Week One - Journal Entry

So when I can find the time, I read books on organic farming. A previous degree in Sustainable Systems has led me to imagine, someday a small farm. Lavender? Organic veggies...something. Usually I read a chapter or two before I drift off at night. My most recent find, The Quarter Acre Farm, by Spring Warren, details a season of organic food production off of her quarter acre lot in California. She discusses her issues with cabbageworms. Her organic response? Bt - a naturally occurring biologic agent. It did the trick. And companies took notice: "Companies have now engineered plants that express the endotoxin (what applications of Bt produce to infect insect larvae) directly without the help of bacteria. Unfortunately, insects are now quickly building resistance to the plant-expressed endotoxin, something that doesn't happen quickly with the natural bacterium". While hardly a surprising scenario...I had been hearing about the development of superbugs and superweeds as a response to herbicides, pesticides, fungicides since high school. Her following musings related to how I felt about the "Positivism" as presented in the Schon piece:
"Sometimes it seems that science is the environment's brilliant little sister, watching learning growing, and is mostly incredibly cool and much loved. Yet, though brilliant, she's also sometimes a sophomoric, bratty, and irresponsible little sister, so that Environment keeps shouting to Mother Nature. "Mo-ther! Tell Science to keep out of my stuff! She keeps messing everything up!" Positivism, I suppose, at its worst. And yet, obviously, different incarnations of research has a valued place. I began to get at this in the Sustainable Systems program, where students started to grapple with a construct of a complexity of science -- systems as related to and not divorced from human practice. The concept of ecology...which, interestingly enough, seems to be a term increasingly finding its way into composition research to describe complexities of language as situated in specific human constructs (based on some reviews I started in the literacy class, I started looking at previous articles in CCC, and found the term "ecology" as a metaphor to describe complexities of literate practices. For now, the term suits my ever-expanding view of what literacy is...though I realize there is much excavating to be done on my part in pursing this comparison.