Okay everybody, it's been one heck of a seven-month hiatus... and I don't regret it a bit. Due to recent events this blog will probably take a little bit of a different direction now. Here's what's been going on: First, now I'm in grad school getting an advanced ag degree. Second, we're having a baby in a week or two. Both very exciting, and both good environmental blog fodder. Let's give some quick updates and see where we go from here.
*****
Grad school: Specifically, the DPM program at University of Florida. The DPM degree is set up along the same lines as an MD or DVM (veterinarian) program with lots of classes and internships so you can look at something, figure out what its problem is, and fix it- just like a doctor or vet with people and animals. MS and PhD degrees are great for learning how to do research, which is important- but not how to fix things. So let's say you did your PhD in plant pathology and worked with viral plant diseases for your research. Then you get a job doing crop consulting or ag extension, which is a pretty typical career path for advanced ag degrees. Your first year on the job would go something like this.
Farmer: Yup, so now we've got this leaf spot on the corn, which is a new one... What is it, what should we do about it?
You: Hmm. Well, it's not a virus.
Farmer: Alright.
*silence*
Farmer: Is that it?
You: 'Fraid so.
Farmer: I am so glad I/the taxpayers spent money for this advice.
Not very good, is it? In order to avoid this awkward situation, I will be spending the next four years learning about more than one thing, which is unheard of in higher academia. (I like to give my husband a hard time because he can slam out a term paper for his PhD in a few days, whereas mine take a couple weeks because I have to actually learn something new first. I'm going to call it a sign that the education is working.) Every so often when some interesting environmental information comes down the pipeline I'll go ahead and put it up here.
*****
And second, there's the baby. Don't have much to say about this one as it hasn't happened yet. We're going with cloth diapers and EC, so we'll let you guys know how it works out- I figure that's fair game for a green blog.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Speaking of Vision...
...Here is a great blog post by the ever-so-visionary Julie M. Smith. You will notice that later posters unfortunately failed to catch the vision and went on to quibble about how unrealistic it is to expect a house to be as clean and quiet as a temple etc. Well, DUH. Julie was perceptive enough to realize that there is more to a temple than neatness and quiet, and it's those other things that she's talking about.
http://www.timesandseasons.org/?p=4164
I loved Sister Beck's talk (and Julie's subsequent post) because of how much she emphasized keeping ourselves in line with the things that truly matter. And I can post this on a sustainability-oriented blog, because that's what sustainability's about too. : )
http://www.timesandseasons.org/?p=4164
I loved Sister Beck's talk (and Julie's subsequent post) because of how much she emphasized keeping ourselves in line with the things that truly matter. And I can post this on a sustainability-oriented blog, because that's what sustainability's about too. : )
Monday, February 4, 2008
A Proper Introduction for LDSustainability!
Here's a proper shout-out to the excellent blog found at ldsustainability.blogspot.com. I think our blogs started at about the same time- must have been the Holy Ghost. : ) This guy's blog is a good go-to place for quotes and cited sources on the environment in LDS theology (and extended, high-quality ruminations thereon). I'm really excited about that because I know the quotes are out there but can never find them. (Now we have something to cite in Sunday School! Hoo-rah!)
Not to mention, his blog is a little more high-brow than this one. Not that that's hard.
Not to mention, his blog is a little more high-brow than this one. Not that that's hard.
This'll quench the thirst right outta ya
So this post is about pollution and doesn't really have anything to do with Mormon-ness directly, but I was so darn impressed by this link I had to post it anyway. Wait- it sort-of relates to self-sufficiency, because: While daydreaming about the setup we're going to have on the farm, I think it would be a good idea to have a cistern/pond filled by roof runoff. A very do-it-yourselfy, self-reliant sort of thing to do. But then sometimes I think "Ew! Cisterns are prone to getting full of tadpoles and tadpole pee! Do I really want to make that kind of open-ended commitment to ecology? Even parasitologists have their limits, said limit usually being their mouth." But once I read some of these case studies on crazy sewer/potable water system mixups that have happened, living the unplugged life swillin' tadpole pee starts to look pretty good. Some are sort of boring (#21, the nickel-plating plant). Some are good for eliciting giggles from engineers (#7, the one where an air compressor at a dentist's office got confused and tried to keep the entire city's potable water supply at 80 psi... of air). Some are just... WOW (the hospital, the mortuary, and the poultry plant).
One entry of note is #28, where it appears that a line connecting "reclaimed water" (either greywater or mostly-but-not-completely-treated sewage water, I'm not quite sure which) to somebody's irrigation system got crossed and ended up pumping about 50,000 gallons of said reclaimed water into the town's drinking water pipes. Oops! Doesn't sound like anyone got hurt though. Go greywater! And #30 happened to me while working as a waitress at, we'll say the big Mexican restaurant in Provo that's not Beto's. The water out of the taps was salty for about 10 minutes... I'd wondered what kind of sinister forces could have been at work there, and this is not making me feel any better about it.
Without any further ado, here's the link. Things to think about: http://www.treeo.ufl.edu/backflow/casehist.aspx#6
One entry of note is #28, where it appears that a line connecting "reclaimed water" (either greywater or mostly-but-not-completely-treated sewage water, I'm not quite sure which) to somebody's irrigation system got crossed and ended up pumping about 50,000 gallons of said reclaimed water into the town's drinking water pipes. Oops! Doesn't sound like anyone got hurt though. Go greywater! And #30 happened to me while working as a waitress at, we'll say the big Mexican restaurant in Provo that's not Beto's. The water out of the taps was salty for about 10 minutes... I'd wondered what kind of sinister forces could have been at work there, and this is not making me feel any better about it.
Without any further ado, here's the link. Things to think about: http://www.treeo.ufl.edu/backflow/casehist.aspx#6
Thursday, January 31, 2008
The Coolest Thing I Ever Didn't Post
So earlier today I was checking out LDS Sustainablist's lovely blog (see sidebar link! Ka-ching) and started writing a comment. Then it turned out to be really long and I reread it and thought "Dadgumn, this is pretty good. I shoulda put that on *my* blog!" So anyway, if you want to humor me in the most shameless self-promotion I think I've ever done outside of a job interview, you should read it and check out the rest of the blog too. He's got a lot of links and sources that I'd always wanted to put up but never actually did (and now don't have to, heh heh heh. Thanks!)
http://ldsustainability.blogspot.com/2008/01/commentary-thank-you-mr-andrew-sullivan.html
http://ldsustainability.blogspot.com/2008/01/commentary-thank-you-mr-andrew-sullivan.html
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Barn Cat Ecology and Other Related Thoughts
Even with the farm being in the Deep Planning stage still, I've been thinking a lot about... cats. Barn cats are a farming tradition because they keep rats and mice out of the barn: very agreeable. Most barn cats I've known were also friendly little guys, and good at sleeping the laziest possible position in any spot of sunlight that's positioned so that they can both watch you work and sleep at the same time. I like barn cats.
All that being said, I'm pretty sure we're not going to have any. We have to consider the farm in terms of an ecosystem, and there's just plain no place for cats. The number-one reason for this is there's no way you make a barn cat stay in the barn and only kill rats and mice. It's going to wander around and kill all kinds of other things, most of which are actually native and we'll be wanting to conserve: birds, snakes, lizards, large insects (bugs big enough to get a cat's attention are often predators on other bugs- or dung beetles, which are good for everybody because they bury manure), etc.
Let's consider all the other reasons I don't think we need cats to farm.
-Mousing and ratting can be taken care of very capably by chickens and terriers. No joking- chickens will hunt down and eat mice. They tell me when you see it, you really believe those things are descended from Velociraptor. Nummy free-range eggs, anybody?
In addition, cats don't do too well against rats of any respectable size anyway. For quality ratting you need a terrier, and if you're truly serious about keeping the population down the only real answer is to not provide them with food and shelter. That's right, sanitation... which is a good idea anyway if you're making food.
-Toxoplasma and other zoonotic diseases. [Aha! you say. There she goes on about parasites again. I promise this also has a point] Contrary to the hype about pregnant ladies not changing litterboxes, most people do NOT get Toxoplasma from cat poop. Most people get it from eating undercooked meat from animals that have been around cat poop. Toxo makes its living by residing in cat innards and laying eggs, which after making their grand exit get eaten by rodents and livestock and who knows what else. These eggs then hatch in this non-cat host and make their way into the muscle tissues, where they sit back and wait for their host to get eaten by some other cat. Felines of all sizes seem to make good hosts for egg-laying adult toxo, and in nature it's a fairly good bet when an herbivore meets its end that a cat of some sort was involved.
Sometimes, however, toxo's tidy little plan gets derailed. Instead of a cat, an herbivore full of toxo cysts gets eaten by a human! Darn the luck! It won't be able to grow up and lay eggs in *that* kind of homestead. But, unless killed by very thorough cooking, it will still put forth a good-faith effort and try to grow. In most people it doesn't get very far before being nuked by the immune system. However, in pregnant ladies without any previous exposure it can affect the fetus; in the immunosuppressed, elderly, or very young it can cause neurological problems. Dain bramage.
An outdoor, barn-mousing cat is almost guaranteed to have toxo thanks to a steady diet of rodents. An outdoor, barn-mousing cat is also guaranteed to poop in all kinds of places where the livestock are guaranteed to put their mouths- such as, say, the ground. So the short version is that if I have cats around, any meat I sell to people is a hazardous material if not cooked into the shoe-leather stage. That's the power of ecology, folks, and people don't buy grass-fed organic meat so they can cook it into the shoe-leather stage.
For this very reason we're also going to be fairly vigilant about trapping & killing feral cats that show up on our property. I know that's going to turn a lot of people off, and if it makes you feel any better I'm not exactly excited about it either. Remember how I like kitties? But here's the thing. For a wild (or feral) animal a natural death is the only unnatural death. Everything dies eventually; people are very unique in the sense that we often do it via old age. Starvation, disease, being run over, freezing to death, or getting torn up by raccoons are about the only options feral cats have. I have to wonder sometimes what exactly the trap-neuter-release folks think they are saving feral animals from by not allowing them to be euthanized.
This also leads into all kinds of "How can you eat meat?!" questions, but that's enough for now. : )
All that being said, I'm pretty sure we're not going to have any. We have to consider the farm in terms of an ecosystem, and there's just plain no place for cats. The number-one reason for this is there's no way you make a barn cat stay in the barn and only kill rats and mice. It's going to wander around and kill all kinds of other things, most of which are actually native and we'll be wanting to conserve: birds, snakes, lizards, large insects (bugs big enough to get a cat's attention are often predators on other bugs- or dung beetles, which are good for everybody because they bury manure), etc.
Let's consider all the other reasons I don't think we need cats to farm.
-Mousing and ratting can be taken care of very capably by chickens and terriers. No joking- chickens will hunt down and eat mice. They tell me when you see it, you really believe those things are descended from Velociraptor. Nummy free-range eggs, anybody?
In addition, cats don't do too well against rats of any respectable size anyway. For quality ratting you need a terrier, and if you're truly serious about keeping the population down the only real answer is to not provide them with food and shelter. That's right, sanitation... which is a good idea anyway if you're making food.
-Toxoplasma and other zoonotic diseases. [Aha! you say. There she goes on about parasites again. I promise this also has a point] Contrary to the hype about pregnant ladies not changing litterboxes, most people do NOT get Toxoplasma from cat poop. Most people get it from eating undercooked meat from animals that have been around cat poop. Toxo makes its living by residing in cat innards and laying eggs, which after making their grand exit get eaten by rodents and livestock and who knows what else. These eggs then hatch in this non-cat host and make their way into the muscle tissues, where they sit back and wait for their host to get eaten by some other cat. Felines of all sizes seem to make good hosts for egg-laying adult toxo, and in nature it's a fairly good bet when an herbivore meets its end that a cat of some sort was involved.
Sometimes, however, toxo's tidy little plan gets derailed. Instead of a cat, an herbivore full of toxo cysts gets eaten by a human! Darn the luck! It won't be able to grow up and lay eggs in *that* kind of homestead. But, unless killed by very thorough cooking, it will still put forth a good-faith effort and try to grow. In most people it doesn't get very far before being nuked by the immune system. However, in pregnant ladies without any previous exposure it can affect the fetus; in the immunosuppressed, elderly, or very young it can cause neurological problems. Dain bramage.
An outdoor, barn-mousing cat is almost guaranteed to have toxo thanks to a steady diet of rodents. An outdoor, barn-mousing cat is also guaranteed to poop in all kinds of places where the livestock are guaranteed to put their mouths- such as, say, the ground. So the short version is that if I have cats around, any meat I sell to people is a hazardous material if not cooked into the shoe-leather stage. That's the power of ecology, folks, and people don't buy grass-fed organic meat so they can cook it into the shoe-leather stage.
For this very reason we're also going to be fairly vigilant about trapping & killing feral cats that show up on our property. I know that's going to turn a lot of people off, and if it makes you feel any better I'm not exactly excited about it either. Remember how I like kitties? But here's the thing. For a wild (or feral) animal a natural death is the only unnatural death. Everything dies eventually; people are very unique in the sense that we often do it via old age. Starvation, disease, being run over, freezing to death, or getting torn up by raccoons are about the only options feral cats have. I have to wonder sometimes what exactly the trap-neuter-release folks think they are saving feral animals from by not allowing them to be euthanized.
This also leads into all kinds of "How can you eat meat?!" questions, but that's enough for now. : )
Monday, January 21, 2008
They Call Me Dr. Worm
So as you can see I've been thinking about the Hygiene Hypothesis lately, that newest addition to pop medical theory. The basic idea is that our bods are designed to fight off nasties, and without nasties, the bod becomes bored to tears and starts to gnaw on itself out of sheer ennui.
Now, here's one thing I've noticed. When you look at popular press pieces about the Hygiene Hypothesis, it's all cheery stuff about how it's ok to send your kid to day care, because colds and flus are actually *good.* They keep them from getting other health problems like allergies, asthma, autoimmune disease, etc. It also follows then that vaccines are bad, because they keep you from getting sick. Never mind that the current allergy and asthma epidemic still managed to happen despite scads of kids being in day care. That would be critical thinking, not guilt alleviation, thanks.
When you look at the actual medical literature, of which there is quite a bit, colds and flus and vaccines aren't even mentioned. (Except for "These aren't the pathogens we're looking for.") You know what is? A little bit of endotoxins (outer coats from gram-negative bacteria... they live in poop, among other things), some hepatitis A, even cold-sore herpes. But mostly... Worms! Tapeworms! Ascarids! Nematodes and pinworms and flukes, hooray! Now why is it that the popular press doesn't want to come out and say it like it is?
Here's the part where it becomes a) boring and b) explicit. This is basic worm ecology for anybody who cares, I'm starting to think they're rather charming as long as they stay in the petri dish.
The #1 Rule for a parasite (or symbiont) is Don't Kill Your Host. I didn't realize it until I started working here and they had me sit in on the vet students' Livestock Parasitology class, but this means they don't actually reproduce inside their host's gut. Then they would crowd themselves out, and that would be rather silly. What they do is lay eggs that require some outdoors time to hatch (and then they have to get eaten by the right host before they desiccate and expire. Being a nematode is difficult.) Tricky, eh? This is why a lot of them have complicated life cycles with multiple hosts- it lets them get outside their main host and survive a season while migration, weather, etc bring on good circumstances to reinfect fresh uncrowded new hosts. So basically, if you have a nice low therapeutic dose of worms in your caecum, they're not going to go outta control on you.
Worms really do perform some voodoo on the host immune system because they plan on being there for a long time (unlike most bacteria) and would like not to get nuked. Since until the last 50-100 years everybody had worms, we never really developed a good way to keep house without the little darlings. We had come to depend on them; in a sense, a low worm population is more of a symbiotic relationship than parasitic.
So that's the Hygiene Hypothesis, folks: Worms. Anybody who tells you different is trying to sell something. An anti-vaccination book, perhaps.
*******************
And since vaccines work by giving the immune system something to work on, rather than prevent it from ever coming into contact with germs.... Hygiene Hypothesis as an argument against them is just asinine, isn't it?
Now, here's one thing I've noticed. When you look at popular press pieces about the Hygiene Hypothesis, it's all cheery stuff about how it's ok to send your kid to day care, because colds and flus are actually *good.* They keep them from getting other health problems like allergies, asthma, autoimmune disease, etc. It also follows then that vaccines are bad, because they keep you from getting sick. Never mind that the current allergy and asthma epidemic still managed to happen despite scads of kids being in day care. That would be critical thinking, not guilt alleviation, thanks.
When you look at the actual medical literature, of which there is quite a bit, colds and flus and vaccines aren't even mentioned. (Except for "These aren't the pathogens we're looking for.") You know what is? A little bit of endotoxins (outer coats from gram-negative bacteria... they live in poop, among other things), some hepatitis A, even cold-sore herpes. But mostly... Worms! Tapeworms! Ascarids! Nematodes and pinworms and flukes, hooray! Now why is it that the popular press doesn't want to come out and say it like it is?
Here's the part where it becomes a) boring and b) explicit. This is basic worm ecology for anybody who cares, I'm starting to think they're rather charming as long as they stay in the petri dish.
The #1 Rule for a parasite (or symbiont) is Don't Kill Your Host. I didn't realize it until I started working here and they had me sit in on the vet students' Livestock Parasitology class, but this means they don't actually reproduce inside their host's gut. Then they would crowd themselves out, and that would be rather silly. What they do is lay eggs that require some outdoors time to hatch (and then they have to get eaten by the right host before they desiccate and expire. Being a nematode is difficult.) Tricky, eh? This is why a lot of them have complicated life cycles with multiple hosts- it lets them get outside their main host and survive a season while migration, weather, etc bring on good circumstances to reinfect fresh uncrowded new hosts. So basically, if you have a nice low therapeutic dose of worms in your caecum, they're not going to go outta control on you.
Worms really do perform some voodoo on the host immune system because they plan on being there for a long time (unlike most bacteria) and would like not to get nuked. Since until the last 50-100 years everybody had worms, we never really developed a good way to keep house without the little darlings. We had come to depend on them; in a sense, a low worm population is more of a symbiotic relationship than parasitic.
So that's the Hygiene Hypothesis, folks: Worms. Anybody who tells you different is trying to sell something. An anti-vaccination book, perhaps.
*******************
And since vaccines work by giving the immune system something to work on, rather than prevent it from ever coming into contact with germs.... Hygiene Hypothesis as an argument against them is just asinine, isn't it?
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