Land Acknowledgement / Arborescence

underground green readings

I read these two short image pieces that I wrote in late 2022 and early 2023 at my event in New York City this past weekend, so I wanted to post them here on my blog. They’re both fragments from the same larger thing about the green midwest that I was working on then, am no longer working on now, but may one day resume.

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LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

For millennia, on this very land, prairie grass swayed ceaselessly under summer sun and died under winter snows. Generations of dead prairie piled on top of each other in communal graves to form the richest soil on the planet. Bison roamed. Snakes lay in wait. The prairie grass stood taller than a man for hundreds of miles. Lewis and Clark walked through it on their westward journey, and that was the herald of the end. In just two centuries, the dynasty fell. We call what came after “the cornfields”, but it took just as much land for soybeans. Our planet’s perfect prairie soil was terraformed into the corn-soy empire. Corn and soy presented as edible food, but this was a trick, to keep the children from asking too many questions when they sat in the backseat of the car looking out the window at the empire’s exposed innards on the way to their grandmother’s house. The empire was too big to hide itself so it had to resort to such tricks. 

Almost none of what was produced in the former prairie was directly eaten by humans. This was an empire spanning millions of acres, producing incomprehensible quantities of corn and soy. If America tried to eat it all directly it would gorge itself. Three-fourths of the soy and half of the corn were fed to livestock. A third of the corn and some of the soybeans were converted to fuel. In terms of the tiny portion of the crops that went to human food, most of the soy went to vegetable oil, and most of the corn went to corn syrup: edibility questionable. What was happening out here was not agriculture in the ancient sense. This was conversion of energy from the immortal sun above and from the corpse of the old prairie below. Corn and soy not as crops, but as biological machines of energy extraction. 

The true purpose of the cornfields is the open secret I want to acknowledge. The hidden secret is that the prairie isn’t really gone. It sets up base on the side of the road, in abandoned lots, at the bottom of quarries, in forgotten parks where tax dollars have run too low for the ruthless blade of the lawnmower to assert itself. Out of human eye, the old grasses and wildflowers struggle against the weedy invaders that the corn-soy empire brings as its anti-native enforcement wing. A difficult battle, but the noble exiled prairie perseveres. Never does the prairie forget its claim to rule. The prairie subsists in the margins of error, margins too awkward for the empire to reach. These corners of resistance are not a real threat to corn-soy. They’re a minor annoyance already factored into its soulless profit projections. But the corn-soy empire is the sworn enemy of the prairie. Usurper of the birthright land, drainer of ancestral reserves. Every night the prairie waits, cloaked in darkness, moonlit dagger shining, plotting its revenge.

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ARBORESCENCE

Imagine this: your body, but you're standing tall rigid and dignified, not slouched over all the time. You’re always standing still but it's not out of lethargy; the stillness is part of who you are. You’re protected from the world by a rough coating that's still pleasant to the touch. Every day, you reach out with green fingers towards the sky to catch its light. 

With the light in your fingers you grow bigger. You feel your past totally within yourself at every moment. You grow in rings that clearly delineate your life into “eras” that while distinct are totally complete. And even though they’re distinct and complete they build on top of each other. You have no moments of failure, no reversions to a previous weaker state. You are always growing stronger, and all you have to do is reach out.