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Wholesome: An agroecology professor called on me to describe the primary contradiction of capitalism
(hexbear.net)
And then after class said that she would like to teach another one where the question is "should we even have a livestock industry at all?". I told her that I'd love to teach one where I just make the students repeatedly read The Jungle and Grapes of Wrath until they start burning shit down and she replied that it already seems like we're heading that way.
My only good professor.
Agroecology people have always, without fail, been the coolest people in food studies events or conferences. Something about working with the land rather than forcing it to give food just soft radicalizes you.
I'm going the ecology route because it's just getting paid to be a Marxist. Nature is the proof of dialectics and the most interdisciplinary field I could find in urban ecology is the most intersectional political project at the root of eco-Marxism. Agroecology consulting is one career track I considered because it's turning dialectical materialism into a fun little puzzle with tractors.
How much of that field is just working with uncaring wealthy livestock farmers? I ask because I have a friend who went into Environmental Science and struggled to find work that wasn't just appeasing those people.
That's what kept me from going into it. The separation of town and country is important to me from either side of it, but rural communities here are extremely reactionary and the businesses are mostly wealthy landowners. I don't want them to stay in business and I want their land to be public, so sustaining what exists just feels like repainting hell. In urban ecology what I want just makes the city more pleasant to live in and my customer base is every taxpayer. It's a lot easier to feel good about most of my work and advocate against the greenspace I don't like.
I couldn't hack the biology of it all, so I went the social sciences/humanities route, and now I'm looking to go to grad school for Food and Rural social Geographies.
The hard science classes were so difficult for me, only proving that I'm not a biologist/chemist/physicist/programmer/mathematician. My only scientific skillset is what made me good with medicine or the humanities. I can apply a bunch of analytical angles to a messy subject that I understand contextually and spot the contradictions as part of dynamic processes. Geography seems like it'd be such an amazing field for that. David Harvey's work was huge for me refining those skills.