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.

Market Devolution

There was a time and there still are places where the market was a periodic activity conducted between tribes within a bioregion who may be otherwise in a state of alliance or animosity. This was a time to suspend hostilities, to exchange surplus and to share in festivities.

With the advent of aggreculture (sic)* and the rise of conquering tribes, urbanization and literacy, a cyclical process set in. Following one after the other these societies rose in population density, fragmented into castes and classes, supporting a progressively dysfunctional, self serving elite disconnected from primary production, all the while drawing down on the energy and resources of the ecosystems they exploited. For some time even these cultures had a market day.

What dislocations led to our present perpetual enslavement to this so called, “invisible hand”?

Generations of the educated spent more and more time in the intellect, developing abstractions on abstractions. Within this historic movement we can locate the rise of the economist:

“…views on the origin of value, which over time became increasingly disembodied and subjective. Mercantilists located wealth in precious metals; physiocrats argued that since the ultimate source of value was nature, all social wealth was ultimately derived from agriculture; the political economists claimed that value was a product of human labour (in other words, that it emerged through the body, at exactly the point where our minds become a physical force in nature). For neoclassical economists it transcended the physical altogether, and became simply a subjective measure of desire. From their time on, the value of an object became increasingly indistinguishable from its price: how much potential buyers were willing to give up to acquire some product on the market. It exists only in the eye of the beholder.”      David Graeber, A Handbook of Economic Anthropology, page 440

The war against nature at the root of science leads our best minds to ignore the very knowledge they pursue. Physicists living in houses that waste energy, farmers who destroy the soil they depend on and economists who ignore the 2^nd law of thermodynamics. There can be no such thing as perpetual growth on a finite planet.

“The entropy of the physical universe increases constantly because there is a continuous and irrevocable qualitative degradation of order into chaos. The entropic nature of the economic process, which degrades natural resources and pollutes the environment, constitutes the present danger. The earth is entropically winding down naturally, and economic advance is accelerating the process. Man must learn to ration the meager resources he has so profligately squandered if he is to survive in the long run when the entropic degradation of the sun will be the crucial factor, "for surprising as it may seem, the entire stock of natural resources is not worth more than a few days of sunlight!”

The Entropy Law and the Economic Process Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen ‪

*Aggre(ssive) culture: waging war on biodiversity to foster human’s favourite foods