In starting this blog, I can't help but wonder what compels us to share the quotidian realities of life with others? Solidarity I suppose, maybe a simple inclination to share, or perhaps an earnest effort to rehabilitate the spirit of the commons. This blog is intended to be an ongoing exploration of the ways in which these quotidian realities are embedded in a larger socio-political matrix that can be either tyrannical or emancipatory, depending on orientation, inclination, or positionality. The politics of everyday life. An extended engagement with the various ways in which localized efforts toward autonomous, unalienated experience and social relations are tempered, in the post Zapatista-world, by the cultivation of broader interconnections and networks.

Besides these more theoretical considerations, it is also a place where a lover of seed saving, forest-skills, vernacular knowledge, and social movements can simply ruminate about such things as inspiration dictates. I suppose I'm interested in linking land-race plant varieties, wild mushroom hunting, and traditional music (among other things) to translocal struggles for global justice. I'm not yet sure what the precise linkage is between Morgan's Kentucky Butcher dent corn, morel mushrooms and, say, the Allianza por la vida y la paz in Guatemala's El Peten department, or PRATEC in the Andes; but I'm sure it's there. Such connections are suggested in la Allianza's campaign slogan of resistance to Plan Puebla Panama--"Agua, Maize, y Tierra son Nuestros" (water, corn, and land are ours). Or in Zambian's refusal of GMO corn shipments from the U.S. amid potential famine conditions. Or the Zapotec's refusal of the same. (More on each of these instances to come). It seems that there could be no greater symbol of resistance to the homogenizing spectacle and inverted truths of corporate economic globalization than the humble seed, saved and perpetuated across generations, or a meal gathered from the woods. But these are not only symbols of resistance, but the substance as well. So, subsistence, understood as the creative mutual labor essential to wresting life from the hands of global consumer society, is innately subversive. How else to account for the nation-state's (and the transnational corporation's) deep investment in and commitment to the elimination and/or assimilation of marginal subsistence populations?--the ongoing project of delivering such peoples from their backwardness, of integrating them/us ("we") into the master narrative of "progress." That may indeed be written as the central struggle of history attending the maturation of the modern world system--one that is still being written. From TVA's first hydroelectric project on the Clinch River in Anderson County, TN in the early 1930s to Three Gorges Dam in contemporary China; from the enclosure of the English commons to privatization of water in the contemporary world--the shadow history of modernity.

So, yes, the paper sack full of caseknife bean seeds my mother sent me in the mail, seeds she was given by her great aunt, is deeply political in its implications--linking generations and place and knowledge and genetic diversity against the alternative. These are much more than just beans.