense of what's really happening there--but I still think there's an antiwar case to be made for more troops to be sent.On And me posted 2 years, 11 months ago 4 Responses

more on contraception

Slate has some things to say about contraception, including a longer-lasting, non-pill male contraceptive.  Scroll down past the thing about adolescent bariatric surgery...On Meet the male pill posted 2 years, 11 months ago 6 Responses

Thinning

Backcut,
I meant to comment on this and just didn't get around to it the other day, but as far as I know thinning does not enjoy a particularly good reputation among environmentalists, be they animal folks or not.  Somehow the people doing the "thinning" always stand to gain the most financially from taking the biggest, healthiest trees, and leaving a lot of sickly, flammable undergrowth.  Besides, thinning requires orders of magnitude more logging roads than does even plain old clearcutting.

If I'm misinformed on this, please correct me, but it's never been my impression that scientists really thought natural fires couldn't do the job on their own.On They don't ignore it posted 2 years, 11 months ago 90 Responses

that's what makes horse races...er, cookbooks...

Wow, another thing I didn't realize anyone could not like.  I mean, the supermarket-in February ones, sure, but real fresh tomatoes in the summer?  I think I'd die without them.

But, hey, whatever makes you happy. :)

And Canis, the restaurant is Gabriel's, and they do supposedly have excellent guacamole, although I haven't eaten there in so long I don't remember it personally.  I find the architecture creepy--you have to go sort of around and down a ramp to get to the dining area from the front door, making it seem dungeon-like--and in any case the food's not as good (in my opinion) as it is at Diego's in the De Vargas mall, or at the Pojoaque truck stop right up the road from Gabriel's.

I guess it's good that there are people who don't like avocados, tomatoes, and green chile.  More for me! :)On A Krafty concoction of hydrogenated goo gets its day in court. posted 2 years, 11 months ago 20 Responses

Mmm, avocados...

Kathy,
You...don't like avocados...?  Wow, I didn't know that was possible. :)

I personally don't like mayonnaise, so back when I used to eat tuna I made my tuna salad with mashed avocado instead.  It really would never have occurred to me that there were people who didn't like avocados.  Besides, in good guac the avocado supplies texture more than anything, since it's almost guaranteed to be overwhelmed by the chile, lime, and onions.  I can't see green peas really working for this, although I guess you could use chickpeas and make a Mexican-flavored hummus as a guac substitute.

Oh, and Canis, when I worked at Artesanos (a Mexican import shop in downtown Santa Fe), we sold molcajetes, and I have to say, those things scare me.  I know supposedly once you've ground up enough uncooked rice or salt or whatever in them, they stop shedding pieces of stone, but...well, an archaeologist once told me you could learn things about farming by seeing the condition of the teeth on excavated remains, because the mano and metate used to grind the corn left little bits of stone in the corn, chipping the teeth of those who ate it.  When I make guac I just cut things up and then moosh them together with a fork, heathen that I am. :)On A Krafty concoction of hydrogenated goo gets its day in court. posted 2 years, 11 months ago 20 Responses

Sorry Jason...

I have a couple of quick OT things to say, and then I will go away.  Papers don't write themselves, you see...

Pandu:
We have had good luck with those sonic rodent repellers.  They're electric, but you haven't mentioned being off the grid?  That's the main problem I can see with them.  Some of them work and some don't; I'm guessing you probably get what you pay for, because some of them seem so cheap it's hard to imagine there would be a rural house without them if they worked at that price.  I don't remember the brand we used that worked, though. As far as I know they never bothered the cats or dogs in the house.

Caniscandida:  
Totally with you on the grammar police thing, but I do wonder if it's necessary to worry about that here.  That said, I have plenty of outlets for my grammar-police-ness (see: "Papers don't write themselves."), although you presumably do too--don't you have grading you should be doing? :)

Atreyger: Depending on one's belief system, it may not take your urging for me to end up among the damned.  That said, you are welcome to wish me all the ill you are able; I certainly should be the last to restrict anyone's right to offend others.  But if you want to participate in a conversation while offering nothing but offensive, belittling comments and statements of your own moral thoroughness, you can certainly expect me to continue to call you on it.On They don't ignore it posted 2 years, 11 months ago 90 Responses

control

Supposedly men can achieve multiple orgasms by learning to orgasm without ejaculating.  As far as I know I've never known anyone who could do this, so I don't know how pleasurable it would be, but it's apparently possible, so maybe this pill is a similar idea?

I have scant faith in straight men when it comes to birth control.  I don't know if it has to do with not wanting to limit their virility or just that they don't want to have to bother with anything extra, or what.  Whatever it is, women usually have to take charge even for the predominant existing method that men can use, making sure there are condoms available and that they get used.  At least with a condom a woman can know for sure whether it's being used, and can usually know if it's being used correctly; I personally wouldn't trust a man, not even the one I live with and trust, to be in charge of birth control in a way I couldn't verify.

Don't get me wrong, I'm certain that there are lots of very conscientious men out there who don't need any help in this regard, but since on the most immediate level I'm the one who has to worry the most about it, I'm more comfortable with something that allows me to be the one to worry about it.On Meet the male pill posted 2 years, 11 months ago 6 Responses

10k tag

I'm assuming he means the "tag"--the permit--for killing the wolf costs $10,000.On Between hunters and environmentalists, that is posted 2 years, 11 months ago 17 Responses

not always less than friendly

Where I come from, at least, the relationship between hunters and environmentalists has often been more complex than this.  For one thing, both hunters and environmentalists can generally agree that ranchers are the enemy, because the more cows there are on public lands, the fewer other animals there are to protect, or conserve, or whatever.  Also, non-subsistence hunters are generally among the relatively wealthy and white, and the despoilers of the landscape with their herds of cattle are often poor and Hispanic, so it gets all complicated really fast.

But yeah, totally, what you said, if hunting advocacy groups can't advocate cracking down on these sorts of things, it's not going to help relations.On Between hunters and environmentalists, that is posted 2 years, 11 months ago 17 Responses

in a slightly better mood now...

I am not glad that you lack the energy to reply point-by-point. We probably agree far more than we disagree. I have the distinct impression that people skim through some of these posts looking for a point of contention, some weakness, and attack. I've been guilty of this and will try to be more responsible. I ask others to please read each of my comments as a whole, and perhaps glance at preceding comments, before launching an attack. I will try to do so as well.

You can tell me to stop eating meat because animals suffer. I am open to learning more about this.

 You can tell me to stop eating meat because I harm the environment. I am open to learning more about this.

(Don't pick up that stone quite yet.) There are folks willing to kill and present the product to us in neat little impersonal packages. Fortunately there are also people -- like Jason -- who are willing to tell us what is really going on. We need to know the truth so that our minds can override the craving.
...

 But... I don't think it is unusual for people to let others do their dirty work for them. So criticizing me on this issue won't be very effective. Just consider most computers... I do not know about yours specifically... plastic, even recycled, from petroleum (oil spills, corporations, wars, abused workers), rare metals (depotic governments, corporations, genocide, bush meat), electricity (mountain top removal, poisoning water, carbon dioxide, nuclear waste, blocking rivers with hydroelectric dams, rare metals for photovoltaics).

Like I said, though, could just be me. :)

Wow, I just typed "like I said".  My mother is spinning in her little cardboard box of ashes.... ("It's 'as you said,' dear")On They don't ignore it posted 2 years, 11 months ago 90 Responses

In the real world,

compromises are made.  In the real world, I can't even get my own horse rescue to commit to a vegetarian menu for its fundraisers (they had a barbeque for the last one, which kind of blew me away...).  In the real world, we have mismanaged things to the point where we have to remove some deer for the continued safety and survival of all the animals, plants, and people in these utterly abused ecosystems, and we can't wait for them to die off.

I do not find it suspect for environmental groups to advocate removal, by euthanasia or responsible hunting (and I think that's a big caveat, because I don't trust the average person with a gun), in some cases.  I find it suspect when they do not indicate regret in these cases, or ever try to find other solutions.  I find the idea of mass-slaughter-as-policy extremely suspect.

We can do better than this.  I don't have to support Ducks Unlimited or groups that advocate the slaughter of entire populations of feral animals (dogs, cats, some horses on islands off southern California I forget the name of, etc) just because they're doing some good things, even though they're also doing some bad things.  There are people who are doing the right things for the right reasons, it just takes a little more effort and thought to find them, and it takes additional effort to try to bring together groups that think they're opposed but really aren't, like feral cat rescuers and environmental groups.  I refuse to support a group just because it's large and powerful and seems like the lesser of the various large, powerful evils.On They don't ignore it posted 2 years, 11 months ago 90 Responses

retirement homes

Just so you know, Jason, the retirement homes for racehorses are basically a front.  That is, they do actually help those lucky few horses who can go to one, but the vast majority cannot.  Of the ones who, after the track, are sound enough to be ridden, a fair number go to private homes (in fact, many of the top competitive horses in the world are off the track), but a lot of racehorses are unfixably lame, and most of those go to slaughter.  Getting racehorse owners, track owners, and others who make their money off two- and three-year-old horses to cough up actual dollars to fund decades of retirement for those horses is astonishingly hard, and without locating any actual numbers I feel totally confident saying that private horse owners rescue orders of magnitude more castoff racehorses than the rescue/retirement groups do.

But carry on...

(oh, and I have two chickens, neither of whom has layed an egg in probably three years, but what the hell, they're happy...)On Zombie hens survive euthanasia posted 2 years, 11 months ago 8 Responses

Not too stealthy, Stealthdog...

"Would you rather have hunting-funded conservation, or no conservation at all?"

Oh, and WiscIdea, I fail to see how "lethal management" is superior to sterilization in the long run, except from our selfish perspective that sterilization is "too hard" and doesn't give guys a chance to go out in the woods and drink beer.  The best solution would be to reintroduce large predators, but we all know that ain't gonna happen, so it seems to me like sterilization is a decent second.On They don't ignore it posted 2 years, 11 months ago 90 Responses

conservation != welfare

Conservation organizations have undoubtedly done much good, in the long run, for animals and their habitat.  Let us never forget, however, that those organizations are composed of an elite that can afford to push conservation in the interests of its own continued recreation opportunities.  Big-game hunters (or duck hunters, or fly fishermen, for that matter) may "love" animals and nature, but it's in the "I love animals--they taste so good!" way.  I can't see how this is anything but antithetical to concern for the animals' well-being in its own right.

Let us also not forget that most environmentalist/conservationist groups that take an interest in animals at all take the kind of interest that supports wholesale slaughter of nonnative species, usually without a lot of regard for the current role that species may be playing, and always without regard for the suffering of the nonnative critters.  In cases where, for example, populations of feral cats can be trapped, kittens placed for adoption and adults spayed/neutered and released, eventually reducing their numbers without harming the existing cats, these groups never choose that option.  Where feral animals are spreading diseases to native wildlife, vaccination programs are often passed over in favor of, again, total slaughter.  Wild horses, who you'd think had become an acceptable part of "nature" by now, aren't even considered worthwhile, although of course the few remaining wild horses are totally inconsequential compared to the cattle being grazed on the same ranges by permit (and in fact, the horses are even drastically outnumbered by the elk, about whom few people complain, except to say they should be allowed to hunt them).

So conservationist and wildlife-oriented environmentalist groups are not, in my book, animal-welfare groups, much less animal-rights groups.On They don't ignore it posted 2 years, 11 months ago 90 Responses

also

Amazing, David agrees with me! :)

Robert, sure, ending animal testing isn't exactly like ending child labor, but I think it's a little disingenuous to say it's like ending all work.  One particular aspect of animal interaction with humans is called into question.  I for one am not saying animals should have no interaction with humans; I'm sitting here in riding breeches (and actually I really have to go feed my horses, who, trust me, are happy to be ridden in return for being fed, and generally enjoy both).

We can't work with labs, as you and Kaela suggest, because labs won't work with us.  First of all, as Kaela tells us, labs refuse to work with us because we're so scary; and second, if they did want to work with us they wouldn't have much to offer.  They are concerned about the bottom line, and not about the animals' quality of life, so they would be no more willing to make substantive changes than the factory farms have, and in any case, as i said above, many of the things they want to do in research are inherently abusive, and it's not as if working with animal activists would suddenly make them willing to substantially modify  or give up their research goals.On Nice work, PETA posted 2 years, 12 months ago 21 Responses

Handwaving

Generally, when people accuse others (or themselves) of handwaving, it's sort of analogous to Patrick's "and so on".  That is, people might say things like "Global warming will cause, you know, rising sea levels, and [waving a hand in the metaphorical direction of everything else] all that bad stuff."  Being vague is often a great argumentative strategy if the people you're arguing with are not intellectually thorough enough to notice it (and a deadly one if they do notice, not that that stops me, unfortunately).On It's a disaster, not a catastrophe posted 2 years, 12 months ago 43 Responses

worthiness, etc.

First of all, I never said the life of a plant is unworthy, just that it seems less awful to make a plant suffer than to make an animal with a central nervous system suffer.  But, of course, YMMV.  The worthy lives of more plants are sacrificed, too, when we eat animals rather than eating plants.

As to openmindedness: You'll notice I never claimed to be openminded, just pointed out the hypocrisy of claiming to and then not being so.  I personally am extremely opinionated and have great difficulty being civil to people I think are idiots.  I do try, though, you'll notice.

Are you Tibetan, or a hypocrite?On Umbra on sustainable sushi posted 2 years, 12 months ago 54 Responses

Mmm, flexible thinking.

Yeah, you're totally openminded and never judge a book by its cover.  That's why one offputting remark from someone at a party was enough to prevent you from ever wanting to engage that person in conversation.

Dude, your commitment to balance and tolerance fucking blows me away.On Umbra on sustainable sushi posted 2 years, 12 months ago 54 Responses

knuckling under

Yeah, Robert, I think we should absolutely not push too hard, knowing these abuses can just be outsourced...I mean, look what all those pesky labor laws got us!  Sure, American children no longer work in factories, and American workers now have actual days and evenings off because they don't have to work 12-hour days, six or seven days a week...but really, all the labor organizers accomplished was to push the sweatshops overseas.

No, wait, let me think about that.

Of course it's horrible that animal testing is on the rise in China, but it's still good that it's in decline here.  It's still good that the pressure on companies has risen to a level they actually care about.  It's still good that more Americans are aware of the horrible conditions in labs, and of the lack of connection between animal lab results and human trial results.  These are, let us not forget, mostly American companies, so the suggestion is that American investors and consumers still have some say over what they do; sure, it's easier to forget the issues that are kept out of sight, but that just means we must not let these issues drop out of sight just because the labs are physically elsewhere now.

I don't see what there is to be gained by knuckling under and continuing to let these companies torture and murder American animals just because we think there might be worse torture and more murder somewhere else.  Sometimes it has to get worse before it can get better.On Nice work, PETA posted 3 years ago 21 Responses

oy...

disregard my punctuation skillz, or lack thereof...On What is it good for? posted 3 years ago 24 Responses

action

I think the attempted murder "counts" just as much, karma-wise, as the successful one, because I think the action in question is the attempt itself.  Perhaps simply plotting the murder, or talking about it, without making any actual preparations, would be equivalent/reverse of talking about one's commitment to the orphans in Darfur (hey, say "orphans in Darfur" six times fast...).

I'd also like to point out that we, here at Grist, are largely engaged in talking about our own commitments to our various (overlapping) causes.  A person could make the case that we learn and obtain motivation through our interactions (I know I do--reading posts here helps me not cave when doing the un-environmental thing is cheaper and easier and more fun), but it is nevertheless true that we spend a lot of time berating one another and, by inference, congratulating ourselves.  I don't know how bad an idea that is, really, but I thought it was worth pointing out the meta-ness, since this whole conversation about the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness is essentially all about the meta.On What is it good for? posted 3 years ago 24 Responses

I plan...

...to do my freakin' homework (two papers due, plus readings, etc...).  And maybe ride my poor ignored horses, if it doesn't rain all weekend.On Nothing posted 3 years ago 4 Responses

one-earner families

That's a nice fantasy, but historically it's just that, a fantasy.  The few decades after WWII when that was possible are only accepted as the norm because they were the right amount of time ago to seem like "back then" to people now.  We had a lot of money, companies offered a lot of benefits, and... it broke them.  In the long run, even a non-greedy company (were there such a thing) couldn't sustain the kind of benefits offered in the 50s.

Before WWII, it's true that it was somewhat rare for both parents to work outside the home (except for millworkers and such), that doesn't mean one income was sustaining the family.  It used to be much, much more common for there to be home-based industries--small farms, etc--which were small enough to allow one parent to also work outside the home, meaning really it was more like a 2.5-job family, rather than a 1- or 1.5-job one.  Of course, none of this has ever applied to wealthy families, but for regular people, living on one salary and taking lots of vacation has never been and likely will never be a reality.On A former McDonald's cook explains his return to the family farm posted 3 years ago 22 Responses

burns out

Yeah, but now that our friend Senator Burns is history, I don't know how much longer it's going to be a problem.

Yay!!!!!!On Is banning horse slaughter like banning whaling? posted 3 years ago 37 Responses

fake pie

Yeah, but it's okay, because at least you're not pretending to cook.  I totally agree with you--if people want convenience food, they should be prepared to come clean about it.  Hey, I buy frozen pizza--but I don't kid myself that it's different than getting one delivered, except for aspects like cost.

When I first lived with my fiance, he was astonished to find out what fresh produce looked and tasted like.  He didn't know that cherries had pits!  That totally blew me away.  He's totally reformed now, which means when we see his family we have to suppress snickers when they "cook".  These are people who buy canned potatoes--I shit you not.  What would make someone decide to can a potato, or a pumpkin for that matter, I have no idea--the whole point of these foods is that they store well in their natural state.  I wouldn't be surprised if his father and stepmother don't own a vegetable peeler.  

Then again, I'm guessing the vast majority of American households are in the same boat, judging by how difficult a time I'm having finding a decent-quality replacement for my vegetable peeler, which has finally gone unusably dull after two generations of use.  It seems that they no longer make plain old, simple, non-tarted-up vegetable peelers that are also made of decent, decently sharp steel.  You can buy the expensive "ergonomic" ones that won't peel anything but a carrot, because their protrusions hit the side of any non-carrot-shaped vegetable, or you can by the $3 supermarket ones that will peel any vegetable you want--once, and then they'yre dull (and un-sharpenable).

Oy, I have such a hard life!On Two non-turkey recipes for the Thanksgiving feast posted 3 years ago 19 Responses

frozen everything

Well, and while it's true that there were more people buying butternut squash and Maine potatoes today than I've ever seen any other time, I also noticed that the freezer-endcaps had all been filled with premade pies, tubs of Cool Whip, etc.  Also, plenty of the butternut squash being bought was the kind that's peeled and shrink-wrapped so all you have to do is cook it (because peeling a squash is just too hard, I guess).

Oh, and right at the entrance there was an enormous tower of jars of "gravy".  People, seriously? It takes ten minutes to make fresh gravy using soy sauce, veggie bouillon, and cornstarch!

Sigh.

So it's not a writeoff for the prepared-foods business, really.  It's just that people want things that are not only prepared, but specifically prepared to seem somehow homemade.  How very 1950s.On Two non-turkey recipes for the Thanksgiving feast posted 3 years ago 19 Responses

Men are apes, Jason?

You said it, not me. :)

KIDDING!!! (lest anyone get upset...)On A former McDonald's cook explains his return to the family farm posted 3 years ago 22 Responses

what do these people eat the rest of the year???

Okay, so, I'm in the supermarket and all of a sudden all the things I like to eat are being besieged by people preparing for tomorrow, and although it's 8 AM and usually there would be about ten people grocery shopping this early, there are so many people they've almost run out of grocery carts...so I wonder:  the other 51 1/2 weeks a year when they're not eating Thanksgiving leftovers, what the heck do these people eat?  

To me, "normal" Thanksgiving food is "normal" because it's what's in season and what I, at least, crave in early-winterish weather.  Root vegetables, gravy, pie, etc, seem totally normal to me, not special things you only make once a year.  I didn't buy a single thing this morning that I won't buy again next week or the week after.  SO I have to assume that the people who are suddenly buying all this stuff are usually eating with zero regard to what's in season, and most likely are not cooking much if at all, if their Thanksgiving food needs cause the population of the grocery store, and specifically the produce aisle, to more than double all of a sudden.  It's just depressing, you know?On Two non-turkey recipes for the Thanksgiving feast posted 3 years ago 19 Responses

style?

There's exactly one reason I don't own more organic cotton clothing than I do:  I can't ever find anything I'd be caught dead in that comes in my size!  My sheets and towels are all either old or organic, but when it comes to clothes...well, a few pairs of socks and underwear, a bra, a pair of "yoga" pants (read:  very expensive bootcut sweatpants).

Organic cotton clothing is all made either for size-0 Pilates-practicing rich women or else for dirty-hippie types.  While I share a number of views with the latter group, neither group is one I'm likely to wear the clothing of in this lifetime.  I'm hardly fashionable, but I want clothes that feel good and look decent, and that are useful for the things I do in life.  Handmade shawls are well and good, but what am I to do when I am working outside and need jeans and t-shirts?  Until I can replace my rapidly-worn-out jeans with organic ones that work as well, I will keep shopping at the mall, because I can't go around in clothes that no longer cover the parts that legally (or practically) need covering!On The U.S. organic cotton industry has a tough row to hoe posted 3 years ago 12 Responses

abstraction....

...is for people who have time.

My mother and my grandmother both died of cancer, at 60 and 57 respectively.  The types of cancer were statistically and genetically unrelated, so it's not as if there's some measurably compounded risk to me, although of course individually each of their cancers is a risk factor for me; it is, however, clear to me that I am at increased risk, that I should not plan too hopefully what I want to do when I get old.

Of course, if I really felt this way, I would be out enjoying the beautiful day today, or at least doing something useful like cleaning my house or writing the paper that's due next week, rather than sitting here failing to resist the lure of the internet.

Gotta go.

Oh, and Caniscandida, I should say that I always enjoy your scholarly comments on literary matters.  Well, except to the extent that it confirms my knowledge that I am not as well-read as I should be (but I have read short passages of Homer in Greek, so there!)On Is Western time on the outs? posted 3 years ago 20 Responses

jarring, indeed

I recently started canning again (my mom and I used to do it, and I hadn't for the last decade or so), and I find that a decent way to at least limit the number of non-local, out-of-season things I eat.  The one caveat:  only high-acid things can be canned on a water bath--or, in English rather than food-preservation-ese, only fruits and tomatoes (not tomato sauce!) can be canned in a big pot of boiling water.  Everything else requires a pressure cooker (and tomatoes are a lot quicker if you have one, too) to reach temperatures high enough to prevent botulism. See   the National Center for Home Food Preservation for current info on how to safely can at home, because the way your mom did it decades ago was actually dangerous enough that they revised the standards, and a lot of those old recipes are no longer recommended since the risk of food poisoning is too high.

Being lazy and cheap, I just did a few jars of tomatoes and a whole bunch of apple sauce and skipped buying the pressure cooker for now.  Applesauce is the easiest thing ever, especially if you have a hand-cranked apple peeler--This year I even skipped using a ricer or grinder, just mushed it with a slotted spoon, since the peeler cuts such thin slices that once it's all cooked there's not much to grind up.  I canned half-pint widemouth jars, which are just the right size to substitute for a yogurt or other snack/dessert in a lunchbox.

I also bought a bushel of butternut squash before my local farmstand closed.  Maybe I should have bought two of them, though... but for now, I still have some local veggies.

I am thinking about getting a chest freezer (energy-star approved, natch), because it would do two things:  first, it would allow me to store more food with less hassle and risk than canning (while maintaining more nutritional value--some things have to be processed in the water bath or pressure cooker for so long that they lose all their vitamins and whatnot); and second, I could save a lot of money by stocking up on things I like when they're on sale, and that money could then go to making the expensive but environmentally-reponsible choices I prefer to make when I have the money, or I could just donate more to environmental groups.  It seems to me that the energy used by an efficient chest freezer kept in the cool basement would be less than the energy used to transport string beans from California in February because I don't have any local ones left due to insufficient freezer space.  What say y'all?On Umbra on eating locally in winter posted 3 years ago 15 Responses

Ummm...

...yeah, because catching wild salmon is so tremendously environmentally friendly!

It is completely unnecessary to support the devastation of the oceans in order to feed the hungry.  Why not give canned Hormel vegetarian chili?  My brother-in-law, a 4-star chef who utterly disdains all fake-meat products, ate it and asked for seconds when we served it at a family get-together.On Donate wild salmon instead of tuna posted 3 years ago 1 Response

and so on?

Off-topic as usual,

Patrick, why is "and so on" a no-no?On Poor countries can't afford to tackle climate change posted 3 years ago 57 Responses

tea taste

Interesting about the taste of the coffee.  I'm not a coffee conoisseur at all, though I do drink the occasional cup.  I'm much more of a tea person, and I find that the Equal Exchange teas are uniformly awful, with a thin, cardboard-y taste and an aroma reminiscent of Lipton.  Obviously someone must like it, though, or they wouldn't stay in business--there aren't that many eco-conscious suckers out there buying things they know will taste awful to support fair trade, are there?On The ethical and environmental dilemma of coffee posted 3 years ago 11 Responses

east of the mountains

Honestly, everything I read about both candidates suggested neither one was being nice at all.  I've never trusted Madrid, who seems to me to be part of the bad-old-days Democratic Party in NM, and Wilson seems like a decent and hardworking person albeit one whose views differ greatly from mine (of course, I didn't see any of the attack ads since I'm not at home, and in any case don't have a tv).  I'd still rather have Madrid, if only because congress is controlled more by the parties than individual people, so I don't have a problem holding my nose on this kind of thing.

Then, too, it's academic for me because my congresscritter is Tom Udall, so my opinion on Madrid/Wilson is of limited value and zero votes.

As far as sides of the mountains:  First of all, which mountains?  From my driveway in Tesuque, I can see five geologically unrelated mountain ranges on a clear day:  The Sangre de Cristos all around and to the east, the Jemez across to the west, and the Ortiz, Sandias and Manzanos to the south.  So it gets complicated. :)  

But in general, um...no.  The Sangres, which are the southern tip of the Rockies, divide bleeding-heart-liberal Santa Fe and Democratic-machine Rio Arriba county on the West from the more-Republican ranchers on the edge of the Plains to the East.  So in our particular area, it doesn't hold true.  I've always thought of NM as two totally separate states, but along the other axis.  Southern NM is almost completely different, culturally. Plus, they grow green chile down there, and we grow mostly red (this is partly a joke about how seriously we take our chile, but also about how the landscape and climate are totally different).  The line between northern and southern NM goes approximately between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, but closer to the latter, in my opinion.  I think ABQ has some stuff going on that makes it uniquely neither North nor South, what with being the sole large city in the state, having a fairly large number of high-tech workers, etc, but fundamentally it's more part of the southern half.  Climate-wise it certainly is, being more desert-y and Arizona-like, compared to the more Colorado-like climate up in SF.  

Historically, the climate makes a big difference, because the Spanish as they came up from Mexico passed through the vast expanse of desert down there but mostly didn't stop on the way, so the historic political establishment in the state is all up north, where the Spanish did stop and stay in the cool, comparatively lush valleys from Santa Fe north.  Because those people are the core of the stranglehold formerly held by the Democratic Party, the northern and especially the north-central parts of the state are blue but not all that liberal, while the southern part of the state is populated more by anglo ranchers who of course are mostly Republican.On Race bitter to the very end posted 3 years ago 5 Responses

Atreyger,

1. Go to Hell.

2. "Free range" as a term slapped on product labels is completely meaningless, as are a lot of others, like "all natural"--they all have zero legal force, and therefore can be put on products to deceive consumers.  Just because a cow isn't in a confinement stall doesn't mean it's out on pasture.    That's what I was referring to; I was not saying there's no benefit to truly free-range methods.  Sometimes it helps to try to understand what people are saying before being snotty.

And hey, Amazingdrx, if this conversation bores or otherwise negatively impacts you, fell free to go somewhere else.  It's called "discussion", and apparently other people here feel like they want to have it, so if you don't...On Is banning horse slaughter like banning whaling? posted 3 years ago 37 Responses

Profit

Of course there must be a profit made on these credits, or no one would do them (and even a nonprofit would have to make enough money to pay for supporting their organizational structure in addition to producing the actual product.  No one here was saying they shouldn't.  What GreenEngineer was saying (which was exactly to the point!) was that it's fair, and necessary, for people to ask what, exactly, they're getting for their money.  Part of the reason they don't want to do that is that they're afraid people will not understand when they see that there's some profit left over after the actual cost of the product, but they need to get past that, because the overwhelming majority will in fact understand.  Especially if, say, they were to show a table of their costs compared to the standard costs of energy, and show that while their product costs more, it's because it actually costs more, not because they are skimming extra profit off.  That would really cement their credibility.

When there's no transparency, it is a problem (ie, I know this organic apple tastes better than that conventional one, but I don't know for sure whether it's because it's truly organic, or because it's actually a GM fruit engineered somehow to taste better).  When there's no transparency and no tangible product, the emperor has no clothes at all.  I can evaluate an apple on its merits and tell whether I think it's the product of organic practices, but with a commodity, especially one I can't physically experience at all, who knows?  So the potential for abuse, especially with the throngs of gullible customers environmentalism has produced, is considerable.  You could sell me biodiesel and I might think that's great, but if what you're not telling me is that orangutans were burned to death to produce it, that's not so great, which is why it's crucial that people who are trying to do the right thing continue to ask lots and lots of questions to keep producers of the things we want  honest.On The producer of the controversial wind-credit cards speaks out posted 3 years ago 21 Responses

replies

Kaela:
Yes, it is very hard to maintain dietary restrictions of any kind when you don't have a well-thought-out reason and access to satisfying food that falls within the restrictions.  This is why, as I keep saying, I'm not vegan; I read the vegan cooking magazines, and the recipes they call "satisfying" (ie "meaty" although obviously that's not their usual word) would usually not do it for me without some cheese, milk, or butter.  So I add cheese, milk, or butter.  It's still better to eat butternut squash soup than chicken, even if it has some milk in it or is topped with a spoonful of sour cream.  For some people, though, that doesn't do it (my fiance is one of them), and I don't think it's horrendously wrong to eat meat every once in a while as the price of maintaining a vegetarian diet that doesn't drive you up the wall the rest of the time.  My theory is, before I met him he ate meat three times a day, every day, so he's made a 9000% improvement if he only eats it one meal, once a month.

Clearly, in this society--where most of us can eat whatever we want, basically--it is important to come up with something that doesn't feel like deprivation, or else it will never work.  I for one envy those vegetarians who are disgusted by the thought of meat, because after many years, I still drool at the smell, which is kind of embarrassing and incredibly annoying.

CC:

On cannibalism: Personally, for the record, I have never had much of an appetite for any of my neighbors.  Well, OK, every now and then a certain inclination, which could metaphorically be called an "appetite"; but that would generally not be considered a species of cannibalism.

Atreyger:
Whether the oxen mind plowing more or less than they mind getting killed and eaten depends, I suppose, but they almost certainly do prefer plowing.  If their humans are kind and understanding, then they certainly prefer plowing.  My horses generally enjoy being ridden, and when they don't it's on the same level at which I sometimes don't want to go ride--that is, general laziness--and certainly not on the "Please kill me now!" level.On Go veggie -- a poll posted 3 years ago 41 Responses

new not necessarily better

From NPS preservation brief 9:

Many styles of storm windows are available to improve the thermal performance of existing windows. The use of exterior storm windows should be investigated whenever feasible because they are thermally efficient, cost-effective, reversible, and allow the retention of original windows (see "Preservation Briefs: 3"). Storm window frames may be made of wood, aluminum, vinyl, or plastic; however, the use of unfinished aluminum storms should be avoided. The visual impact of storms may be minimized by selecting colors which match existing trim color. Arched top storms are available for windows with special shapes. Although interior storm windows appear to offer an attractive option for achieving double glazing with minimal visual impact, the potential for damaging condensation problems must be addressed. Moisture which becomes trapped between the layers of glazing can condense on the colder, outer prime window, potentially leading to deterioration. The correct approach to using interior storms is to create a seal on the interior storm while allowing some ventilation around the prime window. In actual practice, the creation of such a durable, airtight seal is difficult.

...

Consider energy efficiency as one of the factors for replacements, but do not let it dominate the issue. Energy conservation is no excuse for the wholesale destruction of historic windows which can be made thermally efficient by historically and aesthetically acceptable means. In fact, a historic wooden window with a high quality storm window added should thermally outperform a new double-glazed metal window which does not have thermal breaks (insulation between the inner and outer frames intended to break the path of heat flow). This occurs because the wood has far better insulating value than the metal, and in addition many historic windows have high ratios of wood to glass, thus reducing the area of highest heat transfer. One measure of heat transfer is the U-value, the number of Btu's per hour transferred through a square foot of material. When comparing thermal performance, the lower the U-value the better the performance. According to ASHRAE 1977 Fundamentals, the U-values for single glazed wooden windows range from 0.88 to 0.99. The addition of a storm window should reduce these figures to a range of 0.44 to 0.49. A non-thermal break, double-glazed metal window has a U-value of about 0.6.

(emphasis added)On Umbra on inefficient windows posted 3 years ago 4 Responses

etc, etc.

In defense of people (now there's something you'll rarely see me say!), it is impossible to care equally about everything.  There are just too many things!  The world is too big for me to get as upset about a hundred people dying in a natural disaster on the other side of the world as I would about one friend of mine dying in a car accident, which is why newspapers everywhere give more airtime to the local car crashes than to the earthquakes and floods on the other side of the world.  It's not because we're bad people that we care more about what's closest, just that you have to discriminate (in the non-political sense of that word, if it still exists) on some basis or your attention will be too divided to care enough about any one thing.

Also, lest I sound holier-than-thou, I should point out that I myself was once a person who loved horses but didn't think even once about the morality of eating a steak.  I got over it, but still.On Is banning horse slaughter like banning whaling? posted 3 years ago 37 Responses

connections

Wiscidea,
I don't know of any stats on this specifically, but I think the answer to "Do people who are kind to domesticated animals behave better towards wild ones" is a qualified Yes.  Someone who intentionally and reasonedly treats all domestic animals well is likely to be concerned for wildlife in that more abstract sense (I won't ever have a chance to physically care for or abuse a wild animal, but I still care about preventing them from suffering).  

That said, most people who are kind to animals are only kind to some animals, and abstraction is indeed a big part of it.  I can't tell you how many horsepeople I know who give to equine rescues and are, to the best of my knowledge, kind to their own horses--but still eat meat all the time!  I have had, thus far, basically no luck getting the major fundraiser for the horse rescue my mom founded to go veg.  People come for this trail ride and gourmet lunch, and they go out and ride their horses, come back and take their saddles off and give them carrots and groom them and make sure they have water and shade and whatnot--and then go eat chicken.  It's odd.

So I'd like to say people who care about animals care about animals, period, but obviously it ain't so.  Not too different than anything else, really--men who are totally respectful of their own wives and mothers have absolutely no shred of caring for the women getting raped and murdered in Sudan et al, loving PTA-participating parents don't care at all about conditions in third-world orphanages or even in foster care across town, etc, etc.  

I do think that having an actual foundation behind one's theories helps; one can consistently show, for instance, that healthy attitudes towards domestic animals go hand in hand with healthy attitudes towards not engaging in domestic violence, say, and I'm guessing that extrapolates to health attitudes towards animals not physically under one's control, but I don't think that whether or not someone actually, physically kicks dogs accurately predicts whether he will either beat his wife or illegally hunt endangered species.  If you see what I mean...On Is banning horse slaughter like banning whaling? posted 3 years ago 37 Responses

organic booze

Kaela,
I also meant to thank you for the link to organic whiskey etc.--I'll have to try that!On Business Week article gave some the wrong impression, company says posted 3 years ago 20 Responses

zoning

I wouldn't be surprised if the earliest known cities in Mesopotamia had some kind of land-use restrictions, too.  Lots of humans living in close quarters means lots of arguments, and there is only so much variety to those arguments, so that fairly quickly someone gets the idea to codify what was decided the last time someone had this same argument, and just do the same thing that was done then.  That said, the restrictions have undergone a vast shift in the last ~150 years.

The rise of zoning as we know it today in American cities came about because of the Victorian obsession with the sacredness of the home.  Previous restrictions on land use tended to be of a limited nature, for instance specifying characteristics of the building that could be built on a site (implying that this only applied to the first building, not any subsequent structures that might supplement or replace the first one).  Perpetual covenants, easements, etc,that could be enforced by a neighbor were established by Parker v. Nightingale in Boston in 1862 (prior to this, the seller of the property was usually the only person with standing).  Parker wanted to enforce a covenant (introduced by the subdivider who had sold the property encompassing both his and Nightingale's lots) providing for residential development only, and that's why we have zoning as it exists in America today (this is the short version, trust me).

People want to be able to do whatever they want, but they also want their neighbors not to have the same liberty.  In the end, people want the latter even more than the former, so they've taken  Parker to its logical conclusion, to the extent that most people can no longer conceive of a world in which their neighbors would be allowed to cram a zillion houses, or a noxious industrial plant, on the lot next door.  They're going to be awfully surprised...

It must also be noted that, at least in part, governments have brought these new takings laws on themselves by letting eminent domain be abused so egregiously.On Regulatory takings initiatives tie communities' hands posted 3 years ago 9 Responses

vegetarian invasion!

Yes, we want to impose our beliefs on everyone.  We're right, after all!

No, wait.  Actually, we're just waiting for the carnivores to dies off from all the nasty side effects of their meat-eating ways, and then we vegetarians, with plenty of resources stockpiled thanks to not breeding like rabbits, will be able to take over the world!

What the hell are you talking about?On No demand for Iceland's whale meat posted 3 years ago 61 Responses

beeswax and silk

PETA (and a lot of vegans) do in fact refuse to use honey, beeswax, and silk.

I think in some cases the real cause is undermined by making a big deal out of these more minor issues, since it tends to cast the whole movement as a little nutty. Also, tea without honey just doesn't cut it (of course, tea without cows' milk doesn't cut it either, which os one of the reasons I'm not vegan).  I'm opposed to killing insects, but not as opposed as I am to killing higher animals.

And as for efficiency and complete combustion--if the wick burns, and only a small amount of the wax does, you can melt it and make new candles.  So unless the dripless candle burns a whole lot longer than its drippy equivalent, it's actually less efficient.

That said, I think this sort of issue is to environmentalism as the silkworm issue is to veganism, which is to say, maybe fun to discuss but possibly not the best thing to go around talking about in public, lest people think you're a nutcase and ignore everything else you have to say.On Umbra on dripless candles posted 3 years ago 8 Responses

Actually, that's not why.

People are not, in fact, considerate of other life forms, even the ones that resemble us most (even the ones that are us).  Animals don't "deserve my sympathy" because they are like me.  They deserve my attempt to not make them suffer, and they deserve it for exactly one reason:  They are able to suffer.

Putting property right in the hands of those who rely on it for their livelihood...let's see, that gave us the overgrazed ranchland of the American West (at least the part of it that is privately owned--and even the publicly-owned lands are leased for a fee, albeit nominal), untold numbers of Superfund sites (because apparently ownership isn't enough to keep companies from walking away when they can't clean up the mess they've made of their private property), factory farming, etc.  Yes, there are problems with shared responsibility becoming no responsibility, but I'm not a big believer in the property owner as a source of proper property management.On No demand for Iceland's whale meat posted 3 years ago 61 Responses

Property Rights

I don't have the time or the energy right now to take part in this discussion fully, but I wuld like to say that I can't think of a more loathsome step we could take than to give humans property rights over those animals we don't already have property rights over.  Animals' lack of rights--their lack of standing, their lack of an "interest" (in the legal sense) in their own well being--is already a major cause of animal abuse.  

Anyone who's interested in a full explanation of this issue should read Gary Francione's Animals, Property, and the Law.On No demand for Iceland's whale meat posted 3 years ago 61 Responses

manure as pollution

Actually, manure wasn't valued all that much until relatively recently.  In pre-internal-combustion-engine cities, it was a huge health and sanitation problem.  As a fertilizer, its contributions have received uneven recognition; farmers in 19th-century New England had to be taught to build a whole new style of barn (with a manure basement) to keep the winter's worth of manure from being thrown outside in the snow and rain, allowing the nutrients to leach away while the soil was too frozen to absorb them.  

And actually, as a pasture fertilizer manure has its problems.  In this case, it seems that all the parasites and pathigens are probably killed by the "digestion" tank, but in general, one of the biggest pasture-management challenges (with horses, anyway, since I'm not much of a cow expert) is keeping grazing animals from re-ingesting their own manure, as this completes the life cycle of intestinal parasites (worms, basically) that lay their eggs in manure and have to be ingested to hatch.  It's fine to put manure on, say, a vegetable garden, though, because the eggs will eventually die in the soil and can't make their way into a new host with no one grazing in their immediate vicinity.On See post-bovine methane generate clean electricity! posted 3 years, 1 month ago 12 Responses

trains vs. trucks

One of the problems with rail travel (in this country):  It's going to be a long road back to it (pun intended), because we've already committed so heavily to undermining tracks to pay for highways.  Taxes on passenger rail tickets built the interstate highway system, which is why it now appears cheaper, individually, to use those highways.  You still have to pay to use railroads, but even where there are tolls, the amount you pay directly towards highway infrastructure is negligible, so it's hard to convince people trains are actually cheaper for many applications.

The interstate trucking industry is a major catastrophe waiting to happen.  It has expanded greatly in the last couple of decades, but pay has remained fairly static and both company policies and the laws governing the situation are exploitative of the drivers, so what you have is a bunch of relatively inexperienced drivers (because of the demand for ever more drivers, and because retention rates have dropped as drivers realize it's not as good a job as it once was) being pushed way too far (because they can't make any money at all unless they push or break the limit of how far they can legally drive in a given time period), many of them on drugs to combat both the fatigue and the boredom of their lives, and when accidents happen the drivers usually get left holding the bag, as if it's their fault that they're overtired and that people driving cars don't know how to pass them safely.  This state of affairs seems likely to come to some sort of crisis at some point, and while I wish that weren't the case for the drivers' sake, I think it might help get us headed back towards rail freight.  

Local truck delivery from rail terminals is no problem; the trucks are already on the road, and in fact the existing fleet could be greatly reduced if fewer vehicle-miles overall were required.  Of course, that will just compound the already-mind-boggling problem of what to do with a few million more dead Freightliners, since the Freightliner is the Hyundai of the big-rig world, and no one will buy them, so when the leases run out the company parks them and walks away...

As for flying...yes, I think we have to get used to things taking longer again.  

I think electric cars and more widespread solar electricity and a lot of other things are crying out for a major breakthrough in ways electricity can be stored in large, portable quantities.  It's amazing to me that, with all the other things we've invented in the last few decades, basically zero progress has been made on this.On A new book says tackling climate change is doable posted 3 years, 1 month ago 19 Responses

The best bad words

...are in Spanish, IMNSHO. :)

of course, hahaha, penis! But just try getting one of them to say the word "vagina" out loud...I didn't love the Vagina Monologues, but Eve Ensler did at least make people say it, which was good.

That said, the word itself does nothin' for me.On Apropos of absolutely nothing posted 3 years, 1 month ago 24 Responses

hair shirt

Jones,

Hair shirts have nothing to do with hippies, dirty or otherwise.

For centuries, extremely pious and/or guilt-ridden Christians (although possibly others too, not sure) have worn these to cause themselves pain as a punishment for their (perceived) sins.  Usually it's figurative, as in this case; the point is that we should not feel guilty or punish ourselves, but rather should from this day forward stop doing the dumb thigs that got us into this in the first place.  A philosophy, I believe, that lends itself to widespread success as soon as we get our heads out of the various undesirable places where they currently are, which will be approximately when Hell freezes over if history is any guide. :)On A new book says tackling climate change is doable posted 3 years, 1 month ago 19 Responses

Will houses need ot be replaced?

No, absolutely not.  Almost every house can be made energy-efficient enough that it's a net loss to tear it down and start over.  Some large houses are only reasonable as multi-family homes, but they can be divided up pretty easily.

Solar thermal panels can make any house "passive solar", basically.  All you need is south-facing roof.  Yes, it's a major retrofit, but it can be done almost anywhere.

Destruction of houses that don't suit us anymore--either from a fashion/appearance standpoint or from an energy-efficiency one--is a big part of what got us in the fix we're in now.  Loss of historic buildings has led to ever more destructive practices, and more demolition will absolutely not help that.

Btw, I'm a grad student in a historic preservation program, so I might be a teensy bit biased, but I also study this stuff all the time, so I hope I have more factual knowledge of it than the average person (else I'm wasting an awful lot of money and effort!).On What's the best balance of green and cheap? posted 3 years, 1 month ago 15 Responses

I love all critters, but...

Okay, so I can't necessarily say roaches don't feel pain--I'm pretty sure they do, although even I don't think they have complicated enough nervous systems to cause me quite as much concern as more complicated critters do.  

That said, while not discounting their suffering, I feel that there are certain creatures I do not feel the need to allow in my space.  I would rather put a roach outside than kill it, but if you live in New York, where it's just going to get back into someone's house right away and roaches are actually a real health hazard, that's just not realistic.  

I also make exceptions for flies on my horses.  I don't generally desire to kill flies, but when my horse's ears start bleeding from bites, I don't really get upset about killing flies to keep them from biting him.

True, it's not 100% logically sound, but neither am I willing to become a Jainist, sweeping the ground before me to avoid squashing a bug.  We must all draw our lines somewhere, and I think I can safely speak for CanisCandida as well as for myself when I say that a reasonable line is one between harm we can reasonably avoid and harm we can only displace.On Umbra on battling cockroaches posted 3 years, 1 month ago 11 Responses

Corporations are the problem, not GMOs

Let me be clear:  I am 100% opposed to the underhanded corporate maneuvering that has gotten GM soy, corn, canola, etc, into our food supply despite the fact that a lot of the people eating would be opposed if they knew.  I'm largely in favor of organic labeling, especially because of the improvements it brings about for animals (not 100%, surely, but better than nothing).

But what I'm opposed to is the corporations, not the science.  They have taken a fascinating thread of science and woven it into a net to catch profits (we're the by-catch, to strain an analogy to breaking).  It is an unquestionable evil in my mind to risk people's health for the corporate bottom line, not to mention the evil of severing farmers from their cyclical relationship with plants by making their seeds sterile.

But I have to agree with Wiscidea that fundamentally it's a promising technology.  It could be used alongside other environmentally and otherwise sensitive techniques to actually help people and the environment at the same time.  That would be great, and if everything were out in the open and explained to the public's satisfaction, I would have no problem seeing it labelled organic.

I'd like some more hard evidence regarding the Bt and antibiotics and whatnot, too.  Calling a scientist "extremely credible" doesn't make everything she says true (and the fact that the "Institute of Science in Society" website glorifies her without mentioning that she is the organization's founder makes me skeptical).  I looked around www.thecampaign.org and I didn't find anything that really addressed the issues we're discussing.  If you have facts, please post them, though!On Weigh in on the question posted 3 years, 1 month ago 44 Responses

er, make that "art history"

On Energy is better spent elsewhere posted 3 years, 1 month ago 93 Responses

preconditions

Loot,

It's very true that David enjoys the same (very considerable) freedoms as everyone else in the US.

Those freedoms just aren't as considerable as we'd like to think.  We can say whatever we want, but when we're drowned out by corporations that have many orders of magnitude more resources than you and I do, I think it's still fair to say the debate is constrained.  

We let corporations speak freely too, don't forget.  As long as they don't tell lies for profit--well, okay, as long as they don't get caught--they can say just about anything.  They have the voice of hundreds or even thousands of individuals, all saying the same thing, and I think that's an unfair precondition.  Our civil rights were not intended to be given away to corporate "persons" who are able to drown out actual people.  Watering down our rights does, in fact, take some of them away.

Great letter, though, David.On It never ends posted 3 years, 1 month ago 9 Responses

Already?

I'm sad that we have to be depressed about this this early.  I mean, I get that it's not that far away, but...well, if Hillary doesn't run I'll be much happier.  I think she's been a fairly decent Senator, and I think she can be a better one once she's more firmly established (which is what she's spent these last years doing, sucking up to everyone above her, so soon she should have more room to actually do stuff).  I think she'd be a decent president.  I think she's 100% unelectable.  I think Dick Cheney would beat her if he were to run.  I will wail and moan if she decides to run.

Maybe someday.  Just not this time.  Please, Hillary?On Who's doing what posted 3 years, 1 month ago 20 Responses

What a name!

Like everyone else, I don't have time to read everything, so I usually read the summary, am partially enlightened, and move on.  Hey, I learn more than I would have without your post!

This time, though, I would like to point out that this guy should be nominated for an Ironic Name Award or something. :)  Actually, Slate has a whole column devoted to such people (you know, Dr Fury the psychiatrist who specializes in anger management, etc), I just can't think what they call it right now.  But anyway.On New mine safety official not so good on the whole mine safety thing posted 3 years, 1 month ago 4 Responses

Artesanos

PS--if you do decide to go with Mexican tile for part of the house, let me know, I'll be more than happy to help you decide what you need to order.  The trim pieces and whatnot can be confusing, and the patterns even more so if you use patterned pieces.  I am a tile-design geek, though. :)On What's the best balance of green and cheap? posted 3 years, 1 month ago 15 Responses

Solar's wonderful, but:

Solar has had one problem for the last 20-30 years, and that's storage (well, okay, most RE sources have the same problem).  Solar panels have come quite a long way, and the electronic gadgets that monitor the system have come an incredibly long way, as have the inverters that turn the current to AC.  

Twenty-two years ago when we installed our system, it was one of the first in our area, and no one made a control panel to regulate the charging of the batteries, etc, so Windy Dankoff (who subsequently started a company that makes the best RE-friendly water pumps out there) designed a mad-scientist affair made of seemingly spare parts screwed down to a piece of plywood; last year I finally replaced it, and the replacement looks like a stereo speaker with a digital readout, and should make the batteries last years longer.  Our solar panels are huge compared to what's being installed today for the same capacity.

But the batteries?  They're exactly the same.  We're on our third (I think?) set of batteries, but they've all been basically the same, lead-acid batteries that have to have water added periodically, won't last forever, are extremely heavy, and are toxic to manufacture (although the recycling is pretty decent).  Since the sun doesn't usually shine at exactly the same time we want power, solar is going to stay on hold until someone figures out how to store it better than this.  It's fine as a grid-tied system, producing energy for the grid during the day and drawing from the grid at night, but that inherently limits the percent of our energy that we can ever hope to get from solar.

Maybe the answer is to partner it with other types of RE that have different limitations.  That said, no other type is as clean, efficient, and maintenance-free as solar, so it will be hard to ever get enough of anything else to make up the deficit between demand  and solar supply at night and in cloudy weather.On Travis Bradford thinks so posted 3 years, 1 month ago 3 Responses

common cause

The thing about making common cause with people we otherwise can't agree with:  Americans suck at it.  Hello, two-arty system?  We apparently couldn't handle a system where a bunch of small parties have to form a coalition before any government can ever get anything done, because (and I am the first one guilty of this) we simply cannot shut our mouths for long enough at a stretch.  Our opinions are just too important!

That said, criticizing the behavior doesn't mean I think it's unequivocally wrong.  For instance, while I absolutely think I should be working on the same side as Christian environmentalists even if they think gay marriage is wrong, I have a very, very hard time with it in practice, because it is...drumroll please...too important.  

And, as CanisCandida says, timescale matters; it may be too late for my gay friends to get a fair shot at things I think they deserve as soon as the next couple of years if I don't stand up for them.  The complete ruination of the earth is expected to take a little longer than that.  WEll, and it's harder to conceptualize, so despite being more important than anything else in the long run, it suffers from our collective imagination deficit.

The major force keeping our divisive attitudes of importance going strong in America today, I think, is that somehow we've gone from having strong opinions to trying to impose them on others, in a way I think we haven't seen since Puritan New England.  I wouldn't be willing to fight so hard for things like gay marriage if the other side wasn't trying to ban them, and likewise, if liberals weren't trying to force gay marriage down the Christians' throats, they would care a lot less about it.  The escalation, though, is already in motion and no one knows how to stop it.  We are tied together in so many ways, we can't help tearing one another apart.

I would be happy to let Christians do their thing, except their thing involves (among other things) using my tax dollars to teach their kids things I think are flat-out wrong (and yes, I get that this is not th emajority of Christians--it's just an example).  Many, if not most, Christians in this country would be perfectly happy to let gay people do whatever they wanted to do as long as it didn't involve their government or their churches, but since that's exactly what's involved in what gay people want to do, the issue is inherently thorny.    So it's all well and good to say "live and let live", to become a libertarian and espouse letting people do whatever the heck they want as long as they don't step on your toes, but in reality, stepping on people's toes is at the very heart of what we all often want to do.

So it's hard, very hard, to say you're going to work with someone for the long-term, vitally important good...when tomorrow, or next year, they may be working against you on something of urgent importance.

Of course, we should still try.On Tune in posted 3 years, 1 month ago 12 Responses

Guess I'm not as smart as Patrick

     America is still almost 70% white.  That is not "pretty" diverse except mainly at the edges (coasts).

Because, of course, all white people are exactly the same.  No diversity there.  Nope, my Lithuanian Jewish family is exactly like my fiance's German and English Protestant one.

I would imagine the percentage of Chinese people in the US is at least as high as the percentage of whites in China, no?  Even if you're only counting diversity in terms of broadly lumped racial groups like that, the US has a fair degree of diversity compared to other nations.  I don't think the fact that non-whites can still count themselves a minority as opposed to whites means that we have "failed" at diversity.  It isn't a contest.

Also, "diverse" is not code for "brown".  

     Did you check the SPLC link?  People of color and immigrants certainly think race and racism factor into the discussions of immigration.  That is why so many anti-immigrant groups use language that is if not directly racist, then is suggestive of racism.

...

       Population growth has nothing to do with immigration.  I am for reducing population growth, against the anti-immigration movement.  Does that make sense to you?

I grew up completely off the grid, and for many years my house had no heat except what came from one wood stove (which, due to concerns about pollution, we used sparingly, so usually the house was just cold).  I grew up walking or riding my horse when I could, rather than driving.  I grew up seven miles outside the nearest town, so we had to drive to get groceries, etc.  I would bet you that our environmental footprint was lighter than it would have been if we'd lived in town with heat, A/C, unlimited city water, and grid electricity.  You may think your way is best, and that all the rest of us ignorant, theoretically rich, morally inferior people should acknowledge our sins and vow to do things your way in the future, but you're not necessarily right, and you're not winning a lot of friends by insisting that you are.

  On It's easy if you try posted 3 years, 1 month ago 35 Responses

Race

Race enters into a lot of things, but this ain't one of 'em.  Yes, in practice brown people want to come to white countries and live like white people, and that doesn't help global warming.  Yes, in practice most of the people doing most of the consuming are still white.  But as Sheri pointed out, if the wealthiest 20% disappeared, the other 80% would not continue to exist as they do--they'd gobble up the resources newly available to them!  It's human nature to consume as much as possible, and it's an accident that those most able to do so are disproportionately white.  Race comes into it by accident, but I truly don't think racism comes into it at all.  I think you think, Patrick, that it's racist of us to talk about the problems in the world without saying that the solution is to blame ourselves and glorify the poor downtrodden brown people, when in fact that just has nothing to do with this.  

I don't care about immigration.  There are billions of people in the world, and they all eat, no matter where they are.  There have to be fewer people in the world, period.  We can't go on like this. That's all there is to it.  We all have to consume less, and Americans have a lot farther to fall than a lot of people, but last I checked, we were a pretty diverse nation, so it's not like it's just the rich white Americans who are "to blame".  In any case, blame doesn't help, stopping population growth does.

And Sheri, it's not because poor countries have no natural resources that they're poor--in fact, some of the poorest have some of the greatest natural resources, which rich-country-based companies extract whenever and however they can.  That also has little to nothing to do with the fact that, as a species, there are too damn many of us.

and finally, Kaela, your take on blaming things on the brown man--that cracked me up! :)On It's easy if you try posted 3 years, 1 month ago 35 Responses

homemade or canned?

If you're feeling too sick to cook, both the Amy's no-chicken and the miso sound good (and the miso you can get in little packets you mix with hot water, although the mix is quite salty).  You might also like the cup-of-soup thingies--lots of non-acid flavors, including a bunch of potato- and/or bean- based ones that are quite good, imo.  The Spice Hunter ones are available at just about every grocery store now, i think.

If you're up to making some soup, I have two recommendations:  cream of potato+, or non-creamed potato+.  

The short version:  Saute an onion in plenty of butter or olive oil.  Add potatos, washed and cut into bite-size chunks, and enough water to cover them.  Simmer until potatoes are tender to a fork.  If making not-creamed soup, add frozen corn and some Quorn fake-chicken Tenders (the little chunks in the bag), and a can of tomatoes if you have changed your mind on the acid thing, and cook till everything is heated through.  Salt and pepper to taste.  This will be better the next day, but good right away.

If making creamed soup, you can use other veggies along with the potatoes.  Parsnips, carrots, turnips, butternut squash, etc, are all good, and can be cooked right along with the potatoes.  Broccoli and spinach and such should be added towards the end and only cooked for 5-10 minutes.  When everything's done, puree with a blender or food processor, spice as desired, and add a little milk or cream (I'm not sure how you'd make this vegan and make it optimally tasty, especially since I can't abide any of the milk substitutes, but YMMV).

I love soup.  On Seeking veggie-friendly flu remedies posted 3 years, 1 month ago 9 Responses

yep, we're locusts

Kaela,
Yes, it's like locusts, that's it exactly.  I don't want individual people to suffer, as I said, except those very few who deserve it (which in my mind mostly means people who abuse animals, but that's another topic entirely), and even then, I'd happily settle for them just instantly and painlessly ceasing to exist.  I would have no problem with it if the Powers That Be could just press a button and eliminate all or almost all of our species (provided that, if it was almost all, there was some sort of promise that a few centuries of population growth wouldn't bring things right back to where they are now).  I don't want people punished for the harm we've done, I just want the harm to stop.

Patrick,

Not everyone who lives in the suburbs has a McMansion and an SUV.  Not everyone who lives in a city apartment is living a green lifestyle.  I think you'd find I use less of just about everything than just about anyone, and I live in a fairly rural suburb.

Also, why the obsession with racial prejudice?  I know there are some people who are specifically concerned with our country and its natural resources, which might be degraded by more people being here, however they get here, but it really seems like most of us are concerned with the burden on the environment throughout the world, which is really related only to the overall number of people and amount of resources they use, regardless of what country they're in.  Truly, I have never once thought that an immigrant, white or brown, legal or not, was more of a burden on anything than anyone else, but they're still humans and they still eat and drive and turn lights on, in most cases.  I especially don't see how playing the racism card is relevant in a discussion where it's pretty much a known fact that we Americans are disproportionately responsible for the problems at hand, and wealthier Americans (lots of whom are presumably also white) are disproportionately responsible within that.

Sheri,

Lawns are generally pretty abhorrent.  I'd like to point out, however, that my lawn is perfectly acceptable (well, to me anyway, if not to my neighbors whose son runs a landscaping business), and not a drop of petroleum is ever burned to maintain it.  I do need to put some lime on it, and maybe even fertilize it in the spring, but that's the extent to which I ever worry about it--no herbicides, no synthetic ferilizers, etc--and I mow with a reel mower. I watered my lawn once this past summer.  Yes, I'm in Massachusetts, which is one of the few places one can get away with this, but it's worth pointing out that it's not lawns, per se, that are evil.
On It's easy if you try posted 3 years, 1 month ago 35 Responses

but if humor doesn't work...

Just so we're clear:  If humor can't be used to shame people into not being idiots...I'm not averse to killing them, except it's still illegal.  Some people just need killing, you know?  But I'd definitely agree with Kaela et al and say you should stand behind what you said.  It may not be a good summary of what you think--or even one of the more important parts of what you think--but it's not untrue.  In any event, their stupidity will eventually kill them, regardless of what we say about it.  Too bad it'll kill us too...

Mihan:  That was a great line...and then what they were talking about was pretty funny too, but now I can't remember the name they were comparing to BB-G (the gist of it was that not since BB-G had there been a public figure with such an entertaining name, I just can't remember what it was).  I'm always especially happy, though, when they have PJ O'Rourke on, which they haven't for a while.  His best line that I can remember was about illegal immigrants, something to the effect of "Think about the legal Americans you know--would you let them in your house?" (re. whether or not illegal immigrants should be employed as domestics).  The other best-line-ever also came from that show--"[illegal immigrants] have the collossal nerve to come here and...trim our hedges!"

But here I go, off-topic yet again...On Incentives in modern-day punditry posted 3 years, 1 month ago 10 Responses

ps

I'd like to acknowledge, while I'm here, that I personally am about as funny as a heart attack, so I have no right to insist that others be funny.

Too bad, I'm going to anyway. :)On Incentives in modern-day punditry posted 3 years, 1 month ago 10 Responses

What has enlightenment done for you lately?

The whole "enlightened self-interest" argument has, unfortunately, just enough truth in it to be misleading.  It always ends up in the same uncomfortable philosophical space as the idea that generosity (in the direct form, eg gift-giving) is really just a form of self-gratification (for all us earth sluts :) ).  It is certainly hard to argue against the idea that giving gifts is something we do because it makes us feel good, and it's equally hard to argue that we don't get a rush from doing things that benefit the environment.  Maybe it's even true, maybe the only reason we compulsively reduce-reuse-recycle is that we can then enjoy the feeling of having done the right thing.

I don't think it matters.

It does, however, take some of the joy out of the whole thing to be constantly second-guessing oneself and wondering how pure one's motives are.  Besides, some of the tasks we take on to benefit the environment (composting?  ewwww...and yeah, I know people really love it, but I think it's gross, and half-assedly do it anyway) are sufficiently disagreeable that I say we deserve all the congratulations we can get, even from ourselves, for doing them.  If people think we're nuts...well, raise your hand if no one ever thought you were nuts for some non-environmentalism-related reason.  So at least this creates some more variety in the potential reasons for people to look at you strangely. :)On Vote! posted 3 years, 1 month ago 26 Responses

It depends

As you said, it's complicated, and life-cycle considerations far outweigh initial construction.

The size, location, and use of the structure are all factors.  Manufactured materials have known structural properties, so an engineer can feel comfortable with less margin of error with steel than with wood; a building that is required to bear unusual weights and stresses has to be drastically over-built using wood, in case any structural defects in the wood are present but invisible.

On the other hand, wood is a better insulator than steel, so for a building (ie, most buildings) that needs to have its interior temperature controlled, wood is better for exterior walls (and masonry is best for interior walls, at least if passive solar heating is used, since it stores heat and stabilizes temperature).

The best material is almost always the most local one.  If you live in New England, wood frame is a much better option than if you live in the Midwest, because there are healthy, well managed forests all around, and you can get lumber from local mills, so that the material travels less than 100 miles from stump to jobsite.  I suppose if you live far from forests but near a steel mill, steel frame looks a lot better.

If you live in a place where winters are cold, you care more about insulation; in a hot climate, ventilation and the albedo (reflectivity) of your roofing material matter much more.  In a climate with many days of sun every year, passive solar concerns can trump insulation, even if those many days of sun are combined with cold winters, and passive solar generally works better with all masonry than all frame, if you have to choose just one.

And let's not forget that materials have different qualities in different climates.   Moisture can damage steel and to a lesser degree concrete, and moisture or lack thereof can damage wood; temperature and humidity changes cause wood to swell, shrink, split, and crack, but have less effect on steel and concrete; concrete can spall (become brittle and flake away) in wet, freezing conditions; etc.  So a building that will last 200 years in one climate may not last 20 in another before it needs extensive repair.  Exterior plaster and stucco, applied right, last a lifetime in the Southwest, but only a couple of years in the Northeast.

I believe that for every location there is an optimal building type (for general use, ie residential, commercial, and light industrial, excluding extremely large-scale urban structures).  You can often tell a lot about that optimal type by looking at surviving historic buildings, or historic buildings that would be surviving if urban renewal projects and other development hadn't gotten rid of them.  Buildings built before machinery made it possible to manufacture and transport materials had to be built with local materials that were minimally processed, so they tend to be either wood or masonry, or a combination.  That lets out steel frame entirely, but with a little imagination it can be worked in where appropriate.  If a building is still around after centuries of use, it seems fair to assume it's fairly low-maintenance and provides reasonable comfort for its occupants, so if you examine the characteristics that make it that way, you can often determine how best to create more buildings with equivalent qualities.

An example:  New Mexico's pueblo architecture (the real thing, not "Pueblo Style") shows how, even without glass, a building can be fairly passive-solar efficient, at the same time taking advantage of other aspects of site and climate.  Buildings are sheltered from prevailing winter winds either by the site or by thick back walls with no openings, but are provided with cross-ventilation aligned to summer winds.  They're built on south-facing slopes, with the greatest possible south-facing, unshaded exposure.  Water isn't a great concern, though the sites are generally well drained (one of the quickest ways to raise the environmental and financial costs of any building is to site it so that it needs constant maintenance because of water infiltration problems).  Minimal wood is used, and then generally only for roofs, which are then covered with dirt.

A pueblo building in Seattle would be an unmitigated disaster, though, so again you have to think about where you are before you decide what's green.

That said, it's worth pointing out that, even in the 21st century, more people live in some variety of adobe building than in any other type, and while the majority is certainly not always right, in this case they're onto something. It's the ultimate green material, always local and minimally processed, and if done right leads to a finished product with a very good energy profile.  

Another product not mentioned yet is the Structural Insulated Panel.  SIPs outperform on-site wood frame construction by far due to the absolutely complete insulation and perfect seal (though of course this means SIP construction requires mechanical ventilation), and the manufacturers typically recycle close to 100% of their materials on-site.  They're not perfect--the insulation is typically petroleum-based, the OSB (Oriented Strand Board, or "chipboard") sheathing they use contains small amounts of formaldehyde, and the framing lumber isn't always sustainably harvested--but again, in life-cycle terms, anywhere a wood frame building is the best conventional choice, SIPs are better.

The only places I can think of where steel frame seems likely to have lower environmental costs than wood does are in settings where a large "clear span" is needed, as in a warehouse or an indoor sports arena, or where very heavy machinery needs to be supported.  A lot of those places probably shouldn't exist anyway (although riding a horse is a lot more pleasant indoors sometimes...), so to me steel is the least promising.On Is wood-framing a green building material? posted 3 years, 1 month ago 2 Responses

Oh, the irony

This sounds like a PG Wodehouse story.  Anyone know the one I'm thinking of?  It involves this courting couple, both ardent pacifists, animal lovers, etc, who go to visit the young man's family and fall under the spell of the place, finding themselves compelled to hunt the wild creatures they previously admired from a safe, peaceful distance.  They eventually remember themselves, but not until after the young lady has taken a pellet gun from one of the younger boys in the household and shot his sunbathing uncle with it (from a tree she managed to hide in, if I remember right).

The other day we had wild turkeys in our yard, and my fiance, solely in order to provoke me, commented that they'd make a perfect Thanksgiving dinner, although they might be a bit tough (we don't eat meat and don't own a gun, but he's from the Midwest and can't help himself :) ).On Underwater concert sets world record posted 3 years, 1 month ago 4 Responses

growing up without pets

I can find a few articles that say things like: "Studies have shown that positive interactions with animals assist in childhood development. This includes development of better motor skills, observational behaviour, social interaction and a more nurturing attitude than those observed in children growing up without pets." (from www.uam.net.au/resources/files/PUB_Pro95_LyndyScott.pdf)

I can't find anything that directly addresses the effects on children of growing up with or without pets, or how it affects later attitudes towards animals.  I will say, anecdotally, that growing up with no pets is a lot better than growing up with animals who aren't treated well in terms of fostering later love of animals (duh, sure).  I will also say that people who come to love critters as adults are more likely to have tiny, spoiled pets (naming no names ;) ), although that's not always true.  My mom always wanted lots of animals as a kid, and never really got to have a pet (she had a couple of rabbits and a chicken, but only for a few months each, and a dog for a week or two until her mother decided she couldn't stand it), but as an adult she adopted, over a few decades, scores of dogs, cats, horses, chickens, snakes, mice, and fish.  She favored big dogs, too; one of her favorites was a 100-pound St Bernard/Golden Retriever/??? mutt.  So you never can tell; I grew up with that menagerie, and show every sign of continuing that way.On Underwater concert sets world record posted 3 years, 1 month ago 4 Responses

Bill Gates

Patrick,
I think the Bill Gates thing was something I heard on NPR, but I'm not sure.  If I come across a citation I'll post it.  I haven't turned it up in TSOR (thirty seconds of research), but I distinctly remember him talking about how his wife wanted to give more to health and other direct aid groups and not focus as exclusively on education, and at first he didn't agree, but then he came to understand that caring for people's basic needs so they could take advantage of things like the education projects would actually be best in the long run.

Bill Gates has said a lot of stuff, though, and been talked about by a lot of people (many of them, it turns out, Bible-thumping nutjobs who think he's the antichrist for wanting to do something about overpopulation--oh, the things I've learned in the last few minutes!), so it's not particularly easy (for me at least) to find this one particular thing.On Rethinking 'overpopulation' posted 3 years, 1 month ago 77 Responses

Wait, people weren't sure about this?

...because I had been under the impression that this was accepted as fact by anyone who actually knew about it.

That said, I don't know a lot about it myself.  It just seemed like common sense that exposing wild populations to not-so-healthily-managed captive populations would cause harm to the wild populations.  So, I guess research that no one can argue with is good, because we all know how effective common sense is...On Really posted 3 years, 1 month ago 4 Responses

even further afield...

On New Mexican matters: Willa, you may know my very prickly, very opinionated, very tough-to-deal-with old pal, Pen LaFarge, SF historian, culture critic and cultural curmudgeon, who lives in his father Oliver's house on Old SF Trail.  He identifies more with his mother's family, NM Spanish, and had lots to tell me about Alma Lopez's controversial rendering of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the way the Anglo community offensively defended it.

As for the Alma Lopez thing--when that happened, I was busy trying to pass my final exams senior year of college, so I wasn't in SF, and I don't think I even heard about it at the time.  I googled it just now, and I can't say I was terribly surprised at either the Catholic protests or the Anglo defense and anti-censorship. The museum directors had to know exactly what would happen before they ever displayed such a thing, but I guess creating controversy is not a terrible thing for museums to do, in some ways. (but this is a whole different kettle of pinto beans, of course, and even farther than we are already from the actual topic)

When I was in Santa Fe, I lived for a while on Valley Road, a bit beyond Fort Marcy and that pink Scottish Masonic Moorish castle; I used to walk to Albertson's and back with my food.  Later, I lived near Saint Anne's Church, off Aguafria, and shopped at Wild Oats.

Wait, you lived in Santa Fe and didn't shop at the Marketplace?  It's actually now a branch of La Montanita Co-Op, a small chain with stores in Albuquerque and a few other places in NM and AZ, but they were and are the only locally-owned store in the area selling locally-grown food (not everything, of course, but a lot more than at Albertson's).  That said, you have my deepest admiration for carrying your groceries all that way!  I hope you at least had one of those little rolling cart thingies, although I know in SF people would look at you really strangely for using one.  Growing up in Tesuque, walking anywhere was never a real option, sadly.

The Scottish Rite Temple is a truly strange place, and not just because of the Pepto-Bismol-colored stucco (for those of y'all who have not been to SF and are curious, you can see it at www.aasrsf.org).  It's pretty inside, though, and has this theater with a bunch of different layers of scenery to create forests and things, and a huge pipe organ.  

As a general rule, pretty buildings or no, I tend to distrust fraternal organizations, probably something to do with the Shriner who assaulted me with my own protest sign when I was protesting the Shrine Circus at the rodeo grounds a few years ago (I still have scars, and yes, I was completely peacefully protesting and didn't do anything to provoke it other than being there).  It turns out the Shriners' support for children's hospitals is dwarfed by their support for their own beer fund anyway.

There were a lot more beautiful buildings dating from the 1880s-1910s until some genius decided to promote tourism by tearing them all down and replacing them with flat-roofed faux adobe "pueblo" style crap.  That's yet another rant, though, albeit a partially environmental one:  The stuccoed frame buildings with flat hot-tar-and-gravel roofs are not only appalling to look at, but are an environmental nightmare of toxins, nonlocal materials, and building type so unsuited to the climate as to create huge energy waste.  Oh, and they look even worse when the stucco cracks after a few years, so they get replaced, while centuries-old adobe buildings are still used.  Ironically, some of the buildings that were lost when the Tourism Board...excuse me, the Historic Design and Review Board took over were actually adobe, just not in traditional styles.  A century of environmental stupidity later, I think Santa Fe is on the brink of oblivion because we've attracted so many more people than we have the water for in the long run.

As it turned out, a big tornado-ish storm blew up suddenly, and we never got out of the car.

Also, seriously, you feed your dog couscous and organic turkey?  You're a better man than I! :)  My dogs eat California Natural lamb-based kibble, because at least the lamb is free-range.  I know there are plenty of problems with that, but I can't believe it's not better than, say, the factory-farmed chicken that goes into the other kibbles of equivalent quality.  I'd do organic dog food if I could get it, despite the fact that it's something like ten times the price of Purina (CalNat is only two or three times the price of Purina...only!).  Cooking for them, though...I can barely manage to cook for myself sometimes.  Besides, it's basically impossible to get organic meat in the Boston area (where I am now, though pining for Santa Fe).  Even Whole Foods doesn't have organic meats, only free-range, I think, and anyway they're fifteen miles in a direction I never drive for any other reason, so even driving a Prius it's hard to justify.

Life's so complicated.On Animal welfare, that is posted 3 years, 1 month ago 23 Responses

On the actual topic...

The California law sounds awesome!  I hadn't been following it because of the whole not-a-Californian thing, but it's very exciting.

In New Mexico we'll never get a law like that, thanks to all the people whose dogs spend their entire lives on chains.  Apparently, every last lousy one of them votes, or at least claims to when quoted in the newspaper.

And cockfighting...we can't even ban that, because the no one wants to risk being deemed opposed to Hispanic cultural activites.

People are dumb, you know?On Animal welfare, that is posted 3 years, 1 month ago 23 Responses

there's no conflict

I happen to think that species preservation is a moral imperative, more so than saving individual creatures

David,

I still don't see where your camp and mine have anything major to argue about here.

The vast majority of animals who are individually abused by humans are domesticated species, mostly farm animals but certainly plenty of pets too.  While I happen to love horses, dogs, etc (and even less cute/personable species--chickens, for example, are hysterically funny, personality- filled little critters, for the most part, despite being viewed by most people as too dumb to regard as individuals), environmentalists--including me--are not concerned about the extinction of horses, dogs, or chickens.  In fact, domesticated animals contribute greatly to the problems faced by wild species.

There are all kinds of reasons to preserve wild species, from the "who knows what we might need them for" approach to the "we already use more than our share of the earth's resources, so let's try to share with other species" one, to, well, whatever everyone's reasons actually are.

Every one of those reasons that I know of leads, eventually, to eating less meat, wearing less leather, etc.

There might come a day, if we live so long as a species, where we no longer raise and kill domesticated animals for meat and other products.  At that time, the question would arise of whether the moral case for animal rights/welfare was enough by itself.

We're not even headed that direction.

Right now, the biggest source of animal suffering in the world is human exploitation of farm animals.  It's such a huge problem, both from the point of view of the farmed animals and from the point of view of every other living thing in the world (including us) that it doesn't even merit debate.  There is no question that the planet would be healthier, and sentient beings of all kinds would suffer less, if we reduced the consumption of farm-animal derived products.  

On a philosophical level, of course it merits debate, but on an action level, it's a complete no brainer.On Value judgments are inescapable posted 3 years, 2 months ago 17 Responses

not morally neutral

I don't really mind if you happen to believe that a commercial fishing boat or a feed lot is the moral equivalent of Dachau, but I'm not particularly interested in hearing (or reading) you or anybody else talk about it - or indeed in any other form of association."

Robert Delfs,

If Caniscandida won't say it, I will.

The slaughter of innocent creatures, ripped from their herds/families and shipped long distances in horrible conditions only to be put to death for no good reason in ways that range from morally questionable to outright horrifying--sounds a lot like both the Holocaust and the meat industry. Suffering is suffering.

(by the way, I'm Jewish, so don't even go there)

You claim not to care if I think it, only if I say it, and to that I say, what the HELL?  This is, last I checked, a discussion forum.  If you don't want to hear other people's dissenting opinions, you might be in the wrong place.  If you don't want other people to be able to express their dissenting opinions at all, ever, I'm sure there are some lovely dictatorships to which you can apply for citizenship.  

Regardless, however, of how mad this issue makes me, or you, or anyone else, there's a no-brainer way out of this whole argument.  Domestic animals in factory farms are destroying the environment.  If you really want to save biodiversity, for whatever reason, we should all be able to agree that going into the supermarket and buying a package of meat is a bad move.  I personally care less about how we get there--to a humane and sustainable world--than I care about whether we get there in time, and I would have thought all environmentalists and all who care about animals could at least agree on this much.On