The City Mouse in the Country

  I t's easy to think that we are living in the proverbial end times.  Smoke pours across our borders from unchecked Canadian wildfires, across the world the temperatures continue to rise and records are broken daily.  Deaths due to heat related issues are reported in monotone voices by our news anchors.   Nearly everyone admits that climate change is real and that we are experiencing it.  You have many that think it's to late, and see no reason to change their lives.  I used too be one of them.  Change however is inevitable and our species has a knack of getting itself into trouble only to find a way out of that trouble. For example in this week alone we learned of reclaimed coal mining land where 1 acre is feeding 2000 people , while it is certainly a green washing piece for the company - I'm going to concentrate on the positive.  The fact that 1 acre of land is feeding 2000 people and that restoration is occurring at all.   There was a time when the open pit of a mine w

A few days ago we had a series of very hot days, where the record for the hottest day was set and then broken the very next day.  Here in the United States we have various parts of the country that are under Heat Domes and other weather conditions have resulted in temperatures in the triple digits. One of the reasons that my wife and I moved to the country was to avoid increasing heat and humidity that we were experiencing in Florida.  However in moving to the country we bought a home that did not have central air or heat.  We were lucky enough to adapt to both extremes in a variety of ways and have adopted many of the concepts discussed here.  I have covered the topic of staying warm without central heat before in this blog and decided that I should talk about staying cool without central air this time around.  As the temperature rises in the future it's going to affect how we work, play, eat and even the decisions that we make .  It's also going to affect the most disenfran

  Where I live in Western Pennsylvania was mostly spared the worst of the soot and smoky skies caused by the recent Canadian wild fires.   However it still managed to blanket most of the North East in some of the worst air quality we've ever had . In some ways it was a taste of our near future. It's just one more thing that is piling up on the scale leading to an eventual tipping point.   It's not all doom and gloom of course...but it is mostly doom as study after study after study are all pointing to a difficult and deadly future. Now...that being said I'm still an optimist about the future.   I don't believe we are going to prevent "the worst" from occurring.   I do believe however that we can do what we can to at least delay the worst of it.  We are still going to have to deal with global warming and all the consequences it brings; from submerged coastlines to super storms to the forced mass migration of people. Delaying the worst of it gives us time to

Life can be stressful here in modern America.  Sadly we have become a country where a parent may worry that they will never see their child again as they board that school bus or go out with friends.  Not to mention the additional stress of worrying about our countries direction; and the direction of the planet, as a whole. We live in trying times, but worrying about the future all the time is only a recipe for sleepless nights and ulcers.  We all need that proverbial margarita by the pool sometimes.  In many ways I looked forward to taking the past week off and traveling to Niagara Falls and upstate New York with my wife. It has been nearly 30 years since either of us had been to the Falls, and on the way up we passed solar farm after solar farm and more than a few windmills generating power, we even passed a hydroelectric plant.   Green power is the future and in a way my heart sung that so much renewable power was being generated. However I also thought about the gas that we were bu

When I first moved to the country I wanted to get involved in something.  I wanted to become part of the community.  I wanted to belong to, and add to, something greater than myself.    In small town America that usually means joining a Church or your local volunteer fire department but since I'm an agnostic bordering on atheism, the local Church was out.   I'm also old and out of shape so the fire department was out.    So that left the Odd Fellows who have a local chapter close to my home. While I may not always agree with who my local chapter supports as an organization and what they do butI know that I am making a small difference in the life of my community somehow.   A homeless person manages to snuggle under blankets provide by the Odd Fellows on a cold winter's day, a child gets a scholarship, someone gets a warm meal.  Today we don't think much about mutual aid unless we are giving funds to some charity or faced with some sort of natural disaster.   Many of us

I started this blog for a few reasons and I never intended it to serve the purpose it does now.  I'm trying to pass on information in a variety of ways to help others.  I'm trying to help others learn from my mistakes. While my blathering may seem trivial.  It's not, for we have to put ideas and concepts out into the world so that they are be built on, improved, discussed and debated.  That's how we make progress.  That's how we build a better world.  Currently I'm still recovering from one very bad day when deer rampaged trough my garden and ate or destroyed roughly two-thirds of it.  I had invested a bit of money into it when it came to soil, fencing, containers and what not; only to lose part of that investment to deer. To deal with the deer, I'm going to have to possibly invest more and buy electric fencing or a variety of chemicals. I'm reminded of William Alexander's semi cautionary tale of gardening from his book The $64 dollar Tomato . It

“ None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.” ― Allen Ginsberg   The weatherman stated that we have not had any significant rainfall in over two weeks.  Nor did he see any relief in site. We are not in drought conditions yet, we are just unusually dry.  Interestingly enough, Pennsylvania should be getting warmer and wetter in the future if the climate models hold true.  If we narrow that down even more to my home town , the picture becomes even more interesting.   Solar Punk Pittsburgh For now though, I was worried about my garden.   It is not that big, I basically have a variety of containers around where I am maintaining lettuce, leeks, tomato's, peppers, strawberries, grapes, sunchokes (which I was really interested in growing) and a few other things.     Every garden needs to be watered and I played around with the idea of a r ain water collection systems before, we even had a simple one in Florida.  This water could be used in the garden