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Reviews of books, films, TV shows, and websites.

Sustainability and Subsistence? Review of The Good Life

By May 15, 2012
Farm

We each seek what, for us, is “the good life.” Because that's so personal, “the good life” is almost undefinable. In The Good Life: How to Create a Sustainable and Fulfilling Lifestyle author Sherry Ackerman describes her "good life", and, while she gave me practical ideas to make my life better, she didn’t make a believer out of me. Farming in Vermont Ackerman's story is compelling. After earning a Ph.D. in philosophy, she moved to the mountains of Vermont to a farm, determined … [Read more...]

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Better living through fluoride

By May 4, 2012
Spraying DDT on Jones Beach, Long Island, 1953.

Before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring came out in 1962, America was a simpler place where "Better Living Through Chemistry" wasn't an album by Fat Boy Slim or a snarky T shirt for urban hipsters. It was a DuPont corporate slogan that became an optimistic motto for promoting everything from spraying kids directly with DDT to  marketing food that didn't spoil. According to The Case Against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics … [Read more...]

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Factory food is making us dumber and dumber

By April 26, 2012
wonder bread ad

In the film Idiocracy, the decline of America comes not through an oil shock, a debt crisis or even the rise of China and India. Instead, a kind of reverse eugenics, where yuppies defer childbearing until it's too late while guys in wife-beater T shirts keep on multiplying themselves generation after generation, brings the nation to a sad place in the year 2505. The average IQ has declined to well below 100. Water is only used for flushing toilets but a power drink called "Brawndo, the Thirst … [Read more...]

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Growing up in the first Great Depression

By April 9, 2012
Great Depression

It seems that gone are the days of finding Grandma’s thrifty old ways and viewpoints amusing and charmingly old fashioned. But are we missing out on not only a resource that's much needed today in hearing about how our grandparents used to live, but also simply tuning into and honoring the wisdom of the elders? As the US faces an uncertain future, financially as well as in many other ways, it's time to turn to those who've lived through other hard times, such as the Great Depression, to … [Read more...]

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The daily grind, Amish style

By April 3, 2012
what spikes

For people who are into re-skilling and building household resilience, an essential source of non-electric and hand-cranked gadgets is Lehman's. With a store in Ohio's Amish country, Lehman's sells thousands of old-timey implements online for use in the kitchen, around the house and out in the garden. Lehman's is the place to go for canning jars and supplies as well as Aladdin oil lamps, wood cook stoves and even hand-cranked laundry machines. We ordered their Hand Cranked Grain Mill … [Read more...]

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Tired of waiting for the barbarians

By March 30, 2012
Planet of the Apes shot

Ever since the dawn of the Nuclear Age, Hollywood has fed movie audiences on a steady diet of end-of-the-world thrillers. And from The Time Machine and The Planet of the Apes to The Road and The Hunger Games, for half a century moviegoers have hungrily gobbled up this fare like so many baskets of greasy apocalpytic curly fries. It may seem that people always and everywhere have thrilled to dramatic stories of the end-times. After all, the mother of all apocalypses comes not from Armageddon … [Read more...]

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No more excuse to wait on going solar

By March 27, 2012
solar panel on kitchen mitt

Even before I began working with a company that develops solar energy projects, I was fascinated by solar panels. Though I had lots of science toys as a kid, I always wanted a kit to build my own solar panel, but somehow I never got one. And as I got interested in the environment and energy in college and grad school, I vowed that someday I'd "go solar" myself. But getting my first job -- and my second, third and fourth -- out of school, I found myself moving likewise from one city to the … [Read more...]

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Yes, you can ferment your food: Review of “Wild Fermentation”

By March 14, 2012
A Reuben

If you're an old hand at all things DIY, congratulations. The following review may or may not be for you. But if you're like me, and devoted to a low-impact lifestyle but a newbie when it comes to all the skills to get you there, read on. Like bread making, about which I wrote a few weeks ago in the beginning of my Yes, You Can...series, fermentation can easily scare the living daylights out of you. Not only does it operate on the presumption that you're working with the bacterial world (a … [Read more...]

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The best of all possible worlds has no use for peak oil

By March 7, 2012
optimism poster

Panglossian Disorder? What on earth is that? And how does it apply to peak oil? Inspired by the eternal optimist Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire's Candide, psychologist Kathy McMahon, who calls herself the "peak shrink," explains on Peak Moment TV (episode 199) that she invented Panglossian Disorder. It's a condition of people who view the post peak oil future with unrealistic and even pathological optimism, the kind that is usually a front for deep fear, effectively shutting off to the realities … [Read more...]

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Kick Wall Street to the curb, get $15 trillion

By March 5, 2012
invest in good times

It was only a matter of time after we started eating local food and Buying Local from main street stores that we'd start hearing about local money. It started with local currencies in such places as inflation-wracked Argentina and the wealthy Berkshires of western Massachusetts. These experiments in modern complementary currency spawned dozens of scrips around the world from Britain to India to Japan backed by the full faith and credit not of lofty central banks like the Federal Reserve, but … [Read more...]

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