Spring has been creeping upon Newfoundland, though during my walk home today snowflakes were falling. The snow has melted into small heaps of gravel which was kicked up from the roads. It lends everything a strikingly gray, lumpy look, making me wonder how it all gets clean again.
I went to a presentation this evening about snow geese overpopulation and effects on salt marshes. It was connected, of course, to everything else in the world, as ecology (and sociology) tends to be. The rise in snow geese populations is a line that fits nicely onto the rising line for nitrogen used on corn fields in the midwest, and the subsequent productivity of those corn fields. I just had a final for my students, and one of the questions was about the Green Revolution - a time from the 1970s (through today) that we intensified crop production through various inputs, genetic modification, and monoculture plantations, leading to all sorts of unexpected results. This was certainly what Max Weber meant when he said that the modern virtues of efficiency and predictability lead to unintended consequences. The problem, of course, is that humans do not learn, or cannot learn as fast as they can do, and so we are constantly analyzing our own mistakes while making new ones.
I've been playing a lot of Settlers lately, between my usual walks and (now) walking up stairs that never go anywhere at the gym. Hockey season has ended, and I am sad. I think I made about 10 games, each time an improvement on the ice. By the end, I was able to stop confidently on one side and hesitantly on the other; I could receive and make passes; and I could skate backwards pretty fast. I'm inordinately proud of myself. Now I'm watching the Stanley Cup, which I have learned is a series of games and not just the championship. I am rooting for the Boston Bruins because I like their uniforms and they look like lurking, grizzled comic book heroes. Everyone else around here seems to be for the Montreal Canadiens, who are shorter and pluckier.
I continue to wear my winter hat (toque) nearly everyday, often indoors. My reflection has a bouncing ball on top of my head, making me look like an exotic creature.
This weekend M and I are headed to Twillingate to hopefully see icebergs and definitely see quaint Newfoundlandia. I went to a conference last week about rural revitalization and then I was talking with a friend who told me that Newfoundlanders might not want revitalization, they just want to keep living as they have. And I thought that was a nice idea, but you can't stand still in a moving current. So they cut wood and make lovely jams and shoot moose, but their kids leave and they scratch their heads at it. Several speakers at the conference said that kids these days are only interested in their ipods, but I wondered at the type of kids who would go into industries that are, clearly and implacably, dying. There aren't a lot of options for the kids to stay, and so they leave. They're trained to leave. It's an unintended consequence of mechanization, sure, of globalization and neoliberalism and a complacency in the pursuit of cheap. Weber said that we create iron cages - that our cultural rules are wound around us until we cannot move. I think he meant that we cannot make choices within the systems we've created, that what started as meaning becomes suffocating, ritualistic. We oversee the slow death of something that we thought we cared about, but that we don't know how to save.
I can't claim to really care about Newfoundlandia. I might just like the idea of it. And do I care if it disappears? I don't know. I suppose I would care about the loss of the funny accents, and the storytelling. I'm just an advocate for diversity, and yet I work against it. I've taught English, the great homogenizer in the world; I'm here to watch the Newfoundlanders as an ethnographer, taking notes on their decline. I'm here to analyze the mistakes of the past while making new ones as quickly as I can.
