Resilience

It has been an exhausting week. The height of grant/fellowship season, a string of authors coming to class, a beautiful visit, an election, a cross-country email argument shitstorm, the arrival of a third roommate into the house, the impromptu visit of said roommate's parents... Estoy cansada.

But it goes on, I go on. One more big fellowship application due this week, plus an essay that I'm actually looking forward to writing. After handing in the NSF proposal essays to our profs as our last writing assignment, this week's paper is supposed to be a retheorization of our project with these profs in mind as audience instead of scientistic strangers, drawing on stuff we've read so far this semester. Which is fabulous stuff, so I'm excited about it...

I've started thinking about Foucault's (drawing on Nietzsche) concept of geneology, and writing the geneology of the Petén instead of its history. And I'm trying to draw on ideas of "contact zones" and the anthropology of encounters, but to make land (under which I subsume soil, trees, water, air, petroleum, bugs, heat, etc) an active player in these encounters, as opposed to its usual role as either a passive site of encounter or the constructed object of discourses that arise out of that encounter. It is those things too, but it is more.

This is theoretically tricky, making land speak, while simultaneously arguing that none of the other groups I write about (scientists, conservationists, agricultural migrants, returned refugees, Q'eqchi' Maya, whomever) have a solid claim to the position of speaking for land. And, of course, in my attempts to claim that land speaks for itself (by resisting all other claims to its voice), I myself am speaking for land in my voice, in my text... So, that's kinda funny. We'll see what these smarty-pants professors say about that.

In other news, I finally met for real with my advisor recently, and he's awesome. Super nice, super smart, very encouraging, full of helpful critiques, has two cute kids, a british accent, generally an all around acceptable mentor. As we were talking about my proposal, he picked up on a little comment about (be still my heart) non-equilibrium ecology and its incredible potential as a framework for solving these messy conservation problems. He said something along the lines of, "Oh, yes, I know that piece [which I cite in my proposal] by Zimmerer - such a lovely idea. But so idealistic. You know the lawyers would have a fit, all that business about shifting boundaries and flexibility. Of course it would work, but in the end there's going to be some lawyer somewhere who needs a line drawn on a piece of paper, and it will just never happen"


zfffft. That is the sound of my idealistic bubble being burst, just like that. The line, and the citation, were cut from my final proposal draft, for mostly different reasons.

But, with a little distance, I realize the ol' panarchy can get me right around the side of that bubble. Or under it, or inside of it, or around and on top of it. Why even try to engage at the level of lawyers, when smaller scales and the changes that occur on them can and will eventually feed back (revolt!) into larger ones, precipitating collapse phases on greater and greater levels, like a forest fire spreading from a spark, or like the US-world economy which continues to crumble around us, setting loose resources from their entrenched structures and creating opportunity for revision and reorganization. (Whether or not that opportunity is turned to good use or not is another question entirely).

Hey, looks like I'm still pretty idealistic after all. See ya later nation-states; hello, panarchical world governance. Ha!

Of course, if that doesn't work, we can go back to what Shakespeare suggested, and just kill all the lawyers.