[tamil]

I feel odd for putting up this old picture, but I don’t think that many of you have had a chance to see this shot. Despite all the other shots that I’ve taken, I think that this is my favorite one to date. Those mountains out West are incredible. I’m headed up to Virginia for the weekend for some good family time and loads of reading. It’s insane to me how intense this semester is, but I have to say that it comes at the right time. I’ve been meaning to buckle down, and hard information is the best stuff to buckle down into. I may have decided my field of study, too. I’ve been talking to Kaleb a lot about it, and I think I’ve come to the realization that the sociopolitical qualities of conservation really piss me off. I think that culture is incredibly important, but that figuring out alternative forms of resource consumption that can work with local communities but not deny them the agency to develop into the world scope, as it seems is relatively inevitable. I want to investigate the under-appreciated institution of scientific conservation alongside the cultures that know regions by intuition rather than by science. I could go on about that for a while, but it’s a whole new can of foreign millipedes that I don’t know how to deal with just yet. Sociopolitical conservation just pisses me off too much.

I’m listening to the new Kanye West album. This is some pretty interesting music. Good beats.

Hope that you’re all well.