From Festival Culture to Aggreculture and Back

 In Trinidad and Tobago for 2021 the annual pre Lenten Carnival was cancelled. The University of the West Indies made a call for papers for a virtual carnival symposium: The Mas(s) in We (Re)claiming de People’s Festival. This is my contribution. 

It did not make the cut.

From Festival Culture to Aggreculture* and Back

We live with the possibility of a primal closure. All around us aspects of the modern world - diet, exercise, medicine, art, work, family, philosophy, economics, ecology, psychology - have begun a long circle back toward their former coherence. Whether they can arrive before the natural world is damaged beyond repair and madness destroys humanity we cannot tell. What the West has going for it is the tradition of self-scrutiny, self-criticism, and access historically and scientifically to other cultures. The human psyche makes unremitting demands for physical and spiritual (or symbolic) otherness, and the modern West has the information if not the wisdom for escaping the trap of industrial productivity, corporate blight, and demographic insanity. We can go back to nature because we never left it. Paul Shepard, Coming home to the Pleistocene, 1998

The pre-conquest type of consciousness survives today only in a few, now rapidly vanishing, isolated enclaves. Although widely dispersed, they share a distinctive type of consciousness, one very different from the post-conquest type that dominates the world today. It emerges from a type of child and infant nurture common to that era but shunned in ours. The outstanding demographic condition required for such a life is small populations surrounded by tracts of open territory into which anyone can diffuse virtually at will. This allows those discomfited by local circumstance, or attracted by conditions further on, to move as they wish with whoever might be similarly inclined. This is the case even in the smallest of all the pre-conquest enclaves. The outstanding social condition is a socio-sensual type of infant and child nurture (with constant skin to skin contact) that spawns an intuitive group rapport and unites people without need for formal rules. The outstanding psychological condition is heart-felt rapprochement based on integrated trust. This provides remarkable efficiency in securing needs and responding to nature's challenges while dispensing ongoing delight with people and surroundings. The outstanding economic condition is absence of private property, which allows constant cooperative usage of the implements and materials of life for collective benefit. The human ecology engendered by the interaction of these outstanding conditions makes the forcing of others (including children) to one's will a disruptive and unwholesome practice. Any form of subjugation, even those barriers to freedom imposed by private property, are the kiss of death to this type of life.  Dr E Richard Sorenson, Pre-conquest Consciousness, 1996

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. Arundhati Roy 2020

The Setting

For most of human evolution we were living bioregionally*, crafting cultures appropriate to place. Our languages arose out of the audio-scape specific to the species we shared that space with. Every member of the tribe participated in the making of the artifacts of their culture. We have, from earliest times, organized festive periods of full group, participatory ritual re-enactment of our cultures creation stories. This often involved masquerade and creative use of local, natural materials. Recent reassessment of earlier anthropological work suggests that, in some instances, foraging peoples seasonally switched between large ceremonial, sedentary societies when nature was in glut and small roving bands when prey was more scarce. In some, they organized hierarchically for the settled period and were more egalitarian during the nomadic foraging season. In others it was the opposite. The length of time spent in festival mode varied according to ecological circumstances. In the pre-conquest Polynesian culture of the Pacific islands their harvest thanksgiving would extend over a period of four months. A couple of examples of seasonality in our own bioregion: Certain polities of the Warao from the center of the Orinoco Delta followed an annual nomadic round based on seasonal considerations. Relocating to different habitats in order not to over-exploit the natural resources of their fragile ecosystems. The cycle begins in the south east where they hunt peccary, then moves to the south west where they grow corn and cassava. In the dry season they move north to harvest sago from the Moriche palm. From there the initiates into the sacred art of canoe building would navigate the Serpent's mouth to celebrate their culture hero, Haburi, their first canoe and paddle maker, atNabarima, “father of the waves”, (San Fernando hill), the abode of his spirit and the northern limit of their cosmological universe. This practice was effectively extinguished in the 1930s when the Venezuelan and British authorities imposed a quarantine on the wild dogs that accompanied them. The pre-conquest animist, tribal peoples that inhabited the watershed, of which Port of Spain now sits on the floodplain, moved between the fishing grounds of the mangrove swamp that stretched from Caroni to Cumana in the dry season and up to their gardens on the southern slopes of the Northern Range when the rains bring an effusion of mosquitoes. The presence of Cush cush vines and black earth (biochar) in this area can be seen as evidence for this.

The Opportunity

When complex literate societies use up their energy capital, peak and go into decline, possibilities arise to reconfigure relationships. Greco Roman knowledge was kept alive by the monastics for centuries of “dark ages” before birthing the Renaissance. Starting around 500 AD in Europe the Roman Catholic Church begun instituting new rules on how close cousins could be, to be allowed to marry and forbade parents from touching their children. Whether this was motivated by fear of plague or to increase their land holdings, the consequences included the break up of extended kinship patterns that are normal to most human cultures and eventually to the psychologically distinct WEIRD (Western Educated Individualistic Rich Democratic) outlier demographic of our culture. Ultimately it undermined the power of the Catholic Church and morphed into the Protestant, capitalist, materialist worldview that holds sway to the present. We are again at such a moment of crisis/opportunity. The divide and conquer, globalist monoculture imposed by the industrial growth society (IGS) a.k.a. the Anglo/American empire, is coming apart at the seams as resource depletion meets population growth. It was always going to be a dead end. Now we have the opportunity to consciously localize our politics, economics and festival ontogenesis in keeping with ecological limits and ramify cultural diversity appropriate to place, watershed by watershed.

There is always an optimum and unique way to interact with the geology, the biological communities and the climates we dwell within if cultures are to be resilient and sustainable. When we discharge the historical trauma that holds our ethnic, religious and class antagonisms in place and focus our attention on working together to mind the ecosystems we call home, we will regenerate abundant life and become foragers again. This time we make it our goal to reset to the seasonally celebratory, ceremonial societies of our Paleolithic, pre-conquest past, what Paul Shepard calls the Pleistocene Paradigm.

From Farming to War

I coined the term, *aggreculture, a contraction of aggressive culture, to clarify what that so called “revolution” in the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years ago, really means. It is waging war, full time, on biodiversity to grow mono crops of our favourite foods/addictions. It fueled a population explosion and hence a need for more land and the decision to conquer and enslave our neighbours. The age of empire was born. Spring time festivals celebrated by these farming peoples in Eurasia have come down to us through Christian exegesis as a “resurrection” around the first full moon following the northern spring equinox. Perhaps the most apparent of the aggrecultural revolution’s many social, economic and cultural legacies is the principle that hard work is a virtue, and its inference that individual wealth is a reflection of merit. The credence of a link between hard work and prosperity has played a profound role in reshaping our culture’s destiny. In particular, the ability to both generate and control the distribution of surpluses became a path to power and influence. This laid the foundations for all the key elements of our contemporary economies, and cemented our preoccupation with growth, productivity, trade and the religious belief in “progress”. 

The demise of the finite fossil fuel driven IGS is only one component of the final expression of the era of empires, of power over rather than power with, that has been in collapse for the past few generations after its 5000 year dominance. Equally we have already been in the transition towards the planetary era for over a century. Our current economic, political and social models are not the inevitable consequence of human nature, but a product of historical trauma. With appropriate emotional discharge and re-evaluation, realizing that everyone has always done the best that they could considering how they got hurt, this knowledge will free us to imagine changing the way we relate to our environments, and to one another. 

Societies dependant on aggreculture are much more likely to suffer severe, recurrent and catastrophic famines and pandemics. In contrast, foraging is a low-risk way of making a living. Land based tribal societies have knowledge of many different edible plant species in their bioregions, each of which has a slightly different seasonal cycle, varying in its response to different weather conditions, and occupying a specific environmental niche. When the weather proves unsuitable for one set of species it is likely to benefit another, vastly reducing the risk of famine. As a result, they consider their environments to be eternally provident, and only ever work to meet their immediate needs. They never seek to create surpluses nor over-exploit any key resources. Confidence in the sustainability of their environments is tenacious. When people identify the landscape as family, they mind it and it flourishes, so that they can be supported by it indefinitely.

The Vision

In the post industrial, post scarcity, ecological era our wealth will be measured by the number of intimate relationships we have with the beings we are in symbiotic kinship with in our ecosystems including other humans. Respect will be based on demonstrated integrity. As we explore possibilities for a new normal, we will inevitably abandon the global, extractive, wasteful, debt based, industrial, growth economy and refuse to be consumers of spectacle. Instead we will embrace the local; ecological regeneration; participatory democracy; gift economies; cooperation, generosity, sharing and compassion; experiencing our complete loving connection to all our relations, the universal continuum, as we plan for months of annual festivities. To do this we will need to pay attention to scale and re-inhabit our bioregion as we transform our impact from one of exploitation and degeneration towards becoming healing and regenerative custodians and nurturers of the ecosystems we not only inhabit but will become living expressions of. 

To achieve this participatory, bottom up democracy we begin with education, rolling out courses in Eco Livity [ecology and whole systems] to the whole population. Every urban neighbourhood/rural village (micro watershed/ecosystem) comprising between 150 and 500 individuals, wo/men and children, meets weekly to discuss priorities of community issues. After the talk there is gift sharing, a potluck and local acoustic music and dance. The consensus that is reached at these meetings is taken by a rotating, chosen representative to a monthly meeting of the larger watershed’s councils of between 150 and 500 persons. After the talk there is gift sharing, a potluck and local amplified music and dance to which all residents of the watershed are invited. The same process is repeated at the County/Commons level at quarterly intervals. Subsidiarity informs the role of the Tribal government of the bioregion, that is, to facilitate information flow between Counties that allows for efficient allocation of resources/skills to achieve the goals of the neighbourhoods/villages. The annual celebratory months long gathering of the whole bioregion involves less discussion and more story telling, gift sharing, food, music and dance. The overarching goal of every bioregion is to achieve autonomy by minding each ecosystem within it for optimal biodiversity of species. When every neighbourhood and village is fully independent in food we find fun in the interdependent relationships between ecosystems. 

The ability to tell stories may have given us the competitive advantage over our evolutionary cousins whom we drove into extinction. The stories we told ourselves about our beginnings and how things came to be the way they were, united us in larger group cooperation. (In retrospect it becomes obvious that every worldview is a fiction.) As we begin to re-indigenize with our bioregions we will automatically generate planetary consciousness among all humans, seeing the universal in the local. The time we set aside to come together in ritual ceremony, to remember, to honour, to celebrate and to pass onto the younger generations, the knowledge of our life connections to the ancestors, the plants and animals, the rocks, rivers and breezes of our immediate surroundings, the Earth, the Sun, Moon and stars, will be the motivation for all creativity. In so doing, we might have some questions to consider: Is February/March an appropriate time for humans living in the humid tropics to be celebrating either the beginning of a cycle or its culmination? What season is our period of natural bounty? Is “carnival,” from Latin carn- ‘flesh’ + levare ‘put away,’ meaning “farewell to the meat,” even a suitable word to describe a festival/feast of the tropics? “Fasting” from flesh at winter’s end in temperate climes would have been imposed by natural ecological limits in the pre-conquest cultures. Choosing to fast for this period after the domestication of the Aurox and other ungulates was imposed by artificial, abstract religious observances. Whatever time period we choose for our thanksgiving it will be a time to revel in our ecological and ethnic diversity. John Stollmeyer, January 2021

*What is a bioregion:

- A distinct area with coherent and interconnected plant and animal communities, and natural systems, often defined by a watershed. A bioregion is a whole "life-place" with unique requirements for human inhabitation so that it will not be disrupted and injured.

- A geographical area whose boundaries are roughly determined by nature rather than human beings. One bioregion is distinguished from another by characteristics of flora, fauna, water, climate, rocks, soils, land forms, and the specific human settlements, cultures, and communities these characteristics have engendered. 

- The basic geographic unit that integrates human governance within ecological principals, the minimum area where a human community is able to achieve an autonomous, sustainable, fully democratic lifestyle. In the pre-conquest era identified by a particular indigenous tribal language group.

Trinidad and Tobago, along with parts of the Southern Caribbean are situated in the Orinoco River watershed bioregion.

Foraging our Glorious Future

 All humans everywhere at all times have always done the very best that they could, in every moment, given the information they had available to their conscious awareness at the time. We have always acted, from our heart of hearts, to make the world a better place. In our culture, by the time most of us are adults large parts of our minds are inaccessible due to accumulated un-disharged¹emotional trauma. 

Hominids that were trapped in their bioregions of the near north during the last cold snap in the present Ice Age, for generations, developed survival patterns honed in extreme scarcity. The providential Earth Mother had abandoned her children, there was not enough to go around and the ritual sacrifices were no longer efficacious. The oppressive relationship with women and corporal punishment of children, wars of conquest and fear of scarcity that epitomize our European hegemonic culture was born. 

- Knowing that intercourse would bring into their world another mouth to feed, sexual attraction became fraught with dread. 

- The nigh on constant sound of infants crying from cold and hunger became intolerable and lashing for showing feelings began: Punishment ultimately breeds dishonesty and violence. 

- As the food supply diminished, competition between tribes became necessary and war between kin for access to food/land arose.

- The natural response to un-discharged trauma is to perpetuate the conditions that caused it and so, even though our culture has produced a food surplus every year for the past ten thousand, we choose to create artificial scarcity, putting a high value on what is rare.

Following the retreat of the glaciers that left behind fertile soils up to one hundred feet thick composed of the razed and composted boreal forests and the ground up rock of glacial till, the bare ground became host to the pioneering cereal grains: oats, barley, rye and emmer. The people foraging in this abundance of calories selected for the varieties of emmer that did not drop their seed, that were easier to harvest, thus was wheat created and their population exploded. The Aurox also multiplied whom they likewise domesticated and so was born the wheat/beef people that we can still recognize today by our addiction to the opiate analog exorphins in both: porridge, milk and cookies, bread and butter, cheese toast, macaroni pie, pizza, cheese burger, crix and cheese, cheese cake, cake and ice cream...

The population grew beyond the carrying capacity of their bioregion and our cultural ancestors began waging war on biodiversity as they expanded out from ground zero in the “Caucasus Mountains,” conquering and enslaving their neighbours. This is the birth of aggre-culture². Jared Diamond in his essay, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” calls it catastrophic, as it imitates the destruction of forests wrought by the glaciers. Daniel Quinn in his “Ishmael” trilogy calls it totalitarian as, though it was not the first or only time humans practiced minding our favourite foods, we were the ones who practiced it full time. 

From hamlets to villages to towns to cities, settled life spread, eventually manifesting as the city states of the Sumerians. Their choice of gypsum, limestone and alabaster for the sculpted figurines depicting themselves tells us they were Caucasian. The treatment of the eyes would lead one to suspect that they lived in absolute fear, undischarged in a thousand years of repression. Indigenous peoples around the globe remark this in us still. 

This is the beginning of the age of empire, hierarchical societies that must grow at all costs. Urbanization, standing armies, wars of conquest, haves and have nots, slavery, famine and greed, none of these were normal to the human condition before. However, within a few thousand years this so-called “civilization” had overrun the “Middle East” and had crossed the Himalayas into the valley of the Indus and Saraswati Rivers. By now there arose a need to explain what had gone wrong? Why all this suffering? This period, known as the Axial Age, marks the arrival on the planet of salvationist re-ligion³. No matter if we call ourselves Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, Christian or Muslim we all live by aggre-culture. We all put our food under lock and key and make people work, beg or steal for it. We all think that man is fatally flawed and in need of salvation or nirvana and that it is our prophets that have the inside track on the one right way to live. The story that our culture is enacting: “The world was made for Man and he was destined to conquer and rule it but due to a flaw in his nature he is in fact destroying it.”

So here we are, our sky god, book based, male dominated, adultist, classist, sexist, racist, speciesist culture, ruled by the threat of violence, has now colonised the minds of the majority of humanity. Whether we see ourselves as being at the end of Kali Yug or facing imminent Armageddon we all carry with us the expectation that the world has to die before we see our next Golden Age or One Thousand Years of Peace. 

Well I am here today to tell the truth and the truth shall set us free. There is no fire next time; there is no judgment day. These infantile mythologies we live by are just two among ten thousand others that have held out in the equatorial rainforests of Amazonia, the Congo and Indonesia. In the Kalahari, in the deserts of Australia and in the Tundra of the north the autochthonic, animist, land based/centered, tribal peoples of the earth have continued to count their wealth in terms of their relationships. Evolving laws, customs and institutions appropriate to the bioregions they inhabit. Their infant nurture priority being that they experience constant skin to skin contact until they decide to venture out. Their economy based on the gift: give support, get support. Living largely matrifocal, egalitarian lifestyles, the disciplining of children by punishment is unheard of as adults model appropriate behavior and life skills. Despite the fact that they have been driven into the most inhospitable regions of the planet by conquering pastoralists and aggre-culturalists, they continue to nurture, to sustain and to celebrate their deep connections to the land, to the plants and animals, to the elements, earth, air, fire and water, and to the celestial beings, the sun, moon and stars. All Our Relations. The story that they are enacting: “The world is a sacred place and we humans belong in such a place.”

When the “leader of the free world” takes on the dismantling of the prevailing globalization agenda of the OECD [Old Eurocentric Colonialist Daemoncrats] it is just one element in carrying forward a natural cycle in all literate, complex cultures: de-centralization and dis-intermediation. From the point of view of the status quo of the elite this is a disaster. Their historians refer to these periods as Dark Ages. The break down of the arrogance of empire and a return to more local politics and economics based on a bioregional reality is inevitable. It does not have to be uncomfortable.

Because the so-called nation states of Europe established their borders based on ethnic/language lines after millennia of conflict, they failed to recognise the ecological regimes they inhabited. Before the age of conquering tribes and imperial adventures, cultures co-evolved with the bioregions they were a part of. There is always an optimum and unique way to interact with the geology, the biological communities and the climates we dwell within if cultures are to be sustainable. At this point in history we have the information we need to determine these parameters and to re-inhabit our ecosystems in ways that support biodiversity and the resilience it provides.

The divide and conquer monoculture imposed by the industrial growth society is coming apart at the seams as resource depletion meets population growth. It was always going to be a dead end. 

Now we have the opportunity to consciously localize our politics and economics in keeping with ecological limits and ramify cultural diversity appropriate to place. If we can discharge the historical trauma that holds our ethnic, religious and class differences in place and focus our attention on working together to mind the ecosystems we call home we will regenerate abundant life and become foragers again. 

I am fed up of people talking about transforming capitalism. This system is only the last of a ten thousand year old history of oppression and exploitation of nature and people. The business model is the problem. There is no way of making a profit and accumulating wealth without the destruction of ecosystems and the victimisation of humans. The climate emergency is about eliminating racism/white supremacy and deposing ethnic nationalist leaders. The solution is to work on what gets in the way of us joining with our neighbours in reconnecting, regenerating and co creating with nature, resilient ecosystems. 

1. Humans have inherent processes to discharge emotions associated with hurtful experiences. Fear causes cold sweat and shaking; grief and loss brings up crying with wet tears; rage, anger and frustration elicit temper tantrums; embarrassment is discharged with laughter and boredom with excited non repetitive talking. In our culture these processes are interfered with when adults mistakenly shut down the discharge thinking that this will end the hurt. The opposite is true. The hurts accumulate creating the so called unconscious or shadow.

2. Aggre(ssive)-culture: waging war on biodiversity to mind our favourite foods/addictions.

3.Re-ligion: literally to tie or bind again, like the word Yoga meaning union, both represent responses to the loss of our connection to nature.

NO SECRETS ¹

What is culture? "Culture" and "cult" both come from the Latin verb "col-ere" that meant "till; farm; cultivate; worship". The Latin word itself comes from an Indo-European root which can roughly be represented by "kwel", that meant "turn, move around", and yielded among other words the English "wheel".

The relationship is hence between farming the land and worshiping the gods who guarantee harvest and produce. "Primitive" peoples still sing while they work the land, and these songs may occasionally be religious or magical. Also aggreculturalists tend to till the land by turning over the soil and pagan (rural) religious rituals are often circular.

An assumption appears to underlie this definition that, pre/non agricultural peoples had/have no culture.

In fact culture is the enacting of a story. All peoples have a creation myth that tells of the relationship between humans, the world and divine intentions and explains how things came to be the way they are. The story that our culture is enacting goes something like: The world was made for man and man was destined to conquer and rule it but because of some fatal flaw in his character, he is in fact destroying it and in need of salvation.

There are 10,000 other cultures still extant on the planet, inhabiting the most inhospitable regions, rainforests, deserts and tundra, enacting a very different story that goes: The world is a sacred place and we humans belong in such a place.

Literate cultures have relatively short cycles of growth and decay. As the “educated” elite becomes engrossed in intellectual abstractions divorced from primary production (growing food and fibre) over generations, they begin to make decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of their ecosystems and the populace. This is not sustainable.

Our culture of patriarchal, salvationist religion² (worldview): Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christism, Islamism, Sikhism, Secularism, Democratism, Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Atheism, Agnosticism, RastafarI etc. all living by aggre-culture³ is at the end of its natural cycle.

All the signs are here, baroque architecture, celebrity chefs, gender confusion, a rise in alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide, and disintermediation.⁴ This trend is on course as the complexity of our culture of middlemen devolves back into the sublime state of barbarism when all relationships are personal again.

What is barbarism? The root meaning is from the Greek word βαρβαροι, barbaroi, originally meant “people who say ‘bar bar bar’” (come down to the present as Berbers) instead of talking intelligibly in Greek. In Roman times that usage got bent around to mean “people outside the Empire,” (hordes outside the gates) and thus in due time to “tribes who are too savage to speak Latin, live in cities, or give up without a fight when we decide to steal their land.” Fast forward a century or two, and that definition morphed uncomfortably into “tribes who are too savage to speak Latin, live in cities, or stay peacefully on their side of the border”

What is civilization? The original meaning of the word in late Latin, civilisatio means “having or establishing settled communities.” A people known to the Romans was civilized if its members lived in civitates, cities or towns. A city is a human made environment from which the ordinary workings of nature have been excluded to as great an extent as the available technology permits. We can generalize this further, and say that a civilization is a form of society in which people live in artificial environments.

What sets barbarian societies of the past apart from civilized ones is precisely that a lot less of the environment barbarians encounter results from human action. When you go outdoors, if you’re not outdoors to start with, nearly everything you encounter has been put there by nature.

The post empire phase of planetary consciousness entails thinking globally and acting locally; At this moment in her-story (the whole story, including so called prehistory) our culture has the information and the example of indigenous, animist, foraging societies, who have survived into the 21st century, to adopt co-creative relationships with nature; Communities overcoming ethnic and worldview differences to work with their ecosystem (home), both within city neighbourhoods and in rural village environments, to mind soil life and catch and store  water and fertility high on the landscape to optimize biodiversity and resilience. Regenerating diverse cultures of belonging in biologically productive, novel ecosystems where stable populations live within the carrying capacity of their watersheds and bioregions. Where virtue⁵  [integrity] would determine a wo/man’s status, where leadership could be situational depending on consensus and there would be no need for hierarchy. ⁶

1. Secret s 0-ciety: an inner circle-sanctuary where we can discharge the emotions tied up in our fears, losses and frustrations that prevent us from decolonizing our minds.

2. Re-ligion (to tie or bind again) and Yoga (union) are our culture’s responses to loss of contact with nature.

3. Aggressive culture: waging war on biodiversity to grow humans, dozen or so, favourite foods/stimulants, fuelling a population explosion, then locking it up and making people work, beg or steal for it.

4. Cutting out the middlemen. The word was coined in the 60’s when government regulations limited interest rates on savings accounts and consumers/speculators began investing in securities directly. The word gained new meaning in the 90s with the rise of the Internet where people could access medical, legal, travel etc. information on line.

5. Masculinity correlates with virtue etymologicaly, it has the same root as virility.

6. An hier-arch is a sacred ruler, originally hierarchy was the ranking of angels and other heavenly beings. In the 17^th century its use became, a system in which members of an organization or society are ranked according to relative importance, status or authority.

Buildings, Roads and Drains: the cause of flooding.

Slash and burn agriculture is responsible for some sedimentation of the water supply. However a bulldozer or a backhoe does more irreparable damage in half an hour than can be done by our gardeners in a year. (Which is not to say that they should not be encouraged to adopt techniques that mind the soil rather than mine it.)

Silt and garbage in a river course do contribute to flooding but ultimately flooding is a measure of surface run off.

The earliest civilizations depended on the annual floods to return nutrients to their croplands and they knew enough not to build any permanent structures below the high water mark. In more recent times because of population pressure we have ignored this reality and Port of Spain is a case in point. When the Spanish settled in the area they named the river that ran along (what is now) Observatory St., across Park St., down Frederick St., across Woodford Sq. and down Chacon St., El Rio Tragarita. (Sp. tragar: to swallow or engulf; + ita: diminutive, i.e. "The Little one who engulfs.") This forty-foot chasm was in the habit of regularly washing large parts of the town out into the Gulf until Governor Chacon had its course diverted to its present route as the East Dry River. Yet the problem persists.

In a healthy tropical ecosystem, when rain falls the first thing it hits is an uninterrupted canopy of leaves sixty to one hundred feet above the ground. This breaks up the raindrops into a fine mist and large drops rolling off the leaves. These fall to the forest floor where they meet a one-foot thick layer of rotting vegetation and a tangle of roots. The water has no choice but to percolate down through the spaces between the soil particles until it meets bedrock where it forms the water table. Wherever the bedrock comes to the surface springs happen which are the sources of rivers.

In many watersheds in T&T the integrity of this system was severely compromised for the sake of growing tobacco, cacao, coffee and sugar cane to feed the addictions of the metropole, this lead to increased surface runoff. Some of these estates survived into recent decades and the secondary growth, where it exists, has re-established a healthy canopy. Bush fires caused by uncontrolled burning by gardeners and delinquents has reduced the ridges of some watersheds to fire climax zones of bracken, bull grass, banga and cocorite, leading to renewed increases in surface runoff. Now, hopefully, we are post peak of the last construction boom because, wherever the rain meets galvanize, concrete, pitch and manicured lawns there is 90 - 100% surface runoff.

FORAGING, OUR GLORIOUS FUTURE

Donald Trump is just one element in carrying forward a natural cycle in all literate, complex cultures: de-centralization and dis-intermediation. From the point of view of the status quo of the elite this is a disaster. Their historians refer to these periods as Dark Ages. The break up of the illusion of nation states and a return to more local politics and economics is inevitable. It does not have to be uncomfortable.

Because the so-called nations of Europe established their borders based on ethnic lines after millennia of conflict, they failed to recognise the ecological regimes they inhabited. Before the age of conquering tribes and empire building cultures co-evolved with the bioregions they were a part of.

There is always an optimum and unique way to interact with the geology, the biological communities and the climates we dwell within if cultures are to be sustainable. At this point in history we have the information we need to determine these parameters and to re-inhabit our ecosytems in ways that support biodiversity and the resilience it provides.

The divide and conquer monoculture imposed by the industrial growth society is coming apart at the seams as resource depletion meets population growth. It was always going to be a dead end.

Now we have the opportunity to consciously localize our politics and economics in keeping with ecological limits and ramify cultural diversity appropriate to place. If we can put aside our ethnic, religious and class differences and focus our attention on working together to mind the ecosystems we call home we will regenerate abundant life and become foragers again.