Autumn is the best season

Autumn has always been my favorite time of year, but this past weekend when I took my little sister and her friend to a pumpkin farm, I discovered a whole new appreciation for the season. While my sister went off in search of the best pumpkin ever, I sort of just roamed through the field. It was interesting to see the way the difference in the soil around the pumpkin, versus the soil around the perimeter. I also noticed that the darker the soil, the brighter the pumpkin. I am not sure as to whether or not this indicated healthier soil. It did however seem to produce the better pumpkin. I tried to make a connection to the soil and how it gains its energy from dead organic matter, but I couldn't seem to reach a good conclusion. However, I enjoyed being able to relate the topics we discussed in class, to my trip.

Note of footprint

Ramina raises a important point: how reliable are these data? We will be discussing the theory behind these estimates in a future class, but it might be worth a word or two now:
The footprint makes an estimate of the amount of land needed to sustain human food production, the physical land needed to produce our energy resources, the amount of land needed to produce our timber resources, the amount of land needed to sequester carbon produced from burning of fossil fuels etc. The tally starts to mount rapidly when we fly or drive a lot (lots of land needed to both produce our energy as as a sink for our wastes), when we eat a lot of meat (meat requires a lot more land to produce than vegetables (since the animals eat plants and do so inefficiently)), when we live in a large home that is not energy efficient.

Although, it is tempting to disregard this test as a tedious piece of enviro-promotion, my reading of this over the years is that the footprint in a fairly rigorously developed bit of modeling, and cannot be easily disregarded. It was developed by respectable academic scientists.

We will discuss this later but for now play around with this.

My footprint is 14 acres, we would need 3.2 planets to support >6 billion Liams. If I made our house more energy efficient (we usually keep our house colder that most people would like), bought more of our food locally (reduced transportation costs), and if I did not fly, I could get this down to 1.6 planets. We are planning to get solar panels for our house, and we are optimisitic that we can but more of our food from the farmer's market. I fly to several meeting for my job each year - at the moment it may be difficult to minimize this.

Thought I'd share

Liam

Show Me the Money

Everything I spent money this weekend a little voice in my head would say, "do you absolutely need this". Not that I usually just throw money away, but sometimes I buy items just because I like them, not because I actually have a use for them. The money management assignment allowed me to see how wisely and unwisely I spend my money. For the most part I think I do a pretty good job. For instance, I will save my money for awhile and then splurge on something I really want. However, there are those occasional outbursts where I just spend my money on anything. It is those sprees that I need to be conscience of, especially now that I am away at school. I noticed that I spend too much money on coffee, or magazines. Those are definitely things I can do without. In short, I am really going to pay close attention to my spending, and even better attention to my saving.