Relocalizing Vermont
Posted: Monday, January 16, 2012 - 15:06
I started hitchhiking in junior high, on those mornings when I missed the last city bus to school and my baritone horn made bicycling a difficult option. Since then, I've hitched short and long distances in the US and Europe, met all types, and arrived at all sorts of destinations.
I was glad to see Leath Tonino's description of a five-day hitchhiking trip around Vermont in Seven Days. I've never hitched without a destination in mind, as he did, but some of my most magical experiences have come from unexpected intermediate destinations on longer trips.
I think Tonino captures the freedom and magic of hitchhiking, as well as its uncertainty. My experience of hitchhiking is alternating feelings of impotence--as I watch car after car drive...
Posted: Sunday, August 28, 2011 - 19:00
WDEV and all its Radio Vermont stations are on the air 24 hours a day, with storm-related coverage. Help them with your emails to news@radiovermont.com or calls to 802-244-1777 or toll-free 877-291-8255.
Frequencies: 550 AM, 96.1 FM, 96.5 FM in Montpelier, 101.7 FM, 93.9 FM Morrisville.
The best web-based resources I've found so far are:
http://twitter.com/#!/search/KeithMontpVT
Includes monitoring of scanner traffic and information about street closures and evacuations in Montpelier.http://twitter.com/#!/JennaPizzi
Includes info about flooding in Barre, including photos and videos.
http://7d.blogs.com/blurt/2011/08/irene-vermont-photos.html#more
Crowd-sourced map of Vermont with pictures of damage in various...
Posted: Wednesday, August 24, 2011 - 14:11
The estimable Steve Benen, Vermont's most widely read blogger, wants to underline the importance of investing in education. He picked an unfortunate throat-clearing exercise, however, when he cited a Pennsylvania school district that is saving $15,000 on lawn mowing by having seven sheep graze the school lawns. Benen comments,
You know, nothing says “21st century global superpower” like schools turning to sheep because they can’t afford lawnmowers.
Check out the comments: Readers of the Washington Monthly site quickly defended the use of sheep instead of noisy, inefficient, polluting, gasoline-powered lawn mowers whose fuel increases the trade deficit. As commenter pyewacket put it:
I agree with your overall...
I don't normally promote my radio shows here, but I'm excited to be talking with Richard Heinberg Monday (Aug. 22) on WDEV about his new book, The End of Growth. Tune in 1-2 pm at 96.1 FM, 550 AM, or catch the podcast later at www.equaltimeradio.com.
Update: Another guest was State Rep. Bill Botzow, chair of the House Commerce Committee, reflecting on what Vermont can do and is doing in the face of growth-ending resource constraints. Now you can listen to the show or download it.
Posted: Friday, August 19, 2011 - 12:37
In an unusual column, David Brooks visits Philip Leakey in Kenya and is delighted at the center of appropriate technology experimentation he finds:
Philip has experiments running up and down the mountainside. He’s trying to build an irrigation system that doubles as a tilapia farm. He’s trying to graft fruit trees onto native trees so they can survive in rocky soil. He’s completing a pit to turn cow manure into electricity and plans to build a micro-hyrdroelectric generator in a local stream.
Leakey and his workers devise and build their own lathes and saws, tough enough to carve into the hard acacia wood. They’re inventing their own dyes for the Leakey Collection’s Zulugrass jewelry, planning to use Marula trees to make body...
Posted: Tuesday, August 9, 2011 - 14:23
The London rioters and looters have been using social networking to organize, apparently. So have the forces for order, calm, and cleanup. (h/t Andrew Sullivan)
Posted: Tuesday, August 9, 2011 - 13:36
Well, the title overstates it a bit. Still, NPR's Planet Money draws attention to a fascinating connection between the widespread availability of high-speed photocopiers and the series of events that led to ratings agencies being in bed with the very firms they were rating, which led to S&P, Moody's, and Fitch to rate investment vehicles higher than they were, in fact, worth. Plus some 19th century railroad history! The piece nicely illustrates how delayed and profound the unintended effects of technology can be.
Posted: Monday, July 18, 2011 - 07:36
Carl Etnier, Transition Times blogger.
In the 1930s, Katheryn Breer of Horn of the Moon Farm in East Montpelier walked to high school in Montpelier. She did this even though her father had one of the first cars in the area, which he used to deliver eggs and milk from the farm. The 14-mile round trip was too much to do every day, so she boarded with a family in town and walked home after school Saturday to spend the weekend with her family.
Now, the average Vermont car is driven 17,000 miles a year; school buses transport students daily from Horn of the Moon neighborhood to U-32, a more-distant high school; and daily driving commutes from Montpelier to Burlington or further are not uncommon. In a state that has taken advantage of...
Posted: Tuesday, July 12, 2011 - 13:19
Thank goodness we don't have benighted code enforcers like this here. (h/t Matt Yglesias for the link to the Detroit Fox News station.)
Update 7/13: Oops, I guess we do. At least Burlington is trying to do something about it.
Posted: Monday, July 4, 2011 - 16:01
Ian Urbina has written a series of three articles published in the NY Times which pull back the curtain to reveal doubts and accusations within the much-hyped shale gas industry.
One article, "S.E.C. Shift Leads to Worries of Overestimation of Reserves," is about how the Securities and Exchange Commission, in the waning days of the Bush Administration, adopted a rule that allows gas companies much more latitude in claiming reserves in areas where they had not drilled. Instead of allowing them only to claim reserves in areas close to their existing wells, the new rules allowed them to use modeling to claim reserves further out.
A lot of assumptions go into models, and there's an old saying about what can happen when you ASS_U_ME. In...