Sunday, October 21, 2012

i live in a peculiar place

i live in a peculiar place…a nexus between agriculture and suburban sprawl…close enough to the lake to be part of the milwakee to detroit megapolis but far enough from the urban center that i can still find corn and soybeans growing unfettered within ten minutes of my current shelter…the field of soybeans and the cornfield i photographed all summer represent a part of the industrial agricultural system in this country, but the soybeans grew next to a strip mall parking lot and the cornfield is bordered on the north by a walmart and a hospital on the west…all dominated by a municipal water tower…the south and east of the field are bordered by paved roads with adequate street lighting and storm sewers and, until the recent ( and continuing…despite politically expediently cooked books ) economic slump , was doubtlessly intended to be part of the suburban sprawl…so the plant geneticists continue to develop crops that allow us to subsume agricultural land with the “growth” mechanism of suburban mortgages, one wonders how long that can go on…or if there is a natural limit to unnatural manipulation…there must have been an ecosystem here once…before it was overrun by dense yellow number two and zoysia grass…bits and pieces of it crop up in my garden and in my back yard…some by human intervention ( Jerusalem artichokes and ginseng )…others all on their own ( lamb’s quarters )…there’s a lot in my back yard that isn’t native ( apple trees, Chinese yams, whet, teosinte, maize. Garlic, etc.) but they seem to get along with the natives okay…does that represent an ecosystem or is it just more human intervention? i’m incline to think the latter because it probably wouldn’t be there without me…but does that make it unnatural? does using biological processes for my own ends fundamentally change those processes or am i just providing them space? how much a part of this am i ?

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