http://biocurriculum.blogspot.com

THE OTHER STORY

We humans appear unique among species in our ability to tell stories. We are neither the crown of creation nor the goal of evolution. The universe was not made for us and we are not destined to conquer and rule it. This is the story of only one culture.

Story telling is a skill developed within the context of the hunt, reading tracks brings with it an awareness of past, present and future. “This animal came from that direction back then and will be found in this direction some time later...” The first time some terrestrial primate made this connection must have been a stupendous AHA moment, “GULP”!!!!!! The desperate need to share this realisation drove mutations to drop the epiglottis lower and lower increasing the depth of vowel sounds and the ability to articulate. (Tongue in cheek)

                                             Chimp and Human vocal apparatus

Channelling Yahuay, “ 4 Cries Ache man, when I tell you to go forth and be fruitful how you could take that to mean i’s to fill up the Earth with your own kind? You is a fruit 4 crying out loud!!! You who does get vex when they tell you you is a monkey. It make me as mad as when those ones who say they is vegetarian but they does eat fish. How you think the fish go feel? Fish is a vegetable? Man when I give you dominion over the Earth and every living thing, I ent mean i’s for you to mash up the place. I give you wisdom and understanding in my image for you to make the garden more biodiverse.”

So how did this story come about? The Hebrews inherited their creation mythology, the stories in Genesis, from their Semitic pastoralist ancestors that were part of an oral tradition that had been retold for generations. It lays out the relationship between Man, the gods (Elohim) and the world and explains how things came to be the way they were. The situation that they were trying to comprehend is how and why Caucasian farmers from the North were expanding into the Arabian Peninsula and watering their fields with Semitic blood.

These nomadic herders of sheep and goats of the desert were confronting conquering tribes of cereal grain aggreculturalists* (sic) whose populations had grown beyond the carrying capacity of their home territory (bioregion). They had to imagine a story to explain, how Adam (red [sunburned?] man) came to have adopted this most arduous of lifestyles ever conceived, why he treated his women and children so badly, why he was so afraid of snakes and how he came to have taken into his own hands, the gods prerogative of deciding who should live and who should die, or in other words, “the knowledge of good and evil”. “Adam” was not the first human, he was the first farmer and city (civilization) builder and “Cain” has been killing “Abel” ever since.  Farming was the punishment and the curse. From ground zero in Mesopotamia our culture spread west into Europa and east across the Indus into Hindustan laying waste to biodiversity in order to grow their favourite foods.

               

                                      The diffusion of agriculture                          

                                          The spread of Indo-European languages

   

                                      Spread of Indo-European DNA                  

                                     The spread of the horse-drawn war chariot

The patriarchy and the population explosion are of the same root and it starts in the “Caucasus Mountains” during the last ice age. Winter adapted, white skinned people had inhabited the far north from about 40,000 years ago when the last glacial maximum retreated 11,000 years ago. During this period I imagine there may have been times when tribes were trapped in relatively green watersheds surrounded by impassable ice for generations. This became a land of real scarcity; the providential mother had forsaken her children and the rituals of regicide and blood sacrifice to the goddess were proving ineffectual.

Having become aware of the connection between sex and procreation men and women lived in fear and dread of the temptation to bring into the world another mouth to feed. This lead to the psychological stress of the conflict inherent in the love/hate, virgin/whore dichotomy of our culture. The sound of crying coming from a hungry child became intolerable and led to the first lash and, “spare the rod and spoil the child”. Competition for ever-diminishing resources led to the need to conquer their neighbours in order to survive. (Fear and hatred of snakes sensibly goes back to our arboreal primate beginnings.) When the ice retreated for the last time leaving behind the deep fertility of the razed boreal forests and ground up rock of glacial till, the vegetation that dominated the landscape were the grasses; barley, rye, oats, emmer and eventually by selection, wheat. The humans inhabiting this landscape foraged this seemingly limitless energy source and their population exploded. This was a land of plenty but the story of our cultures traumatic gestation period has never been told and the emotions of fear, rage and grief never discharged. The feeling that there is never enough to go around, no matter how rich and powerful we become as individuals, fuels our greed and other addictions to this day.    

Driven by this irrational fear of scarcity, our culture/system (where food is locked up to create artificial scarcity and people have to work, beg or steal for it) now rewards productivity above all else. It is designed for products not for people. Our economy is based on everyone having or making products, including labour and services, in order to be able to get products = food and shelter. The measure of its functioning is Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The concept of material progress with an ever-increasing improvement in products and the belief in its inevitability is the secular religion of our time. It inherited from the dominant religions a deep anthropocentricism. A blinkered mindset that engenders a culture that continues to lay waste to the ecological support system it is acutely dependent upon for survival.

The concept of separation and glorification of individualism identifies our civilized cultures whose infant nurture practices are at the root of these feelings. Primate infants never experience loss of skin contact until they decide to venture out. This embodies an innate releasing mechanism that is instrumental in the development of emotionally mature adults. When babies are put down, separated from another human, a bond of trust is broken almost irrevocably. 

In cultures that make maintaining skin contact an absolute priority no matter what else is going on the story they live in is, " the world is a sacred place and we humans belong in such a place. 

*aggre-culture: a culture of aggression: waging war on biodiversity to foster humans favoured foods. Especially wheat and dairy both of which contain addictive morphine-like exorphins that mimic the body’s endorphins, reducing pain and stimulating the pleasure centre in the brain. This is an identifiable cultural attribute that defines its expanding boundaries. 

Bioregional Awareness
 "The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery -- not over nature but of ourselves." Rachel Carson 1962

 “I doubt that many people have an easy feeling about the future . . or our ability to protect and maintain the networks of plant and animal life upon which the human future ultimately depends. Nor do I believe it likely that many of us believe that the hope for the future lies in more research, or in some technological fix for the human dilemma. The research already done has produced truths which are generally ignored. We are reaching the end of technological fixes, each of which gives rise to new, and often more severe problems. It is time to get back to looking at the land, water, and life on which our future depends, and the way in which people interact with these elements.” Dasmann 1975

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 human settlements, cultures, and communities these characteristics have spawned.
• The basic geographic unit that integrates human governance within ecological principals, the minimum area where a human community is able to achieve an autonemous, sustainable lifestyle. In the pre-conquest era identified by a particular indigenous language group.

Re-inhabitation:
Local community is the basic unit of human habitation. It is at this level that we can reach our fullest potential and best effect social change. Human communities are integral parts of the larger bioregional and planetary life communities. The empowerment of human communities is inseparable from the larger task of re-inhabitation -- learning to live sustainably and joyfully in place.

 Curriculum
 • Act together as a community,
• Learn local history and natural heritage,
• Discover the wisdom of diverse world views,
 • Distinguish their needs from their wants,
• Develop environmental literacy,
• Understand local ecosystems,
• Make ecologically sustainable choices,

 Act together as a community
• Create greeting and bonding rituals
• Choose a clan name and totem
• Learn songs and dances

Learn local history and natural heritage 
• Story telling: “How Port of Spain came to be”
• Learn hazards of nature
• Develop familiarity with local wildlife

Discover the wisdom of diverse worldviews
• Reading creation myths of different cultures

Distinguish our needs from our wants
• “How long would I live without…?”

Develop environmental literacy,
• The water cycle
• A food chain
• The compost heap

Understand local ecosystems
• Definitions
• The POS watershed
 • Explore our connections to the land, the sea and all living things,

Make ecologically sustainable choices
• Reading grocery labels
• Food miles • Import substitution
• Understand our responsibility as inhabitants of a bioregion.

Know your watershed
 • Describe where your water comes from and where it goes after you use it?
• How many days to full moon? (Give or take two days)
• What kinds of rocks or soils make up the ground under you?
• When does the wet season begin and end?
• When was the last big fire in your region?
• What foods did the Amerindian tribes of your region eat?
• Name five local herbs?
 • From which direction does the rain come?
• Where does your garbage end up?
• On which days of the year are the shadows shortest in your region?
• When are the Agouti in heat and when are the young born?
• Name five trees in your region, are they indigenous or naturalized exotics?
• Name five birds that live in your region?
• Do you know the history of development in your watershed?
• What species are already extinct in your region?
• You are sitting here reading this now, point to the north.

Activities
• Exploring the garden - learning the hazards
• Using all our senses – deer ears, owl eyes, touching, smelling, tasting
• Observing the animal and plant interactions
• Imitating animals
• Recognising bird calls
• Building a model of a mountain to show soil erosion
• Build a model of the POS watershed from a contour map using paper/clay
• Build a compost pile
• Stalking

let's see where this goes...

At the time my sister introduced me to Macrobiotics (Latin for big life) in the 80s when we were both living in Toronto I embraced it with a fanaticism that I had not known possible for me. As I became aware of its history* and philosophy however, I was a bit confused when I found that the community was aspiring to a rural Japanese diet of basically rice and seaweed. The direction is very clear that in order to maintain a balanced connection to our immediate environment we are supposed to be making dietary choices informed by these guidelines: fresh, whole foods, locally grown, in season (with small amounts of fermented preserves as condiments) and pesticide free. In any large North American city that would be cheeseburger and pizza I joked/rationalised. In retrospect, I felt the need to justify the reality that I never was able to kick these habits. Now that we know that wheat and dairy products contain opiate-like exorphins not quite as addictive as heroin, I can forgive myself. But seriously, to be following the principles would actually mean researching the pre-conquest indigenous diet and working towards making an analogous choice available again.

Around this same time I came across the original classical version of the Oath of Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, that modern physicians swear to/on. Along with the expected issues of confidentiality and refraining from making inappropriate advances on patients and their families I was dumbfounded by the following:

• "I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment"
• "I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect"
• "I will not use the knife"

Clearly Doctors have to be complete hypocrites to lay claim to his ethical standards.

While residing in Toronto I was a member of the Karma Co-op, my neighbourhood food co-op, and we had a magazine section that carried a selection of alternative periodicals. One of the events I always looked forward to was the arrival each month of the, "New Catalyst Journal" from Lillooit, Gabriola Island, British Columbia. I would read it from cover to cover and every article, no matter how local the issue being addressed, embodied a perspective that resonated deeply with me. In 1988 the community that produced the Journal hosted the 3rd North America Bioregional Congress (NABC III). The proceedings from the Congress were advertised and I ordered a copy. Upon receiving it I was struck by the work of the MAGIC Committee, standing for: Mischief, Animism, Geomancy and Interspecies Communication. Their role in the Congress was to stand in for the other than-human world: rooted beings, water beings, winged beings and four legged beings at the closing plenary sessions. I made the decision to attend the following Congress in Maine in 1990.

It was there I met Peter Bane and learned about permaculture.

Inspired by this information I returned to the home (bioregion, watershed and ecosystem) of my birth for good in 1994 and immediately set out to "discover" (my owning class, white privilege talking) what our Trini bush had to offer as edible.

The Orinoco watershed bioregion

The St Ann's watershed

*As the legend goes, when Michio Kushi, a young, well to do,  Japanese man is diagnosed with  Tuberculosis in the period between the last two European tribal wars he is sent to live out his remaining days in the pleasant surroundings of an expensive rural sanatorium. At some point his attention is drawn to the life of the peasants working their fields nearby and the question arises, "how come they are so healthy and I am so sick." He decides to go out and meet with them and develops a relationship where he is welcomed to eat with them and becomes acquainted with the philosophy behind their diet. He adopts their  lifestyle and in time his consumption goes into remission and he returns to his family. He decides to study medicine and specialises in lung diseases. Upon graduation he sets up a clinic on one floor of a high-rise building on the outskirts of Nagasaki. His patients are put on a traditional rural Japanese diet. Following the dropping of the Atomic bomb on his city in 1945, the US marines were sent in to investigate the consequences of their scientific experiment and collect data. What they found is that everyone in that building was suffering from radiation sickness except the patients on the Doctor's floor.

Isn't this phenomenal? A healthy human being actually radiates such energy as to act as a shield to incoming radiation! I was blown away when I first learned it.