A Minor Procrastination

OH BOY DO I SUCK RIGHT NOW!
Sitting in an unheated makeshift office in Forest City on Christmas Eve, waiting for a call from my sister to remind me that yes it is christmas, and yes, we are going to make food this afternoon.

I'm having a bad case of holiday-exacerbated can't finish my paperitis, so here. Hopefully by the time christmas finishes, i'll have snuck out enough time to actually finish saying something intelligible, or at least defensible.

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Decision Brainstorm Argument Vomit

Alright, so I titled this paper before I started writing it. Weeks, in fact, before I started writing it, I got so tickled by the notion of calling it "A Feeling of Greenness" that I committed my mind to building a paper around this complex of sentiments. The source material that I drew on in proposing this topic, before the title came even, is an article by Alf Hornborg arguing on the ascendancy of processual contextual models in theorizing ecology, ecology being in no insignificant part a system of meanings, a semeiotic in all of its triadic, Peircian madness.

I could write something over, something mostly borrowed, something along the lines of
Cartesians:
Steward - Niches or dialectic of determinism and adaptation or whatever
Rappaport - Neo-functional, cybernetic, balance/harmony, objectifying, energetic, science model

Non-Dualists/Monists:
Descola - Societies of nature, ontological/epistemological disembedding, processual
Hornborg, Ellen, whoever

Okay, so these later guys are smart - combine them with some articles about indigenous practices and ecological studies carried out by like Erickson, and maybe that Kogi Water system study - talk about good models for socializing nature - blah blah blah, hippie drum circle, ox and plow and hunker down on your farm, etc.

And this is pretty much what I believe at this point, and it's a thing. I've fetishized it as some bit of magical provocation that might bear out repetition in the population, but I feel like even though I've never written this down for this professor, or precisely any professor, I talk through it, I think through it, all the time. It needs a rest.

I want to envision something much more horrible and challenging to glimpse. I want to look at what wizardry governs this space. What is going on here? Who are these tree-like figures, engaged with massive structures forged improbably from raw earth and fantasy.

How did we get to this place? Why come so far to maroon ourselves here? How has the vision of this space changed in the imaginaries that festoon it?

How does all this get thought? How does all this get done? What's good about it? From what perspective? What does it take to grow "food"?

It is weird to try to imagine the leapfrog that has taken place in the agroecology of the midwest over the past century, or even half-century. Turn of the century farmer - embedded in corporeal relations to the beasts of the farm, the wider community of like-arrayed beasts who collaborate in applying their instruments to the earth and tickling nature into fruit - gives way to mid-late century farmer - one to whom are available the heavy machines of a causal superstructure that has blown a complete, Taylorized, factory inside-out over a vast landscape at the same time as reduced the black earth to a pile of tailings, mined in the open and washed out.

What is my argument here without being a part of any of this? Can I make any sense of all this meaning? Am I just viciously picking at an aporia that will not close?

yes