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Woohoo! That's a draft!

As I said, I'm basing this largely on my presentation at the AAA conference, so it draws a lot from the fieldwork and observations of myself and the team I was part of. However, in this longer form (an extra 2300 words, which just about doubles the length of the presentation) I also included some theory-based discussion.
Organic production might be more environmentally sustainable than 'traditional' methods, but how do we measure that? As a less energy intensive process, it might require more extensive land use, especially scaled up to a global level. It could result in additional conversion of natural land to agricultural land.

But what do we mean by natural land? As ecological land history shows us (David Foster writing in Forest History Today), there really isn't a fixed 'original' landscape to define as natural.

In terms of preservation versus conservation, I talk a bit about community-based conservation (CBC) (largely from a Fikret Berkes article we read for the class) and a role I see for farmers markets in it. It's important, CBC argues, for individuals to have a personal stake in management of natural resources in order to have people who will act to preserve those resources. While that sounded disturbingly neo-liberal to me at first glance, I'm realizing the validity of that perspective. Farmers markets, by addressing issues of economic sustainability for small farmers, might also address environmental sustainability by keeping said farmers, who have more personal interest in the state of that land than corporate owners of factory farms do, on their land.

I still need to do a few rounds of read-and-revise as well as put together my bibliography. As I write papers, I tend to just use a bunch of fast-and-loose footnotes, then go back at the end and put everything into whatever format I'm supposed to be using. I don't know about you, but I love footnotes and kind of wish every discipline used them. It's one of the nice things about writing in history. They're so much cooler than parenthetical citations. *grins*

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And once this is all done, I want to read more lit about common pool resources!

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I haven't written about my birthday celebration yet.

Some time ago. My thoughtful and awesome partner Danaeris asked me what kind of thing I might want to do for my birthday. She answered herself by saying that, given how busy I've been, the answer was probably 'nothing.' That was prior to the conference, and I'd been going crazy with getting ready. I agreed.

The weekend of my birthday, she came up to Kenosha to give me a chance to spend time with her as well as work on my projects without having to deal with travelling. It was really nice to have her up. My parents had bought me red velvet cupcakes on my actual birthday during the week, but were planning to make a cake and have ice cream and stuff during the weekend.

Sunday afternoon came around, and I was working upstairs on stuff, wearing boxers and a tshirt. Danae told me I ought to get dressed. "Are we going out?" I asked. She responded noncommittally, then got me downstairs once I had pants on. In the living room, I was greeted not only by pizza that they had ordered from Toppers for me (my favorite buffalo chicken), but also by a surprise Posicat! Danae knew I was super-busy and stressy and was not going to organize anything myself, but decided that it would make me really happy to have people she knew I was close to around. She was right.

It was a really wonderful time, having pizza, cake, and ice cream with my family, my girlfriend, and my dear friend Posicat. On top of food, there was half a game of Arkham Horror. (It seems like that's all there's ever time for!) It was a really happy evening. Later in the night, once people had gone home or to bed, I started telling Danae how happy she'd made me and found that expressing it made me cry a few happy tears. Huge thanks and appreciation from me to everyone involved.

As a present, Posi gave me a lens he'd picked up from a thrift store and wasn't using because he's not a fan of primes. It's the Canon 50mm 1.8, which I'm just ecstatic to have! I had one a while ago and really missed it. It's a wonderful portrait lens due to control of depth of field, and if you're used to f3.5 zooms, it's ridiculously fast. It may actually be the only lens I bring to Chiapas with me! (That's partly because it's a fantastic all-purpose lens if you're willing to work around the fixed focal length, and partly because it's a lot cheaper to replace than my 10-22 zoom!) Thanks Posi! *hugs*