Our island of Dominica is part of the most complex and connected global civilization in history. Humanity moves billions of dollars of goods and services around the world every day, while war, climate disasters, eco-systems breakdown, and pandemics are becoming increasingly disruptive to our globalized way of life.

One day we may once again be forced to make due with our own resources. We may need to replace imports with what we can access and produce locally.

Our history is not unlike the history of many formerly colonized small island states, except that our incredibly abundant natural environmental has largely survived. In 2017, Hurricane Maria showed us that we could survive from our land more easily than our wealthier Caribbean neighbours, who were starved of water and food when weather disasters struck.

To celebrate our 44th year of Independence, I offer Four Lessons from Dominica for the World.

Lesson #1: “Koudmen” (Lend A Hand); Build and maintain Community Mutual Aid

An ancestral survival trait that has been maintained in Dominica over hundreds of years, is the tradition of “Koudmen”, which means “Lend a Hand”. Described by historian Dr. Lennox Honychurch (in 2012) as the “social glue” that holds community together, this form of community-self help is often referred to as “mutual aid” in the industrial North. As countries industrialized and became materially wealthier, they often lost these woven networks of reciprocity and self-sufficiency. In industrial countries corporations and institutions replaced most services and goods that local communities, extended families and kinship groups once freely exchanged.

In contrast, in many Dominican villages we have retained high degrees of self-sufficiency, as villagers still regularly come together to volunteer their skills, resources and time for the development of the community. We celebrate this enduring spirit of Koudmen during the Independence Season on Nov 4th; Dominica’s National Day of Community Service. From this lived experience, my understanding is that community and service are inseparably linked; you cannot have a healthy community without service.

“Groups able to demonstrate remarkable cooperative behaviour will have a better chance of surviving.”

Servigne, Pablo; Stevens , Raphaël. (2020) How Everything Can Collapse

Lesson #2: When we take care of the Land, the Land takes care of us.

“Apres Bondie, C’est La Ter” (After God, The Land)

Our national motto embodies an ideal, and also expresses the best present-day values, practices and aspirations of our people. Dominica’s lush rainforest, which still covers over 60% of our island, contains a UNESCO World Heritage Site, incredible biodiversity, and is one of the last oceanic rainforests left in the world. Historically, our mountains were a refuge for the Neg Mawon (African slaves) who escaped the brutality of the colonial masters’ plantations and created thriving Maroon communities deep in the rainforest, growing crops and foraging food and herbal medicines. The Kalinago, who lived near the rivers and close to the coasts where they could fish, used the forests for hunting and for timber for their canoes. No money needed!

This knowledge of what the wilderness provides humans and how to maintain the abundance, has been passed down over hundreds of years to present-day generations.

Our elder Dominicans have maintained the skill of identifying and foraging local medicinal plants that grow wild all around us. Plants that might be considered “weeds” to the untrained eye, often have healing properties. These are carefully harvested and prepared according to age-old traditions. We can maintain this mutually-beneficial relationship with the wild plants through sustainable foraging, which enables communities to access their nearby forests for sustenance and healing over generations. This local knowledge about how to identify wild plants and their uses, and how to take care of wild places and replant so that they will continue to provide, is an essential survival skill.

Our Forest Reserves and National Parks are treasures, and we need to continue to protect these lands from threats such as deforestation, mining, urbanization, and pollution, that have destroyed the forests in neighbouring islands and other countries.

Lesson #3: Grow What We Eat; Food Security is in our Gardens and in our Hands

The global Industrial agriculture system with its mono-cropping and long global supply chains means that in most countries, to locally source a balanced diet throughout the year is impossible for most of the population. The industrial era has created unprecedented separation of people from the land and growing food. Mass urbanization, fuelled by oil and other fossil fuels means that typically 10x more energy goes into industrial food production than you get out of it. The burning of oil over decades has warmed the atmosphere and is fuelling super-charged storms like Hurricane Maria. In 1950 80% of the global population lived in rural areas, and 20% lived in cities. Today, it is nearly the reverse. Most humans live in cities.

Dominica is unlike other Caribbean islands that much more rapidly and aggressively developed their tourism and export sectors, and where people moved away from agriculture en mass into service industries. In Dominica, as our tourism industry continues to grow we have remained principally an agrarian society, where subsistence farming is still central to how we feed ourselves and earn a large part of our incomes. Today, as many parts of the world increasingly struggle with food insecurity due to droughts, floods and breakdowns in global supply chains, in Dominica we are in an enviable position.

I would say that having access to land and growing our own food remains the foundation of Dominican culture and identity. One reason for our current social stability is that property tax is not imposed in most of the rural areas. Poor families can keep their family land for generations. This prevents families from becoming disenfranchised, as they would otherwise be forced to sell their land to pay the taxes, as has happened in many other islands and countries.

Squatters’ Rights can provide protection to our most vulnerable. “A person who occupies (abandoned) land without the owner’s consent is called a squatter, and the law bars the owner from bringing an action to recover the land after the expiration of 12 years. The squatter obtains this right to continued possession of the land because after 12 years of uninterrupted possession and use of the land the law treats him or her as having acquired what in the language of the law is called a possessory title, that is to say, a squatter’s right to the land.” (Dr William Para Riviere, March 11, 2014) In this way, national policies as well as our cultural values actively encourage us to live close to the land, to farm and produce food for local consumption. In Dominica we often say that we are “Land rich and Cash poor”.

Most parts of the globe are not “Bread-baskets” like Dominica, with our deep, fertile volcanic top soil, plentiful rainfall and a warm tropical climate giving us the ability to grow a seemingly endless variety of crops. Historical influences and cultural retention has ensured that local knowledge and skills in farming remain wide-spread throughout the nation, especially within the older generations. This includes food preservation practices, such as salting, drying, smoking (e.g. smoked fish and salt fish, salt pork etc) The local Rastafarian influence has popularized “ital food”; eating local, organic fruits and provisions, as well as foraging. There is a danger, however that this knowledge might not be sufficiently shared with younger and future generations. Given the aging farming population in Dominica, there is an urgent need to attract more young people into agriculture.

Where “permaculture” is now all the rage in the industrial North, we in Dominica have been using permaculture practices for generations; intercropping, organic composting, using plants to fix nitrogen organically in the soil, protecting soil fertility, rainwater harvesting and more. Most of these ancestral practices are still in use today. However, over the past few decades, the use of non-organic fertilizers and pesticides have been encouraged by donor agencies and multi-nationals institutions and corporations. Many of these inputs are made from oil, which makes our farmers dependent on imports from foreign countries, and they also make global warming worse. Industrial fertilizers and pesticides destroy soil fertility and important biodiversity and create pollution in our rivers and in the ocean.

As we are becoming more aware of the need to eliminate these dangerous practices, I believe we have the opportunity in Dominica to integrate more of our organic agricultural heritage to remediate soils that have been damaged by excessive chemical use and to ensure that generations to come will inherit healthy land and healthy, sustainable practices.

“Although most people think of permaculture as being useful for homesteads and small farms, the originators view it as a means for society to adapt to life without fossil fuels.”

Hathaway, Mark D., “Agroecology and permaculture: addressing key ecological
problems by rethinking and redesigning agricultural systems”

Lesson #4: Learn Practical Living Skills: “Food-Clothing-Shelter-Health”

In my village of Cochrane, with just 380 residents, we have farmers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, bee-keepers, stone masons, barbers, nurses, a doctor, teachers, a pastry chef, mechanics, a vet, an architect, seamstresses, backhoe operators and bus drivers. Even after 25 years living in this community, I’m still amazed at all of the services and resources, all within walking distance in the village.

Could your immediate community provide all the needed skills and resources for everyday life, if you were completely cut off from the outside world, for a few days, weeks…or months?

We learned the answer to this question in 2017 in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Looking back on that experience, I feel it was a practice run for how we would respond to a “global collapse”. The entire island was devastated; the power grid was wiped out, much of the national water system was destroyed, all crops above the ground were destroyed, thousands of animals, structures, livelihoods, cars, bridges, were washed away, and more than 60 people lost their lives. Yet within 2 days community members had restored our village water supply, unblocked the roads, and we worked together to put roofs back on homes, root crops were being shared. Members from our Village Council, Farmers Group, village Health Clinic, and Disaster Preparedness Committee all swung into action to ensure the safety and security of everyone. Political differences were largely put aside, as people came together to provide the wide range of skills and the emotional support that were needed, not only immediately following the disaster, but months and even years afterwards. I felt safe and cared for while doing my part to strategize, replant, rebuild, fundraise and to keep each others’ spirits up.

“A local economy focused on basic goods and services that meets everyone needs, such as food, energy, and fresh water, will outlast one based on non-essentials, such as financial services and tourism.”

(Bradford, Jason, The Future is Rural: Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification)

In Dominica we have strengths and advantages that the world is starting to envy. Our skills, traditions and resources will only become more valuable as the global situation continues to deteriorate. These 4 Lessons we can share for resilience and thriving in a world heading towards collapse.

(Dominica is the English-Speaking island in the Eastern Caribbean, located between the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique)

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Article first published on Dominica News Online, 3 November 2022

Jessica is Dominican, and is the Co-Director of Caapi Cottage Retreats and LINK International Productions Inc. She is on the Boards of the Cochrane Farmers Group, the Dominica Hotel & Tourism Association (DHTA) and a member of the Dominica Health & Wellness Association. Jessica is also a member of the Holding Group at The Deep Adaptation Forum.
Caapi Cottage Retreats: https://www.facebook.com/caapicottageretreats/
Email: jessica@earthbook.tv