Climate Change Resilience in Guyana

Here's another United Nations University (UNU) piece: my paper on resilience and the indigenous communities of Guyana, written last autumn (2011) for the Global Change and Sustainability intensive course. I am posting it here in case it is of any help for those currently taking that course, but also for general interest, especially as concerns Guyana.

The text is as it was when given to the UNU, though I've added a few pictures here to make the columns of text less terrifying. And as before, for those writing in a similar capacity now, this is here to assist and encourage thinking, not to substitute for it. Plagiarizing my stuff is a very fast way to get put in hospital. Please attribute it properly if you use anything from here, okay?

Enchancing resilience against climate and ecosystem changes in Guyana's North Rupununi region

Ai Chaobang (a.k.a. John Ashton), UNU-ISP MSc Sustainability, Development and Peace

12 October 2011

1) Resilience, Change and Sustainability

2) Enhancing resilience against climate and ecosystem changes in the North Rupununi communities of Guyana

Reducing and coping with climate change, significantly influenced by human activity, presents one of the supreme challenges of our era.¹ It is a manefestation – perhaps the foremost – of the sustainability crisis humanity must urgently address.

A frequent concept in the sustainability discourse is that of resilience, and here I seek to explore what it means in that context, as well as how we might measure and enhance it. I then apply it to the specific case of the indigenous communities of Guyana's North Rupununi region, and consider what resilience means in their circumstances and how it might be improved.

Dhalpuri

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. For me, cooking is not typically of the former.

Nonetheless, this day I committed to an exercise in globalization, creating one of my favourite items from Guyana using Japanese ingredients and equipment.

Dhalpuri is unleavened Caribbean roti (of South Asian origin), with a stuffing of ground yellow split peas along with cumin, pepper and garlic. Lacking a mill and tava, I sufficed with a food processor and a frying pan over a stove. It raises interesting reflections on the geography of cuisine: crowded and compartmentalized Tokyo leaves little room for the great communal cooking devices found in the kitchens and yards of Guyana's houses - the cassava processing apparatus of interior households alone would occupy more space than the average inhabitant of Tokyo lives in. Conversely, the tiny microwaves or toaster ovens here might quite amuse a Guyanese!

The process took two hours and made one heck of a mess, but from the outcome rose the taste of some of the most impressive memories I hold.

With my most honoured friend in Tokyo, I toasted Guyana over this product and dedicated this meal to my students at the Bina Hill Institute in the summer of 2010. May success, good fortune and the best of fulfilments be currently finding the journeys of each and every one of you.

Reflections on Guyana 3 - The Coast

Following last week's Guyanese general election, it seems a good time to contemplate another of the country's dimensions from my time there last year: the coast.

Although my prime interest was with the indigenous areas, I spent the best part of two months struggling through swamps of bureaucracy and a splendid assortment of political dodginess in the capital, Georgetown. The coastal strip: a few miles from ocean to bush of urbanized or cultivated land, pressed against the sea by unfathomable masses of pristine rainforest, and sustained by the lower courses of the three great rivers: Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice. This is where most of Guyana's 800,000 humans live, and the country's present sovereign centre of gravity.

This is a society of superb diversity. Most Guyanese are of either African or Indian descent, with small but notable proportions of Europeans, Chinese and others present (above all the indigenous South Americans, from whom the world has a lot to learn.) Crammed into this coastal belt is an explosion of cultural and spiritual identities, not to mention their unique and fantastic cuisines. Indeed, the perfect foundation for a lesson to the world of how a thousand different identities can produce the most beautiful social mosaics.

But of course, we humans never quite make it go that smoothly. Coastal Guyana is mired in turbulent nightmares. As last week's elections exemplify, politics remains sharply divided along ethnic lines: the PPP and PNC are considered the parties of the Indians and Africans respectively, with both having had their long periods of dominance in which Guyanese were sufficiently hard done by to have reason to consider their opposing party a bunch of lunatics. Common social violence in the form of killings and choppings is endemic, and corruption oozes from every orifice of the socio-political superstructure, especially the police. The trauma of history – here chiefly the fault of Britain – still weights heavily upon a populace descended from people who experienced some of the worst atrocities humanity has found it within itself to unleash; and then there's the gender paradigms and hostility to sexual diversity we find in so many countries. For many Guyanese I spoke with, the picture is one of abject despair.

None of this should be. The people I met in Guyana were some of the friendliest I have encountered anywhere in the world. The joyous Caribbean spirit, by which every social occasion is an excuse for a party, and every ordeal an opportunity to get back up and project the might of your heart, infuses this land to the roots and bolts and marrows. A land of tropical sunshine...

 

...eternal festivities...

...eccentric vegetation...

...and cricket. Lots of cricket. Cricket in Guyana is no mere sport: it is part of the soul.

Guyana is also in the news these days for another reason: the significance of its forests as a carbon sink in the struggle to correct humanity's ruination of Earth's climate. While I was there I beheld much rhetoric about the Low Carbon Development Strategy, and bilateral agreements with Norway and such so as to get development money in exchange for keeping the rainforests standing, rather than chopping them down for the rich natural resources beneath. Yet contracts to exploit these resources are continuously handed out, with logging or mining operations persisting all over the country (and goodness knows what their legality is, in a country with quite some work to do as regards rule of law). This naturally concerns the relationship of the coast with the indigenous interior communities: and it is my sincerest hope that the more balanced parliamentary outcome of this election will be harnessed to bring about drastic improvements in all these areas.

Coastal Guyana's journey stretches far ahead. The road is long, and not everywhere in safe condition. But it also has opportunities to make of its society something truly unique in the world, and one hopes, exemplary. Ethnic and cultural diversity; respect for the living Earth; treatment of indigenous peoples: these are all areas where humans on every continent have staggered from one almighty cockup to another. In many lands this has ended in ecological annihilation and crimes against humanity; a mire which Guyana, for all its struggles, has thus far avoided. It may yet reject the destinies chosen by those who demolished other indigenous American societies, or the Aral Sea, or the Indonesian forests, or the Ainu; can still choose a route that teaches humanity it has to do better than that.

All possible paths, from the inspirational to the catastrophic, are available. In the years to come, Guyana's 800,000 people will choose which path it walks; and that path will haul the destiny of humanity on Earth in the same direction.

Reflections on Guyana 2 - The Bina Hill Institute

See also:

Reflections on Guyana (19 August 2011)

The Bina Hill Institute was my place of work for six remarkable weeks in 2010. It featured in my previous Guyana reflections, but is special enough to deserve its own attention.

Reflections on Guyana

Fourteen years in Britain, for the most part miserable. While I must acknowledge the many worthy human beings whose paths have crossed with mine – relatives, academics, guild fellows, martial artists, and so on –  my time in Britain has been of alienation, bitterness and strife. But my impending departure to Japan is not the first time my irreconcilable differences with Britain’s attitudes and norms have led me to leave its shores.

In April last year (2010) I went to Guyana, aiming simply to get out of Britain and forge a destiny somewhere where it was actually possible – in Britain it was not, for I could not identify with that land and there were no opportunities.

Guyana was an adventure which cannot be summarised on one mere wall of text. Its duration was shorter than it might have been – four and a half months – yet within that time it concentrated enough impressions to counterbalance over a decade of British nightmares.

I sought to live and work amongst Guyana’s indigenous people. But half my time there was spent battling with its coastal bureaucracy in a sordid political climate, for the chance alone to get into the indigenous areas. When I did, it was thanks to the indigenous leaders themselves, specifically Sydney Allicock (below), quite possibly the most inspirational human being I have ever met.

 I taught English and Maths at the Bina Hill Institute until the end of the summer term, but I doubt I imparted on these Makushi communities a fraction of what they imparted on me. It is what they have to teach, in fact, that matters in this world.

Much of what is wrong in Britain (and in much of the commercialized world) can be ascribed to the severing of the two crucial bonds that make all human beings human. Each of us, no matter where we are from, is of the Earth; and so too are we social creatures. Our relationships with the Earth, and with each other, define us, and only when those relationships are healthy can we produce societies worthy of the term.

The political, economic and social models in places like Britain have sundered those relationships: we become atomistic, selfish, greedy, prejudiced, mired in arrogance and hypocrisy we cannot reflect on to see. We place ourselves before all our fellows and any concern of the Earth, and peddle contemptuous academic theories that this is but human nature, universal and timeless.

Theories that indigenous Guyana exposes as preposterous. There we have what the pessimists believe impossible: a decent society. A society where people are generally good: friendly, tolerant, curious, with a continual desire to learn, to improve, to make things better for everyone. It is not that they lack problems or challenges – indeed their present challenges may be their greatest yet. It is that they have the humility to understand that all societies have challenges, to reflect on theirs and thereby seek to resolve them in a way that works for everyone.

In Britain humans define themselves by what they have – accumulations of wealth and property, in competition with others. In the Guyanese interior humans define themselves by what they are. That is why the Guyana interior is more “developed” than the likes of London by any meaningful definition of the word.

They have the foundations that Britain has lost: the identification with other people, and with the living Earth on which they depend. So long as those foundations are intact, there is no limit to the greatness a society can attain. Forsake those foundations, and the only way is down – and when societies think most highly of themselves, it’s a long, long way down and the collision at the end will be all the more excruciating. But I had to see with my own eyes that this disaster is not inevitable, not logical, not “development”: that humans can do better than in the likes of London. In the North Rupununi, they do.

So why didn’t I stay? Were my choices concerned primarily with what I want as a person, I might still be there now and for years to come. But that could not be my journey: it was necessary, is necessary, to travel further, wider, find out more about what drives humankind to its madness. It is a journey that now leads me to Tokyo, to the United Nations University, where this goal necessitates that I be a human being first and an academic only second. As either, what I learned from the Makushi shall never be far from the front of my heart or mind. Humanity’s journey can be a good one; and wherever it is miserable or callous, that is not nature, but a breakdown thereof.