Permaculture Tribe of Trinidad and Tobago

The usual story of change is that there is a problem with the system that needs to be solved. The degree of the problem can vary from the system “not working optimally” to “totally screwed up”. The logical solution proposed is one that keeps our hopes up: that “we” the (virtuous, woke, moral, righteous, deserving, enlightened) people in the “good team” can choose to fix the system by either patching it up or offering a replacement, a better alternative.

Our analysis has a different starting point. It begins with an examination of how violence and unsustainability are conditions that are necessary for the system (that is “not working”) to exist, how we are part of this system (and complicit in harm) and how this system has screwed (all of) us up.

Gift Contract Written by Vanessa Andreotti, Elwood Jimmy, and Bill Calhoun, February 24, 2021 Decolonial analysis The usual story of change is that there is a problem with the system that needs to be solved. The…

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/05/all-night-streetlights-make-leaves-inedible-to-insects-study-finds?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawEgM05leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHXQWoWd6ZmlBzuULsPxbCtaY7NHBkyPIWlOYjYYhgd49VK-eo2XNOmelkQ_aem_S5MgRuHIxxa71f63J3h3NQ =1722838112

All-night streetlights make leaves inedible to insects, study finds Scientists believe artificial light may be affecting natural ecology of plant life by creating extended photosynthesis

Starting with her thesis research on how a group of stakeholders in southern California cobbled together a system for managing their water table, and culminating in her worldwide study of common-pool resource (CPR) groups, the message of her work was that groups are capable of avoiding the tragedy of the commons without requiring top-down regulation, at least if certain conditions are met (Ostrom 1990, 2010). She summarized the conditions in the form of eight core design principles: 1) Clearly defined boundaries; 2) Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs; 3) Collective choice arrangements; 4) Monitoring; 5) Graduated sanctions; 6) Fast and fair conflict resolution; 7) Local autonomy; 8) Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule-making authority (polycentric governance). This work was so groundbreaking that Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009.

The Tragedy of the Commons: How Elinor Ostrom Solved One of Life's Greatest Dilemmas - Evonomics The design principles for solving the tragedy of the commons can be applied to all groups

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2388982/15495440-welcome-to-the-agrarian-renaissance-podcast-with-don-?fbclid=IwY2xjawEXA2dleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHQ0ZrEwu6Lv_WO8WREiYx9zQYJC16NBxiFov-KYav37omV4l3Pnqa4RJUg_aem_3rLwtSK80dz53tqu3yn5Ng

Welcome to the Agrarian Renaissance Podcast with Don Tipping - The Agrarian Renaissance Podcast The Agrarian Renaissance For the vast arc of the history of human civilization it has been agrarian. When humans developed agriculture, it enabled us to settle in place, construct cities, and commence the diversification of work that led to t...

Big Dams started well, but have ended badly. There was a time when everybody loved them, everybody had them – the Communists, Capitalists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. There was a time when Big Dams moved men to poetry. Not any longer. All over the world there is a movement growing against Big Dams. In the First World they’re being de-commissioned, blown up. The fact that they do more harm than good is no longer just conjecture. Big Dams are obsolete. They’re uncool. They’re undemocratic. They’re a Government’s way of accumulating authority (deciding who will get how much water and who will grow what where). They’re a guaranteed way of taking a farmer’s wisdom away from him. They’re a brazen means of taking water, land and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich. Their reservoirs displace huge populations of people, leaving them homeless and destitute. Ecologically, they’re in the doghouse. They lay the earth to waste. They cause floods, water-logging, salinity, they spread disease. There is mounting evidence that links Big Dams to earthquakes.

Big Dams haven’t really lived up to their role as the monuments of Modern Civilisation, emblems of Man’s ascendancy over Nature. Monuments are supposed to be timeless, but dams have an all-too-finite lifetime. They last only as long as it takes Nature to fill them with silt. It’s common knowledge now that Big Dams do the opposite of what their Publicity People say they do – the Local Pain for National Gain myth has been blown wide open.

Flashback: Arundhati Roy's classic essay on the Narmada resistance - Ecologise The Narmada Bachao Andolan began 31 years ago as a protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river, and went on to raise questions about the very development model India has embraced. Today, with the NBA reviving their landmark struggle for justice, we are re-publishing author Arundhati....

Economics originally refers to the ways of keeping/minding home. Taking care of each other. The way we connect gifts to needs. The way we connect Labour and creativity. The way we make collective decisions, what to create, how to use resources and how to relate to the human and other than human world. Charles Charles Eisenstein,

While displacing forms of agriculture, we’ve also displaced food cultures—of distribution, preparation, and consumption. The systematic segregation of poor communities and communities of color from affluent and white communities creates the conditions for a literal food apartheid: fresh and minimally processed foods are sold at high prices for select markets that are geographically and economically inaccessible for the marginalized communities, who in turn provide a captive market for the highly processed and refined products of industrial agriculture. These apartheid conditions, the attendant loss of culinary and nutritional knowledge, and the staggering rise of diet-related health problems, are all symptoms of a food system designed for profit rather than care.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/rafter-ferguson/why-we-cant-separate-justice-and-sustainability-in-the-food-system/ #:~:text=Sustainability%20and%20justice%20are%20connected,the%20solutions%20must%20be%20integrated.

To be clear, landcestry is not about attempting to adopt the same relationship with the land as those who came before. It’s not about trying to fabricate indigeneity by co-opting the cultural practices of others, or living in a past that no longer exists, or could even be restored. Climate change, mass extinction – both biological and cultural – and countless other Anthropangaean upheavals have seen to that.

Landcestry is about recognising how, despite millennia of increasingly rapid, profound, and in many cases irreversible socio-ecological degradation, fragmentation and displacement, there is a deeper continuity, even now, twining us all together. By drawing inspiration from this continuity, we stand a far better chance of finding ecologically sound and spiritually inclusive landscape relationships and practices appropriate to the places where we are in the present moment than we do if we continue to root our identities in bloodlines, traditions, and memories from far off elsewheres and long ago elsewhens.

The Last Anthropangaeans - Dark Mountain This year's Plant Practice series comes to a leafy end with Tim Fox's concept of 'landcestry', explored through his work with nettles.

https://regen.foundation/hyperbeings/

Hyperbeings - Regen Foundation Imaging rivers in their true form, and the violence of dams As a child, I was enchanted by the films of the great Japanese animator, Hayao Miyazaki. “My Neighbor Totoro” was the first of his film that I saw, and I’ve been enthralled by his work ever since. Reflecting back on what particular q...

Eat from the body of this place. Drink from this cup. Become “that portion of the landscape that temporarily abides in humans form.”1 There is a dent in the world called “you”—keep that dent it in mind by keeping it in view. Trade personal preference for willing participation. Roll up your sleeves. Relationships require a lot of honest work. That work might begin to feel like home.

A Bundle of Relationships Brightly-colored nasturtium flowers adorned the Feast platters on Sunday, so you can imagine my joy at receiving this gorgeous drawing from Annie this morning. I send my thanks to the dozens of people who pulled in a common rhythm to pull off another remarkable Gratitude Feast. If you’d like to he...

Our analysis has a different starting point. It begins with an examination of how violence and unsustainability are conditions that are necessary for the system (that is “not working”) to exist, how we are part of this system (and complicit in harm) and how this system has screwed (all of) us up. This analysis is about how the current system:

has kept us tied and addicted to its promises and comforts;
has limited the ways we can see, feel, relate, desire, heal and imagine;
has led us to deny the violence and unsustainability that are required for it to exist, as well as our interdependence and the depth and magnitude of the mess we are in;
has encouraged us to create narcissistic delusions about our sense of self importance and our perceived entitlements, keeping us in an fragile and immature state that leaves us unequipped to face the challenges of our times;
has untethered us from the realities of the planet, and the fact that our mode of existence can cause our own extinction.

Gift Contract Written by Vanessa Andreotti, Elwood Jimmy, and Bill Calhoun, February 24, 2021 Decolonial analysis The usual story of change is that there is a problem with the system that needs to be solved. The…

What I confirmed by reading Black Hawk's account is the same as we might learn from any number of anthropology studies; that voluntary simplicity and gift economies provide for all, allow ample time for leisure, celebration, and sport, foster honesty and integrity as the highest social values, and encourage exploration of natural spiritual powers through deep observation, revelation, and clairvoyant dreaming. It is no worse than the lives we live now and in many ways better. This is why in the history of the American colonies those who switched sides and became Indians remained so, while Indians who tried out Western Civilization usually lasted only a short time in their strange surroundings before returning home.

Black Hawk's 11 Percent Solution Award winning author and futurist Albert Bates writes about ecovillages, permaculture, negative emission technology, drawdown, and climate solutions.

So as long as humans believe that they are separate from everything else, as long as they perceive the world separately…. A tree is not a static noun. It's doing trillions of metabolic functions every second. It's interacting. biophysically, with the sun and the air, it's interacting biochemically, it's interacting biologically, doing gene transfer with the fungus on its roots and the soil microbes, like the tree is in a live process. It's a verb. It's lots of verbs. And the idea that it's a noun just makes us think very poorly, makes us very bad thinkers.

And the fact that we're thinking in nouns all the time and built into our language is making us bad thinkers at scale that we don't even realize because we don't know what it's like to have a language that doesn't see the world as a bunch of nouns that are all separate.

Rewriting History with Artifical Intelligence Award winning author and futurist Albert Bates writes about ecovillages, permaculture, negative emission technology, drawdown, and climate solutions.

https://rootssodeep.org/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3WtMu2YBNm6vNn__bWgA59Is5DsAdRtIip7T5P6IzLD0jk1rBn7m7DluU_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw

Home carbon nation presents Watch the trailer Watch the trailer “This is, hands-down, the best agriculture filmmaking I’ve ever seen. The chara

It is probably impossible for someone acculturated to Western thought to truly grasp an animist worldview. But from what I have learned, animism seems to be the way in which liminal consciousness interacts with its environment. The “complex flux of collective sentient immediacy” in which liminality occurs cannot be separated out of its surroundings — therefore everything is part of the sentient collective, including trees, rocks, animals, rain, natural phenomenon such as thunder, and ants. Liminality perceives consciousness in everything because in the absence of abstract logic — or even the ability to conceive of abstract things — universal consciousness is really and truly what is observable.

Cognitive Archeology of the West This is a guest post by Paula Hay Venkat’s recent post The Disruption of Bronze touched on a subject I’ve been pursuing fervently for the better part of a decade now: the time frame in…

these problems leave only one viable alternative, which is to decrease our energy use, per capita and absolutely, to get our energy needs down to levels that could be maintained over the long term on renewable sources. The first steps in this process were begun in the 1970s, with good results, and might have made it possible to descend from the extravagant heights of industrialism in a gradual way, keeping a great many of the benefits of the industrial age intact as a gift for the future. Politics closed off that option in the decade that followed, however, and the world’s industrial nations went hurtling down a different path, burning through the earth’s remaining fossil fuel reserves at an accelerating pace and trusting that economic abstractions such as the free market would suspend the laws of physics and geology for their benefit. At this point, more than three decades after that misguided choice, industrial civilization is so far into overshoot that a controlled descent is no longer an option; the only path remaining is the familiar historical process of decline and fall.

Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush Since the birth of the modern peak oil movement in the last years of the 20th century, a great deal of discussion and debate has focused on how to prevent peak oil and its consequences from bringing about the end of the industrial age. That approach has yet to yield much in the way of practical resu...

One of my presentations at the Age of Limits conference was a talk entitled “How Civilizations Fall;” longtime readers of this blog will know from the title that what I was talking about that afternoon was the theory of catabolic collapse, which outlines the way that human societies on the way down cannibalize their own infrastructure, maintaining themselves for the present by denying themselves a future. I finished talking about catabolic collapse and started fielding questions, of which there were plenty, and somewhere in the conversation that followed one of the other participants made a comment. I don’t even remember the exact words, but it was something like, “So what you’re saying is that what we need to do, individually, is to go through collapse right away.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Collapse now, and avoid the rush.”

Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush Since the birth of the modern peak oil movement in the last years of the 20th century, a great deal of discussion and debate has focused on how to prevent peak oil and its consequences from bringing about the end of the industrial age. That approach has yet to yield much in the way of practical resu...

As fascinating as we may find the impact of conquering cultures on preconquest groups, it pales before the challenge to epistemology posed by the existence of a system of cognition not based on symbolic logic. We of Western training may find it virtually impossible to see how truth can be demonstrated without recourse to symbols that are logically controlled. When I first came face-to-face with these experientially-based modes of cognition wherein logic was irrelevant, they slid right past me. I did not even see them. Even when I did begin to catch on, I tended to doubt such perceptions once I was again within the confines of Western culture. It took years of repeated, even dramatic exposure before these initially fragmentary mental graspings were able to survive re-immersion in Western culture. Experiences repeated, however, eventually make their mark and I began to question whether symbolic logic was actually the only means to get at truth. Now I rather think that alternative routes to truth may exist within the immediacy of a type of experiential awareness that perhaps moves in extra-sentient directions not yet brought into the realm of our modern sense-of-truth. My slowness in this matter leads me to believe it may take modern humankind some time to identify and make use of these perhaps more rarefied mental capabilities.

Preconquest Consciousness Most anthropologists are aware that what comprise the standard habits, inclinations, and activities of humankind in one culture may seem quite exotic in another. When the separateness of peoples is extreme, incompatible modes of awareness and cognition sometimes arise, as occurred between the precon...

https://bio-paradigm.blogspot.com/2010/09/mechanical-logic-vs-biological-logic.html?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1X7SSwo9fcrCWwpBkmk20F10vZJw5hNbszr5HwfrCvLmWDOeT4b_NRSCc_aem_ATZkdHLGoCNTQf8zRW0esBsQZzgtgtN7aAHgP7XYkW2oTVRwQYlUCXqqnVxRN9khSKLgVFwDIU5QR1NLckOaln3s&m=1

Mechanical Logic vs. Biological Logic The evolution of physics and machines as we know them is intertwined with the nihilistic 'logic' of the " dominator culture ." The logic o...

My information on the Norte Chico comes from Charles C. Mann's book 1491, a survey of recent findings about the Americas before the European conquest. Mann is neither a primitivist nor an advocate for western civilization, but an advocate for, well, far western civilization, which was a lot more like western civilization than we thought. At its peak, the Inca empire was the largest in the world, with exploited colonies, massive forced resettling of workers, and bloody power struggles among the elite just like in Europe and Asia. The Maya deforested the Yucatan and depleted its topsoil only a few centuries after the Romans did the same thing around the Mediterranean. Aztec "human sacrifice" was surprisingly similar to English "public ex*****on" that was happening at exactly the same time. Even North America had a city, Cahokia, that in 1250 was roughly the size of London. In 1523, Giovanni da Verrazzano recorded that the whole Atlantic coast from the Carolinas up was "densely populated". In the 1540's, De Soto passed through what is now eastern Arkansas and found it "thickly set with great towns". Of course, that population density is possible only with intensive agriculture. Mann writes, "A traveler in 1669 reported that six square miles of maize typically encircled Haudenosaunee villages."

By the time the conquest really got going, all these societies had been wiped out by smallpox and other diseases introduced by the first Europeans. Explorers and conquerors found small tribes of forager-hunters in an untamed wilderness, and assumed it had been that way forever. In a blow to both primitivism and "progress", it turns out that most of these people were not living in the timeless ways of their ancestors -- the "Indians" of American myth were post-crash societies!

Beyond Civilized and Primitive Even if the social order can do everything to man -- starve him, torture him, imprison him, or over feed him -- this cannot be done without certain consequences which follow from the very conditions of human existence. Man, if utterly deprived of all stimuli and pleasure, will be incapable of perfor...

Cheap oil and coal, along with an anomalously mild and stable climate for 10,000 years, have tricked our economic systems by conflating the consumption and production of goods and services with availability of credit and technological prowess. Shortfalls are met not by rationing and reseeding but by increasing indebtedness or thinking outside the box. We strive to re-inflate national economies by buying, with money that we do not have, goods and services that we do not need, using financial instruments that are complete fictions, in order to sate our addiction to growth. We forget that “economics” and “ecology” share the same root. In Greek, it means “home.”

We need to get rid of the rhetoric that employs terms such as “developing countries.” In the world to come, the only developing countries will be those that follow the example of Bhutan, and develop qualitative measurement of happiness. In that sense the North is the most undeveloped. The notion that somehow all countries can achieve a higher standard of living by industrialization is a busted paradigm and we need to distance ourselves from it. India and Senegal will never be Sweden. Nor should they want to be.
— Slouching Towards Cancun, Nov 14, 2010

Reversing climate change… really? Award winning author and futurist Albert Bates writes about ecovillages, permaculture, negative emission technology, drawdown, and climate solutions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSx8j8lSewA

Game Theory, False Narratives, Survival, Life Advice - Daniel Schmachtenberger | BSP# 20 Daniel Schmachtenberger is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue. The throughline of his interests...

Join the marital arts movement https://www.facebook.com/DaIGJoka/

Da' I' G Joka A movement to regain our Deep Wilderness Connection from the inside out. Exploring our centre of grav

This is a must see:

Zak Stein: "Values, Education, AI and the Metacrisis” | The Great Simplification 122 (Conversation recorded on March 21st, 2024) Show Summary: On this episode, Nate is joined by philosopher and educator Zak Stein to discuss the current state...

IBID;
North Korea and Cuba provide us with two very different examples of states responding to a sudden energetic collapse as their supply of fossil fuels was cut. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, both countries, which were subject to western sanctions, had to respond to a collapse of fossil fuel imports. In North Korea, the state acted as a surrogate parent on steroids – imposing rationing and attempting to control every aspect of agricultural and industrial production. The result was a horrendous famine. In Cuba, things weren’t good. But because the Cuban state acted as an enabler rather than a surrogate parent – allowing people to plant and harvest food on any uncultivated land they could find – starvation was avoided.

This is likely the real choice for western populations once we get through the anger caused by state and corporate complicity in collapsing the economy. Our current path is clearly and decisively in the North Korean direction (which is one reason why I have little time for political activists of all stripes). Whether a Cuban direction is possible, we shall have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, of course, humanity in general and the developed western states in particular are probably already out of time. Not, or at least not solely, because of the climate change which agitates the Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion people (who suffer badly with carbon tunnel syndrome) but because there are a host of overshoot crises which have already begun to pull the rug out from beneath industrial civilisation in general and its kleptocratic western variant in particular. Least mentioned but most important is energy decline, since an economy – whether local or global – is literally the use of energy to transform materials for human use. Without energy, there can be no economy of any kind. Energy decline though, comes in two forms. The most obvious of these, which has only begun recently, is absolute decline. Although by adding “natural gas liquids” – which are used for cigarette lighters and plastic bags – to the figures for oil production, it appears that global oil production has returned to its pre-pandemic level. But heavier distillates – including the diesel fuel that is the lifeblood of the industrial economy – have been declining steadily since the end of 2018. And since production of the other two fossil fuels – coal and gas – requires massive volumes of diesel, then the peak of their production can only be a matter of years away.

This is simple enough to understand. If there is less energy today than there was yesterday, then we are going to have to cease doing things that we used to do.

https://vimeo.com/938098817

Tipping Points of the Earth System - Vital Processes for Regenerating Earth - a r3.0 Dialog with Joe Brewer 04-22-2024 This is "Tipping Points of the Earth System - Vital Processes for Regenerating Earth - a r3.0 Dialog with Joe Brewer 04-22-2024" by r3.0 on Vimeo, the…

I began to wonder if we might describe the ecological crisis as an epidemic of human busy-ness (Siamese twins: Business = busy + ness. The root meaning for “business”: a state of being troubled or anxious; solicitude).
I began to wonder about the consequence of billions of human people frantically trying to numb and distract themselves from the unbearable disappearance of webs of mutual cherishing. Webs once woven from countless little favours.

Mutual Cherishing I’ve got a favor to ask of you. If you find meaning in these public posts, would you consider sharing them with others who might be nourished by the work here? If so, you can forward this email along or press the button below. Also, the audio recordings of these stories are now available on Spotif...

When we reverse the drive for faster, smaller tech gadgets we will do village scale cottage industry production for bioregional connectivity.

https://anthroecologycom.wordpress.com/2020/09/24/economies-are-trophic-flows/?fbclid=IwAR2GwavoY-HgjhBMKwdJbkMSkvF43PiGmOgcOIqldWR9iFeyg2Z7-ZPjLTc_aem_AZwpmdb9W6PiY032eB3-D6x8zQEw97MA3M2Wny9SPUB5fUvvQYL5WBwir5jfV-1KPl8fXXcuGVRs5jJk0_4-yS4z

Economies are Trophic Flows In 1972, as I was just about to get married for the first time, I read the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth. I decided not to have children, given the long term prospects.In the meantime, whil…