Trinidad & Tobago Permaculture Institute

22/05/2025

My mentors:

A conversation filmed in Oxford in September 2010. For more recent writings and conversations, follow my Substack, Writing Home:http://dougald.substack.com/A...

05/04/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16Bjr2T6jC/

31/10/2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArhAQPzc1Eg&list=PLGm9KsDyko_s2eghfX0zT2zyHHExSW-xV&index=8
FBAOW will be hosting the Annual Fire Trace clearing Gayap this month. Stay tuned: DM me for an invite

Part 8 in the video series on the Port of Spain Watershed Regeneration Project of the Foundation for the Bioregional Autonomy of the Orinoco Watershed (FBAOW...

30/10/2024

Myth #1: Agriculture is the path of least resistance.

That agriculture represents the easiest or simplest way of attaining one’s food cannot be supported logically or empirically. Whereas hunter-gatherers must only accomplish the work equivalent to harvesting, and that on a low-intensity, rolling basis, an agriculturalist must also plant and tend to their crops. Agriculture is the most intensive form of cultivation, often requiring massive projects such as irrigation or terracing. This is borne out by empirical data. Due to the law of diminishing returns, though agriculture produces the most food absolutely, the ratio of food per unit of labor is in fact higher than any other subsistence technology. Agriculturalists must work harder for their food than anyone else. (Harris, 1993) In modern “petroculture,” 10 calories of fossil fuels are burned for every 1 calorie of food produced. Horticulturalists have the most efficient lifestyle; foragers have the easiest lifestyle. Ours produces the most calories, but is also the most grossly inefficient.

Jason Godesky Thirty Theses 2006 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. See creativecommons.org for details.

25/10/2024

The economy has no cloths

20/10/2024

The economy is a design, which a few people created led by stories about how we relate to the world.

It is a system for managing our household that is failing, maintained by stories that we now understand are disconnected from reality.

A design that is no longer – maybe never was – fit for purpose, based on stories that are leading us astray.

Many of us don't really know what 'the economy' is, or what it's for. The original meaning in Greek is revealing: it's a combination of ‘oikos’, meaning 'household', and ‘nemein’, meaning 'manage'. A system for managing our household, so that we can thrive in it. 'Oikos' is also where the

20/10/2024

Decolonial analysis

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. 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.

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…

20/10/2024

A debate has emerged as to what proportion of the global food supply is produced by small-scale food producers — one that may have big implications for policy-making addressing hunger. Civil society organisations and peasant movements have estimated that around 70% of the world is fed by small-scale farmers and peasants. However, two recent academic papers are claiming that small farm producers really only feed about one third of the world’s population. Significantly, one of these new papers is authored by the UN’s food agency, who are advising a policy shift toward more support for big farms.
The two studies are:
1. Ricciardi V. et al., (2018), “How much of our world’s food do smallholders produce?”, Glob. Food Sec. 17, 64–72.
2. Lowder S.K., et al.,(2021) “Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated?”, World Development, 142.
A closer look at these papers strongly suggests they should not be relied upon to guide changes in policy. Concerns include:
1. Both studies only measure agricultural production which is an inaccurate way to understand who feeds the world (which is a matter of consumption, not production). They claim to debunk the 70% estimate while mis-characterising what it describes.
2. Both studies miss a large amount of the food that is actually consumed — especially food consumed by poorer people and peasants.
3. The studies use different, sometimes inappropriate, proxy metrics (e.g. counting harvest, land area or economic value of food as a proxy for food consumed).
4. Both studies significantly limit how they define a “small farmer” to 2 hectares while also excluding other peasants and small producers from their calculations.
5. One study (Ricciardi et al.) introduces significant geographical bias, excluding data from exactly the regions with the most peasants and small farmers.

15/10/2024

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.

06/10/2024

Modernity, a neurobiological impairment, relies on non-renewable resources dredged out of the depths that are not integrated into ecological cycles and often create unprecedented ecological harm—the full extent of which we can’t possibly yet know. Even traditional agriculture chews up land on thousand-year timescales (much faster these days)—besides setting up ecological disconnection and objectification, money and capitalism, toxic social hierarchies and power concentrations, and human-supremacist religious and political regimes. For many materials, the prospect of depletion has become apparent after only a century or even decades of intense exploitation. The notion of maintaining current practices on millennium timescales is unsupported conjecture. Today’s practices and material profile represent a one-time stunt.

Modernity (even if defining starting 10,000 years ago) is a short-lived phase that will self-terminate—likely starting this century.

30/09/2024

Only with the development of railways and telegraphy was a nation state made possible… and once created – because power brooks no rival – it quickly embarked upon the disempowering of those disparate county states. We then noted that in the late oil age, air transport and digital communications had laid the foundation for the supranational organs of government of the twenty-first century – and for the same reason, how those supranational bodies had begun to disempower individual national governments.

So removed have we become from the material basis of our way of life, that it is hard to imagine anything other than progress… although for the growing western precariat class, decline is more obvious with each passing day. To those at the height of power, not only is progress expected, but the mythical “singularity,” in which all human decision-making is taken over by a salient AI, is surely just around the corner.

We have ended up with the least competent government possible to steer us through the decline of industrial civilisation

21/09/2024

Last month, delegates attending the 12th World Wilderness Congress in the Black Hills adopted a string of resolutions expected to help ‘indigenize’ wilderness conservation and the conservation sciences in the months and years ahead. Resolutions ranged from reforming conservation efforts to recognize “Indigenous science, knowledge, thought, and wisdom” (Hé Sapa Resolution), support Native-led restoration of migratory herds of bison in North America (‘Through the Eyes of Buffalo‘); enact critical protections for the “Water Forests” of Mexico City, ban mining in the Black Hills and across the ocean’s seafloor, and honor the many violated treaties with Native peoples over the past 500 years of colonization.

All relevant institutions [must] actively promote wilderness policy that acknowledges that nature is multi-dimensional, transcending the material and physical realms; and use language that honors the rights and roles of Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Knowledge and Wisdom Systems, natural and customa...