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Nov. 28th, 2013 04:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogWoohoo! 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*
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*
