Floodplain recession agriculture is essential to downstream tribal livelihoods

Evidence

One elder observed that the survival of his people depended on three rocks that hold up the pot: cattle; crops grown on higher ground in the rainy season; and in the dry season, floodplain (recession) agriculture. If the river is narrowed and controlled from above, two of those rocks will be removed: “[T]he pot will topple over and my people will starve.” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 487

Categorization

• QUESTION: The three-rocks analog is a vivid explanatory device worth holding onto for how slow violence eliminates subsistence systems not at a single moment but by removing seasonal pulses one at a time.