Sign in Subscribe

I'm back, what did I miss?

I'm back, what did I miss?

This Week in the Commons

Not much to report this week, because most of our time since the last newsletter has been spent taking a trip to Virginia for a family memorial service. The trip went well, the memorial was lovely, and it was great to get to spend time with Nate's family. Along the way, Nate and I started speculating about how much biochar it would take to cancel out the carbon emissions of the trip, and I thought it might be a fun exercise to go through the math together.

Round trip, we drove about 1500 miles, with an average fuel efficiency of about 35 miles per gallon. That gets us a total fuel usage of around 42 gallons of gas.

A gallon of gasoline contains about 5.5 lbs of carbon, so we put a total of about 230 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere. (Closer to 840 pounds of CO2, because most of the weight of C02 is contributed by oxygen from the atmosphere, but for biochar purposes we only care about the weight of the carbon.)

Biochar takes carbon out of the atmosphere by taking sticks and twigs that would otherwise decay back into CO2 and transforming the carbon they contain into a crystalline structure that remains stable in the soil for hundreds of thousands of years. It doesn't suck C02 out of the air directly, but over a timespan of ten years or so, it achieves the same results.

Biochar made from hardwoods is usually about 80% carbon, so it would take approximately 290 pounds of biochar to cancel out our road trip, or about a third of what we made at the sugarbush this year.

(And for comparison, if we had flown commercially we'd be looking at a biochar "bill" of around 450lbs, or more than half the sugarbush biochar.)

If you're traveling this summer and you'd like to do your own biochar balancing, let me know! I've got a number of brush piles at Treespeaker I've been meaning to char, and it's always nice to have a second pair of hands for that sort of thing.

Coming Up Next Week

  • Tuesday:
    • 5pm- Whitehall City Council meeting
    • 7pm - Montague Township Council meeting
    • 7:30 - Grant Township Council meeting
  • Friday:
    • 12pm - Dance For Democracy protest at the Weathervane, followed by lunch and postcard writing at North Grove. We'll have pocket constitutions to hand out this week in honor of Nate's grandfather.
  • Saturday:
    • 9am-2pm - Join us at the Artisan Market and learn how to turn junk mail into useful seed packets. We made more than 400 at the market last week!

Food of the Week: Bramble berries

This is a picture of some wineberries that I found on our trip to Virginia, but it's getting to be wild bramble berry season around here too. There are hundreds of species of bramble berries, and they can be a bit tricky to tell apart. Luckily, you don't have to. All bramble berries are non-toxic to humans, so if you find a prickly, shrub-like plant with compound berries, go ahead and give those berries a try.

(In double-checking my info for this section, I did run across the fact that Goldenseal berries are occasionally mistaken for bramble berries and can be toxic, but they're very different plants and should be easy to distinguish. If it's growing on a woody plant and looks like a normal raspberry, it's a true bramble berry. If it's growing on a non-woody plant and looks like a raspberry from some sort of AI hell dimension, that's goldenseal.)

Solidarity Steps

This week's Solidarity Steps is going to focus on opportunities to volunteer with other groups in the area, because we've got lots of neighbors doing cool stuff, and they basically all emailed me while I was in Virginia 😆

  • White Lake Area Climate Action Council is looking for folks to help staff their table and teach people about renewable energy options in our area.
    • They need volunteers for the following events:
      • Saturday July 9, 26 - Montague Artisan Market 9am-12 noon
      • Saturday July 19th - Walk the Beat with White Lake Community Library at WaterDog 1-5pm
      • Saturday August 9 - Montague Artisan Market 9am-12 noon 
      • Saturday August 9 - White Lake Community Library Book Sale 10am - 2pm
      • Wednesday August 13 - Lebanon Lutheran Backpack Giveaway 5pm - 7pm
      • Saturday August 23 - Montague Artisan Market 9am-12 noon
    • You can get in touch through Facebook or Instagram @WLACAC or by emailing them at wlacac@gmail.com
  • There's a new community garden starting up in Whitehall on the defunct tennis court next to City Hall! You can follow them on Facebook to start getting involved.
  • There's an organized effort to get the old dumpsite at Duck Lake State Park cleaned up! Join this Facebook group to learn more.

Recommendation Corner

The New York Times has spent the last several years pushing right wing disinformation about trans people in general, and trans kids in particular. They've played a huge part in normalizing anti-trans ideology among institutional elites, and their work is frequently cited by conservative judges and lawmakers when placing legal restrictions on our access to things like medical care and public restrooms. They've been repeatedly called out for their shoddy reporting on trans issues, including by hundreds of their own reporters, but they've always responded by doubling down.

Their latest effort is a podcast called The Protocol, which focuses on treatment for trans kids, primarily from the perspective of anti-trans extremists like Jamie Reed, whose false testimony was used to shut down medical care for trans kids in the entire state of Missouri. The trans community has been pushing back, but for some reason it's hard for a group that makes up 0.5% of the population and experiences severe employment discrimination to compete with the most prominent newspaper in the United States 🙃

Anyway, if you want to hear journalists with first-hand experience go point by point through the flaws in the Times' latest attempt to whitewash a bigoted moral panic, I highly recommend the latest episode of Cancel Me Daddy. They do a great job of breaking it down and explaining the details without making you tear your hair out.

Concession to Capitalism

Thanks to everyone who chipped in to cover the hosting costs for this newsletter. It's now fully funded for the rest of the year! Our next goal is seeing if we can boost our subscriber numbers. We're currently at 92 subscribers, and I want to see if we can get it up to 120 by the end of the month. So if you've got a local friend who you think might enjoy it, forward it along! And if you're reading this as someone's local friend who got it as a forward, you can sign up for your own subscription at https://newsletter.montaguecommoners.org/

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter! That means you get to see this week's nails. I'm back to a skittle manicure this week, because I finally hit 10 new polishes that I needed to swatch. The bright yellow one on my left index finger glows in the dark, which is mildly alarming when you're sleepy and you don't remember that it does that 😂