What this knowledge would change here
Every case is examined the same way: what a root people does, filmed and documented on EWA — and what that produced, or could produce, in a Western society. Two columns, two sources, no promises.
A precise fact, not a value. Attested by a video you can watch right here.
Why it works. This is the part that transfers, not the culture.
What our system does instead — and what it has tasked no one with handling.
Already done, trialled, or still to explore. Always flagged as such.
What must not be concluded from it. We say so every time — without that, the analysis would be worthless.
Implementation
What this knowledge has produced here
Three documented transfers, from the people who carry the practice to a Western public policy.
What its disappearance costs there
Three epidemiological measurements, among populations where the knowledge was kept — or torn away.
fewer court appearances by minors within one year, in New Zealand, after the 1989 reform drawn from Māori practice.
Go to the case ↓ Fire and territory1.2 Mtof CO₂ avoided each year by Aboriginal early-season burning, across 24 million hectares of northern Australia.
Go to the case ↓ Water and commons1% against 50%of losses to pests in the rice fields still under the collective management of the Balinese subak, compared with those switched to the Green Revolution.
Go to the case ↓ Cultural continuity137,5 → 0suicides per 100,000 young people, depending on whether the community has lost or kept control of its language, its school, its health care and its territory.
Go to the evidence ↓ Language× 7fewer suicides among young people where more than half the inhabitants still speak the ancestral language.
Go to the evidence ↓ The rupture× 1.9more physical violence suffered by the descendants of children taken from their families. Effect measured across three generations.
Go to the evidence ↓Looking for the cause rather than the fault
Where we establish responsibility in order to calibrate a sentence, other societies establish an imbalance in order to repair it. One Western state took the step in 1989: the figures are public.
The Wayuu palabrero: settling conflicts through speech
Among the Wayuu of Colombia and Venezuela, the pütchipü’ü does not judge: he moves between the families until a compensation restores the bond. The system is inscribed on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list.
New Zealand, 1989: youth justice rewritten from Māori practice
− 75%
fewer appearances before the youth court within one year — from 63 per 1,000 young people (1986-1988) to 16 per 1,000 in 1990.
Sources
Robert Yazzie: Navajo justice does not look for the guilty party
The former Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation explains peacemaking in three minutes: you do not establish a fault, you look for what broke the harmony between people, and you repair the bond. It is the same shift as the Wayuu palabrero’s, stated by a sitting judge.
How Māori families rewrote New Zealand justice
The figure in this case has a political history: the family group conference written into the 1989 Act was not invented by legal scholars, it was won by Māori mobilisation. This interview retraces that balance of power — without it, the reform would not have happened.
The youth court sits on the marae
The 1989 reform had a sequel. Some follow-up hearings are now held on a marae: the session opens with a pōwhiri, the kaumātua sit alongside the judge, and the young person learns and then recites their pepeha. The country has fifteen Rangatahi Courts and two Pasifika courts. The video is produced by the Ministry of Justice itself.
The family group conference, explained by the administration that runs it
This is the mechanism of point ④, filmed by the New Zealand Ministry for Children: the extended family, the victim and the young person meet to build a reparation plan; the court only takes over if that plan fails. One minute twenty to see what the meeting that replaced the hearing looks like.
What tikanga requires of the procedure, set out in a public lecture
The New Zealand administration’s clip announces the family group conference in a minute and twenty seconds; it does not show how it works. This public lecture from the Transformative Justice in Education centre at the University of California, Davis shows it for an hour and a half, with two speakers from Auckland: Rawiri Pene, Māori cultural adviser to the New Zealand Ministry of Justice, and Helen Bowen, a barrister specialising in restorative justice. They work through the definition adopted, the facilitator’s role — it is tikanga that governs, not procedure — the place given to victims, then a restorative justice meeting followed through to the decision.
In a group where everyone counts, excluding a member costs more than repairing them. This is not moral gentleness, it is arithmetic.
Our system knows how to punish and, at best, to rehabilitate. No function is tasked with establishing and then treating the cause: the “why” serves only to measure the sentence.
The family group conference brings together the extended family, the victim and the young person, who build the reparation together. It has become the ordinary route, the court the exception.
New Zealand law draws on Māori principles — the place of the victim, the value of apology, consensus rather than a vote — without reproducing a Māori justice system; Māori researchers do in fact contest its being presented as “their” model. And the Wayuu palabrero illustrates the same principle here among another people: it is not the origin of the reform. What transfers is never a culture — it is a mechanism.
Burning a little, often, so as not to burn a lot
A century of Western doctrine consisted in preventing every flame. Preventing fire does not remove it: it stores up its violence and postpones its date.
Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land: daily life and transmission
In northern Australia, fire is lit early in the dry season, in small mosaics, so that fuel never has time to build up. The great end-of-season blaze becomes impossible for lack of matter.
Australia: the method has become a public policy — and a source of income
1.2 Mt
of CO₂ avoided each year by 39 fire-management projects owned and run by Aboriginal people.
Sources
Kimberley rangers explain early-season burning
The organisation of the Kimberley traditional owners films its own teams: when to light, why early in the dry season, and how the mosaic of small fires starves the big fires of fuel. It is the practitioners speaking, not their commentators.
Early-season burning, an approved method of the Australian carbon market
The federal regulator presents savanna fire management as what it has become: an enforceable calculation method that turns fires lit according to ancient knowledge into carbon credits sold on a regulated market. This is the precise moment when knowledge changes status.
California: cultural burning after a century of prohibition
The same mechanism as in Arnhem Land, on another continent. The Yurok, the Karuk and the Hupa are relighting the short, frequent fires that forestry doctrine had banned, and the episode shows what they tend: basketry hazel, meadows, a mosaic of habitats. What was forbidden here for a hundred years is exactly what the forests that have burnt since were missing.
In Canada, the parks agency is taking it up in turn
Parks Canada has made Indigenous fire stewardship an official line of work: training, partnerships in the national parks, support for Indigenous guardians. The report recalls what prohibition produced — a century of accumulated fuel — and shows a community-led burn.
Fire is not an accident to be prevented but a flow to be paced. You set the frequency in order to remove the intensity.
The doctrine of total suppression manufactured the megafires we now see in Australia, in California and around the Mediterranean.
California now recognises tribal authority over cultural burns. Those who know how to do it are once again the ones who do it.
The burning calendar is specific to each ecosystem and cannot be exported as it stands from one continent to another. What transfers is the principle — pace rather than suppress — and the fact that the skill must stay with those who hold it.
A thousand-year-old calendar outperformed agronomic planning
In Bali, the water of the rice terraces has been shared out for a millennium by a network of temples. In the 1970s, the Green Revolution required that this be ignored. The experiment was run, and the results are in figures.
This documentary has no published transcript: the markers will be set while viewing, as for the two cases above, before being added here.
The Balinese subak: managing water in common for a thousand years
The subak is an association of irrigators. The water temples synchronise the flooding and the fallow periods of the entire watershed: no one decides alone, and the ritual calendar serves as a hydraulic and sanitary protocol.
Bali, 1970s-1990s: the Green Revolution, the failure, then the return to the temple model
1% against 50%
of losses to pests: around 1% with the synchronised harvests of the traditional system, more than 50% with the continuous cropping imposed by modern planning.
Sources
Stephen Lansing: the water temples of Bali
The anthropologist works his way down the irrigation network, from the crater lake to the rice fields, and shows the heart of the system: synchronised fallow. By leaving the plots dry at the same time, the subak starve the pests — without a gram of insecticide.
Elinor Ostrom: the tragedy of the commons is not inevitable
The Nobel laureate in economics lists the conditions that allow a group to manage a shared resource sustainably: clear boundaries, rules made by those who live under them, graduated sanctions. The subak meets them all — it is the textbook case, not the exotic exception.
Elinor Ostrom, Nobel lecture: the rules that users give themselves
The previous card states the thesis in eight minutes. Here, Elinor Ostrom demonstrates it in an hour, in Stockholm, in December 2009. She starts from the view of the 1960s — a common good is doomed, you need the state or the market — and sets against it what she found in the field: irrigation systems in Nepal, forests around the world, laboratory games. She ends with the principles found in commons that last. This is the grid that lets you read the Balinese subak as something other than a local curiosity.
A shared resource is not managed through individual optimisation but through synchronisation. The ritual calendar encodes a solution that no one could have calculated, and that everyone can follow.
Modern agricultural planning reasons plot by plot and yield by yield. It had no slot for a collective rule whose effectiveness depends precisely on everyone applying it at the same time.
This is the same reasoning that Elinor Ostrom formalised into eight principles for governing the commons, from Swiss alpine pastures, Japanese forests and Spanish canals — work awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, and used today to design fisheries, groundwater systems and community forests.
The Indonesian administration did not return to the traditional system: it integrated the computer model into its own services, keeping control of the calendars. Recognising that a body of knowledge works, and giving communities back the power to apply it, are two different things.
Knowing where you come from
The three previous cases show what this knowledge brings when we take it up. This one asks the other question: what happens to a people when it keeps its knowledge — or when that knowledge is torn away? The answer is in figures, and it is brutal.
So that the Nakota language may survive
Louise BigEagle, 2021, 6 min — National Film Board of Canada.
“When you don’t know your language or your culture, you don’t know who you are.” Armand McArthur, 69, is one of the last fluent speakers of Nakota in the Pheasant Rump band, in southern Saskatchewan. The film follows him as he teaches his language to the children of his community.
This is exactly the variable measured by the figures in the next column: where more than half the inhabitants still speak the language of the people, youth suicide is seven times rarer.
Three gaps that nothing else explains
These gaps do not come from a prevention programme, a health budget or an action plan. They come from what the community kept — or from what was taken from it.
The only Mi’kmaq immersion school in the world
In Eskasoni, Nova Scotia, children do their entire schooling in Mi’kmaq. Two of the factors measured by Chandler and Lalonde — the language, and a school run by the community — come together here in a single classroom. On the ground, the figures in this case look like this.
Lillian Elias, residential school survivor, now a teacher of her own language
An Inuvialuit elder recounts the banning of her language at residential school, then a life’s work giving it back to the children. The break and its repair are held here in the same story, in one minute forty. Testimony on the Indigenous residential schools.
When a community keeps its story, its young people stop dying
Between 1987 and 1992, two researchers recorded the 220 suicides that occurred among the 17,902 Indigenous young people of British Columbia, then looked, community by community, at whether six things were still there: band self-government, a land claim under way, control of the school, of health care, of police and fire services, and cultural facilities of its own.
The communities that had lost everything recorded 137.5 suicides per 100,000 young people. Those that had kept all six: no suicide at all in five years. Between the two, the range runs from zero to more than 3,600 per 100,000 — in other words, the “Indigenous” average means nothing. What counts is whether the people has kept control of its own history.
None of the six markers kept
Average for Indigenous young people in the province
Average for non-Indigenous young people in the province
All six markers kept
Annual rates per 100,000 young people. 220 suicides recorded among 17,902 young people. Chandler & Lalonde, 1998.
Source — Chandler, M. J. & Lalonde, C. (1998), Cultural Continuity as a Hedge against Suicide in Canada's First Nations, Transcultural Psychiatry 35(2). Read the study ↗
Cultural continuity explained in class, marker by marker
Ninth session of McGill University’s cultural psychiatry course. Laurence Kirmayer first projects the spread of suicide rates from one community to another — the demonstration that the “Indigenous” average means nothing — then the very list of the six markers used by Chandler and Lalonde: band self-government, land claim, school, health, police and fire services, cultural facilities. He ends by reviewing what might explain the gap differently, and why none of those explanations is sufficient. University lecture filmed in the room, slides legible.
On its own, language divides suicide by seven
Nine years later, the same researchers added a seventh marker across 152 communities: the proportion of inhabitants able to hold a conversation in the ancestral language. A threshold appears, sharply, at half the population.
In absolute terms, the gap is almost brutal: a single suicide in six years in the 16 communities where the language is still alive, against 84 suicides in the other 136. And this factor remains predictive independently of the first six. Language is not an ornament that comes along with the rest: it is the vehicle that carries the knowledge. When it stops, the knowledge stops circulating.
Fewer than half the inhabitants speak the language — 136 communities, 84 suicides
More than half the inhabitants speak the language — 16 communities, 1 suicide
Annual rates per 100,000 young people. Hallett, Chandler & Lalonde, 2007.
Source — Hallett, D., Chandler, M. & Lalonde, C. (2007), Aboriginal language knowledge and youth suicide, Cognitive Development 22. Read the study ↗
The same link, tested outside Canada
The figure on this card comes from British Columbia. This seminar at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London shows that the relationship does not stop there: Justyna Olko presents the results of a European programme carried out at four Nahua field sites in Mexico and on Wymysorys in Poland, where the vitality of the inherited language is set against psychological well-being and self-reported health. The demonstration is of the same nature — robust correlation, protective effect — among populations that have nothing to do with the First Nations. University seminar; the author herself presents her results as preliminary.
What happens when a people is torn from its past
The link between memory and violence is hard to prove in the positive direction. It is, unfortunately, very well documented in the other: two countries forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families for decades, and the consequences have been counted.
Australia — the “Stolen Generations”. About 17,150 survivors and 114,800 adult descendants, that is a third of the country’s adult Indigenous population. Compared with other Indigenous Australians, the descendants are:
more likely to have suffered or been threatened with physical violence
more likely to have been arrested in the last five years
more likely to have experienced discrimination
more likely to be in poor general health
Canada — the Indigenous residential schools. The effect can be read across three generations, and this is not a metaphor: it is measured.
Suicidal thoughts during lifetime — adults, parent affected
Suicide attempt — adults, grandparent affected
Depressive symptoms — young people, parent affected
Percentages. First Nations Regional Health Surveys. Bombay, Matheson & Anisman, 2014.
Sources — AIHW (2018), Stolen Generations and descendants, report ↗ · Bombay, A., Matheson, K. & Anisman, H. (2014), The intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools, Transcultural Psychiatry 51(3), full text ↗
At Emory University, 66 teenagers answered twenty questions of the type “do you know how your grandparents met?”. The score obtained is the only variable in the study correlated with all the others: self-esteem, sense of control, less anxiety, less aggression. After 11 September 2001, these same children proved the most resilient.
A meta-analysis of 184 studies confirms the link between identity and well-being (r = 0.17), stronger in adolescence. A review of 25 studies covering 19,231 Indigenous adolescents finds a positive association in 72% of cases — and no negative effect.
119 Aboriginal prisoners followed for two years after release, in Australia. Cultural engagement — practising, returning to country — predicts the absence of violent reoffending. Declared identity alone has no effect. Calling yourself an heir does not protect you; passing it on does.
Correlation is not causation. The Canadian studies compare communities, not individuals: one cannot rule out that a healthy community preserves its language better, rather than the other way round — their authors say so themselves. The average effect is modest (r = 0.17); the spectacular gaps come from very high-risk populations, where a protective factor has room to show. The “Do You Know” study covers 66 teenagers from educated, two-parent families, and has sometimes been taken further than it allows. Finally, no study says directly “knowing your people’s knowledge → less violence with victims”: the reasoning runs through the links above, cultural continuity → mental health → cultural engagement → less violent reoffending.
- Chandler, M. J. & Lalonde, C. (1998). Cultural Continuity as a Hedge against Suicide in Canada's First Nations. Transcultural Psychiatry, 35(2), 191-219. PDF ↗
- Hallett, D., Chandler, M. & Lalonde, C. (2007). Aboriginal language knowledge and youth suicide. Cognitive Development, 22(3), 392-399. PDF ↗
- Duke, M., Lazarus, A. & Fivush, R. Knowledge of family history as a clinically useful index of psychological well-being and prognosis. Emory University. Summary ↗
- Feiler, B. The Stories That Bind Us — popular account of the “Do You Know” scale. Read ↗
- Smith, T. B. & Silva, L. (2011). Ethnic identity and personal well-being of people of color: a meta-analysis. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 58(1), 42-60. PubMed ↗
- Doery, E., Satyen, L., Paradies, Y. & Toumbourou, J. W. (2023). The Relationship Between Cultural Engagement and Psychological Well-being Among Indigenous Adolescents: A Systematic Review. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Abstract ↗
- Shepherd, S. M. et al. (2017). The impact of indigenous cultural identity and cultural engagement on violent offending. BMC Public Health, 17. Article ↗
- Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2018). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Stolen Generations and descendants. Report ↗
- Bombay, A., Matheson, K. & Anisman, H. (2014). The intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools. Transcultural Psychiatry, 51(3). PDF ↗
What pharmacy owes to knowledge that pointed the way
Quinine, curare, artemisinin. These discoveries are often told as forest finds. They are plants that were pointed out : someone already knew what they were for, and said so. What follows measures the value of that indication.
Medicinal plants: Indigenous traditions and knowledge
Public meeting of 22 June 2021, 1 hr 30 — MIL Campus, University of Montreal.
Michel Durand Nolett, an Abenaki from Odanak and head of his community’s environment and land office, sits at the same table as three academics: a pharmacologist, an ethnobotanist and a family doctor. The species traditionally used by the Indigenous communities of Canada are counted in the hundreds.
The discussion goes straight to the questions this case raises: what becomes of knowledge when a laboratory tests it, who files the patent, and why these plants do — or do not — enter everyday medical practice. It is the knowledge holder who speaks, and the researchers who answer.
A short list, and it was already written
None of these three figures comes from random screening. Each starts from a plant that someone had pointed out, often centuries earlier, specifying what it was for and how to prepare it.
Tu Youyou: artemisinin, a gift from Chinese medicine to the world
Nobel lecture of 7 December 2015. The laureate herself shows the passage from Ge Hong’s treatise, written in the 4th century, that gave her the key: do not heat the plant. It was cold extraction that took efficacy from a few percent to a hundred. The knowledge did not only give the plant, it gave the gesture.
The Nagoya Protocol explained: access, sharing — and a revoked patent
Seven minutes of a lecture (University of Neuchâtel, biodiversity law) to understand the return mechanism: access to genetic resources in exchange for fair and equitable benefit sharing, from the 2010 text to its concrete application. The video closes on the Umckaloabo® case: a medicine derived from a South African pelargonium and from traditional knowledge, whose patents were revoked after a claim from South Africa. What comes back is no longer only a moral question.
Four plant medicines out of five were already doing the same job
Two pharmacognosists at the University of Illinois listed every medicine in worldwide use made of a molecule of defined structure extracted from a higher plant. They find 122, from only 94 species — out of the roughly 300,000 flowering plants described.
For 80% of them, there was a traditional use identical or related to the modern use of the active molecule. In other words: in four cases out of five, the molecule does here what the plant was already doing there. And 94 species is not a systematic exploration of the forest: it is a short list, handed down.
Identical or related traditional use
No traditional match
122 molecules of defined structure, from 94 species of higher plants. Fabricant & Farnsworth, 2001.
Source — Fabricant, D. S. & Farnsworth, N. R. (2001), The value of plants used in traditional medicine for drug discovery, Environmental Health Perspectives 109 (suppl. 1). Record and abstract ↗
Why the list is short: the mechanism, shown on the board
Cassandra Quave teaches medical ethnobotany at Emory; this seminar, given to Cornell’s plant biology section, shows the very mechanism the card puts in figures. At 9:40, a slide lines up four medicines and the four plants whose traditional use pointed to them: willow and aspirin, foxglove and digoxin, mayapple and etoposide, poppy and codeine-morphine. At 12:01, the example ofArtemisia annua and of the 1574 Chinese manual that Tu Youyou reread before isolating artemisinin. At 15:01, the diagram that carries the argument: between “all of biological diversity” on one side and “human knowledge and practices” on the other, ethnobotany acts as a lens — that is what “only 94 species” means on the card. University seminar, chaptered by the author.
Two plants pointed out, set against each other across 6,886 patients
The AQUAMAT trial compared, by random allocation, artesunate — derived from sweet wormwood, indicated by the Chinese pharmacopoeia — with quinine — drawn from cinchona bark, indicated by Andean healers — in 5,425 children with severe malaria, across 11 centres in 9 African countries. Result: 8.5% deaths against 10.9%, that is a relative fall in mortality of 22.5%.
Five years earlier, the SEAQUAMAT trial had pointed the same way across 1,461 patients in South-East Asia: 34.7% less mortality. These two trials must be read for what they are: this is not the plant against the molecule. It is a plant pointed out by one tradition prevailing over a plant pointed out by another — one that had been, for three centuries, the best treatment we had.
SEAQUAMAT — 1,461 patients, South-East Asia, 2005
AQUAMAT — 5,425 children, 9 African countries, 2010
The two trials cover different populations: compare each arm with its own control, not one trial with the other. The Lancet, 2005 and 2010.
Sources — SEAQUAMAT group (2005), Artesunate versus quinine for treatment of severe falciparum malaria, The Lancet 366. Article ↗ · Dondorp, A. M. et al. (2010), AQUAMAT, The Lancet 376. Abstract ↗
The world malaria curve has been broken
The malaria mortality rate worldwide, relative to populations at risk, fell from 28.6 to 13.8 per 100,000 between 2000 and 2024. Over the period, the World Health Organization estimates that 2.3 billion cases and 14 million deaths were averted. Malaria remains massive — 282 million cases and 610,000 deaths in 2024 — but the slope has changed.
It is not artemisinin alone: bed nets, spraying and rapid diagnosis count too. But the spread of artemisinin-based combination therapies is measurable: among treated children under five, their share rose from a median of 34% to 68%. The Nobel committee, in awarding the 2015 prize to Tu Youyou, gave the order of magnitude: more than 100,000 lives saved each year in Africa alone.
2000
2024
80 malaria-endemic countries. WHO, World malaria report 2025.
2005-2011
2017-2024
Median values, household surveys in endemic countries. WHO, World malaria report 2025.
Source — World Health Organization (2025), World malaria report 2025. Report ↗ · Nobel Foundation (2015), press release for the prize in physiology or medicine. Press release ↗
Random screening starts from several hundred thousand species. The world’s 122 plant medicines come from 94. This narrowing was not produced by a laboratory: it was produced by generations of use, in which every ineffective plant was abandoned and every useful one handed on. A pharmacopoeia is not the inventory of a flora: it is a flora already filtered.
The first wormwood extracts obtained by Tu Youyou’s team were irregular in activity. The solution came from the text: a Chinese emergency handbook from the 4th century prescribes soaking the plant and drinking the pressed juice — and mentions no heating at all. The molecule was destroyed by heat. The ancient indication contained, in outline, the physico-chemical constraint.
A plant used for centuries across entire populations has been through a full-scale observation of its toxicity at customary doses. That is not a clinical trial, but it is not nothing: natural products and their derivatives gain in relative share as trial phases advance — from about 35% in phase I to 45% in phase III, the opposite of purely synthetic compounds.
This is not a story of fair cooperation. Quinine, curare and artemisinin enriched industries and states; the Quechua and the Amazonian peoples received nothing from them. The Nagoya Protocol, in force since 2014, now requires prior consent and benefit sharing — but it is not retroactive. The Hoodia case sums it up: a patent filed in 1995 on an appetite-suppressing plant used by the San, without their consent; a sharing agreement signed eight years later, at 6% of royalties, accepted “reluctantly”. Not every traditional plant works. In the only direct comparison we have been able to verify — 53 species from north-eastern Brazil tested against eleven micro-organisms — selection by local knowledge yields 50% active extracts against 36.8% for chance: a real, modest advantage, on a sample too small to conclude from. And the 80% figure reads the opposite way to intuition: it states the share of selected medicines that had a traditional antecedent, not the share of traditional plants that yield a medicine. Modern validation remains indispensable. The WHO does not support the use of wormwood as a tea against malaria: the content of active principle varies too much, which exposes patients to relapse and accelerates resistance — already confirmed in Eritrea, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania. Isolation, dosage, controlled trial, combination: this chain is not a formality added to Indigenous knowledge, it is what allows it to hold at the scale of hundreds of millions of people.
- Fabricant, D. S. & Farnsworth, N. R. (2001). The value of plants used in traditional medicine for drug discovery. Environmental Health Perspectives, 109 (suppl. 1), 69-75. Record ↗
- SEAQUAMAT group (2005). Artesunate versus quinine for treatment of severe falciparum malaria: a randomised trial. The Lancet, 366(9487), 717-725. Article ↗
- Dondorp, A. M., Fanello, C. I., Hendriksen, I. C. E. et al. (2010). Artesunate versus quinine in the treatment of severe falciparum malaria in African children (AQUAMAT). The Lancet, 376(9753), 1647-1657. Abstract ↗
- World Health Organization (2025). World malaria report 2025. Geneva. Report ↗
- Wang, J., Xu, C., Wong, Y. K. et al., with Tu, Y. (2019). Artemisinin, the Magic Drug Discovered from Traditional Chinese Medicine. Engineering, 5(1), 32-39. Article ↗
- Achan, J., Talisuna, A. O., Erhart, A. et al. (2011). Quinine, an old anti-malarial drug in a modern world. Malaria Journal, 10, 144. PDF ↗
- Raghavendra, T. (2002). Neuromuscular blocking drugs: discovery and development — the trajectory of curare, from arrow poison to anaesthesia. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 95(7), 363-367. Article ↗
- World Health Organization (2019). The use of non-pharmaceutical forms of Artemisia. Position ↗
- Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Nagoya Protocol and case study no. 7: the commercial development of Hoodia. PDF ↗
Bringing a river back
In Rajasthan, hydraulic engineering had ruled: the villages’ earth check dams were an archaism. From 1985 on, one district did the opposite of what the plan said. Five seasonal rivers there now flow all year round. Case 03 dealt with the collective management of water ; this one is about the structure itself.
The Waterman of India — Dr Rajendra Singh
Ankur Didwania, 2018, 14 min 50 — Decode Mediacom.
The film follows Rajendra Singh in the field, from the first johad re-dug at Gopalpura to the rivers brought back into flow. It shows what the figures do not: villagers digging an earth dam across a small valley themselves, with spade and basket.
It also documents the conflict — the opposition of the marble quarry operators, the court cases, the administrative order to demolish a structure built without a permit. Restoring a river has never been a consensual gesture.
Three figures, only one of them instrumented
The first two figures do not have the same status, and this must be said at the outset: the count of structures comes from the association’s own surveys; the recharge rate comes from a catchment instrumented over two monsoons by two hydrologists from the University of Sydney.
Yacouba Sawadogo: zaï against the desert
In Yatenga, a Burkinabè farmer takes up a planting-pit technique that agronomy had filed away as an archaism, and grows back forty hectares of forest on soil declared lost. The same principle as in Rajasthan: hold the water where it falls, instead of leading it elsewhere. He died on 3 December 2023.
The amunas of Huamantanga: infiltrating water to find it again later
Above Lima, pre-Inca infiltration canals have been brought back into service: rainy-season water sinks into the mountain and comes back out at the springs several weeks later. Eighty-six kilometres of canals, fifteen million cubic metres a year, measured. The Rajasthani johad has an Andean cousin.
Measuring recharge, village by village: the MARVI programme
The johad raises the water table — by how much, and who knows? This fifty-minute technical seminar presents MARVI, an Indo-Australian programme run from 2012 to 2017 in the district of Udaipur (Rajasthan) and that of Sabarkantha (Gujarat), led by Western Sydney University and funded by ACIAR. Its principle: training villagers, the Bhujal Jankaars, to record the level of wells and dams themselves, week after week. You see the cumulative recharge curve of one dam, and what the measurement changes in what the village decides next. It is the instrumented counterpart of the gesture shown in the previous cards.
A first hole in the ground, in 1985
Rajendra Singh arrives in the district of Alwar in 1985; the first johad is re-dug at Gopalpura. Two institutions examined the record before awarding a prize, sixteen years apart, and their counts tally: 4,500 working johads in 750 villages in 2001 for the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation; 8,600 structures, a thousand villages in 2015 for the Stockholm Water Prize committee.
These are structures reported as built, not audited one by one. That is a real limitation, and it does not change the order of magnitude: this district rebuilt, by hand, a hydraulic network that the administration had stopped maintaining.
1985 — arrival of Tarun Bharat Sangh
2001 — 750 villages
2015 — 1,000 villages
Counts accepted by the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation (2001) and by the nomination committee of the Stockholm Water Prize (2015).
Sources — Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (2001), citation for Rajendra Singh. Citation ↗ · Stockholm Water Foundation (2015), The water man of India wins 2015 Stockholm Water Prize. Press release ↗
A course module retraces the story, slide by slide
This module belongs to an online course in environmental sociology; it is presented by Arup Kumar Mitra, professor in the department of environmental studies at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. In twenty-four minutes he sets out what the card summarises: what a johad is and how it is built, Rajendra Singh’s arrival in Bhikampura then Gopalpura, Tarun Bharat Sangh, the area covered by 2001 — and the figure that matters for the next card: three hundred and seventy-five dams on the Arvari alone, a river that began to flow again in 1990 after more than sixty years dry. Online course module, in English, slides legible.
Seven per cent of the rainfall, returned to the water table — and the figure does not move
This is the only field hydrological measurement published in a peer-reviewed journal for this catchment. Claire Glendenning and Willem Vervoort instrumented the Arvari catchment — 476 km², more than 366 structures — during the 2007 monsoon (a dry year, 436 mm of rain) and the 2008 one (a wet year, 714 mm). Seven dams monitored in six landscape positions, twenty-nine wells to read the response of the water table.
Result: beneath the structures, potential infiltration reaches 12 to 52 mm a day, of which 3 to 7 mm actually reach the water table — that is 6.6% of the rainfall in 2007 and 7.1% in 2008. It is the stability that counts: the system returns the same share of the rain whether it rains little or a lot. At village scale, the effect accumulates: at Gopalpura, the water table rose from 13.7 m below the surface in 1987 to 6.7 m in 1996.
2007 — dry year (436 mm of rain)
2008 — wet year (714 mm of rain)
476 km², 366 structures, 7 instrumented dams, 29 monitored wells. Glendenning & Vervoort, 2011.
1987, before the johads
1996, after
A single village, association readings reported by The EcoTipping Points Project. Converted from 45 and 22 feet. A local sample, not representative of the catchment.
Source — Glendenning, C. J. & Vervoort, R. W. (2011), Hydrological impacts of rainwater harvesting in a case study catchment: The Arvari River, Rajasthan — Part 2, Agricultural Water Management 98(4). Record ↗
Five watercourses that were thought dead
TheArvari, 45 km long, used to flow for a few weeks after the monsoon and then dry up. As the dams multiplied across its catchment, it stopped stopping: it has flowed all year round since 1995-1996. Four other watercourses in the same massif followed — Ruparel, Sarsa, Bhagani-Teldeh, Jahajwali.
The important point is not the figure, it is its date: these five rivers are attested as perennial by an international jury in 2001, that is six years after the turning point. This is not the enthusiasm of a first season. The mechanism can be read: the river is no longer fed by monsoon runoff, but by the slow drainage of a recharged water table.
1985
2001 — Arvari, Ruparel, Sarsa, Bhagani-Teldeh, Jahajwali
Ramon Magsaysay Foundation, 2001 citation; Hussain, Husain & Arif, IAHS Publ. 364, 2014.
Source — Hussain, J., Husain, I. & Arif, M. (2014), Water resources management: traditional technology and communities as part of the solution, IAHS Publ. 364. PDF ↗
It is a crescent-shaped earth bank, at the head of a catchment, made with the soil dug out of the basin it closes. It holds back the sheet of runoff long enough for it to infiltrate through a deliberately permeable bed. A large dam does the opposite: it concentrates water at the surface, behind a watertight structure, exposed to evaporation. The difference is not one of volume, it is one of storage place — underground, and spread across a whole catchment.
A johad has neither owner nor operator. It must be cleared of silt every year before the monsoon, otherwise it fills in and its infiltration capacity disappears within a few seasons. The association made this a condition: it contributes its share of the funding only to a village whose assembly is working, takes on the rest and provides all the labour. The skill mobilised is as much social as topographic.
The johad fitted no category: it produces no electricity, feeds no contracted irrigation scheme, and its performance is a diffuse infiltration, hard to measure — the hydrologists who studied it acknowledge this themselves. A structure whose output cannot be quantified does not get funded and enters no plan. Added to that was a legal incompatibility: no one had the authority to permit its construction.
This is not water created, it is water moved. This is the most serious limitation, and it comes from the hydrologists who measured the catchment: beyond a certain threshold, adding structures no longer increases underground recharge but substantially reduces surface flow. Each additional johad ends up taking water from downstream. Knowledge that works at the head of a catchment cannot be transposed to a whole basin without arbitrating between upstream and downstream. Several emblematic figures rest on no independent measurement. The forest cover “risen from 7% to 40%” circulates without the measurement method ever being spelled out, and we have found no remote-sensing study establishing it. The count of wells and the economic returns come from internal surveys. One publication even reports a water table moving from 100-120 m to 3-13 m deep, which is hydrogeologically implausible: we have not taken it up. Restoring a river gives no rights over it. In 1996, the State of Rajasthan awarded fishing contracts on the Arvari without consulting the villages that had brought it back into flow, and the High Court ruled that the State remained its owner. Geological conditions count too: a regular slope, a concentrated monsoon, an aquifer able to absorb and then release slowly.
- Glendenning, C. J. & Vervoort, R. W. (2011). Hydrological impacts of rainwater harvesting (RWH) in a case study catchment: The Arvari River, Rajasthan, India. Part 2: Catchment-scale impacts. Agricultural Water Management, 98(4), 715-730. Record ↗
- Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (2001). Citation for Rajendra Singh. Manila. Citation ↗
- Stockholm Water Foundation (2015). The water man of India wins 2015 Stockholm Water Prize. Press release ↗
- Hussain, J., Husain, I. & Arif, M. (2014). Water resources management: traditional technology and communities as part of the solution. IAHS Publication 364, 236-242. PDF ↗
- Batchelor, C. H., Rama Mohan Rao, M. S. & Manohar Rao, S. (2003). Watershed development: A solution to water shortages in semi-arid India or part of the problem? Land Use and Water Resources Research, 3. Record ↗
- Suutari, A. & Marten, G. Water Warriors: Rainwater Harvesting to Replenish Underground Water (Rajasthan, India). The EcoTipping Points Project. Case study ↗
- Mahapatra, R. (2012). Waters of life. Down To Earth, Centre for Science and Environment. Article ↗
- Council on Energy, Environment and Water. Tarun Bharat Sangh — Johad: Water Conservation, Harvesting and Revitalisation. Case study ↗
Knowing where you are without instruments
Until the 1960s, part of Western scholarship held the peopling of the Pacific to be the result of accidental drifting: without compass or sextant, you do not aim at an island four thousand kilometres away. The opposite demonstration was made at sea, with witnesses and dates.
Papa Mau: The Wayfinder
Nāʻālehu Anthony, 2010, 56 min — Palikū Documentary Films / ʻŌiwi TV, executive producer Merata Mita.
This is the film Hawaiians made about the man who gave them back their navigation. Mau Piailug, born on the atoll of Satawal in Micronesia, agreed in 1976 to take to Tahiti a canoe and a people he did not know.
The film shows the learning as it actually happens — in the sand, with pebbles standing for the stars — and not as a mystery. It also documents the debt: Mau was teaching Hawaiians what Hawaiians had stopped passing on. The production is entirely Indigenous, Hawaiian and Māori.
A demonstration, then a confirmation
The first two figures prove that it is possible. The third, obtained by a method with nothing to do with sailing, proves that it happened.
A course in traditional Carolinian navigation, by Ali Haleyalur
Two hours of teaching, filmed without editing: the master navigator of Lamotrek atoll teaches the star compass as it is learned, star house after star house, without chart or instrument. This is the very corpus that Mau Piailug carried to Hawai‘i in 1976. We publish it in full, because a three-minute summary is not the same thing as a teaching.
Hōkūleʻa in Tahiti, 1976 and today
The Polynesian Voyaging Society’s channel sets the founding 1976 crossing alongside the canoe’s recent returns. The proof was not made in a laboratory or on paper: it was made at sea, without instruments, before witnesses.
The US Naval Academy puts the stars back on the syllabus
Annapolis had dropped its celestial navigation course in 1998: GPS had settled everything. The academy brought it back in 2015 — a few hours of theory at first, the class of 2017 being the first concerned — because a satellite signal can be jammed and spoofed, and there was no fallback left. You cannot hack a sextant.
What the old method protects against
Jamming and spoofing of the satellite signal are no longer a theoretical hypothesis: with traffic maps to back it up, this explains what happens to an aircraft or a ship when GPS lies instead of falling silent. It is the underlying reason for the sextant’s return to Annapolis — and what the Carolinian navigators could do with no instrument at all.
Thirty-four days, and nothing aboard to cheat with
The double canoe Hōkūleʻa leaves Honolua Bay, on Maui, on 1st May 1976. No navigation instrument aboard for the outward leg. The navigator Mau Piailug holds the course by the rising points of the stars, supplemented by the sun, the moon and the swell. The crew sights Mataiva atoll on 1st June and reaches Papeete on 4 June — thirty-four days after departure. More than seventeen thousand people are waiting on the quay, that is more than half the island’s population.
What the Polynesian Voyaging Society itself says must be stated straight away: only the outward leg was without instruments. Mau left the vessel in Tahiti and the return, in twenty-two days, was made by modern means.
Maui → Papeete, reading only the sky, the swell and the birds
the return, Mau ashore, made by modern means
crew members named for the outward leg — another source counts sixteen
people on the quay at Papeete on arrival
Source — Finney, B., for the Polynesian Voyaging Society, 1976: Hawaiʻi to Tahiti and Back. Account ↗ · Bishop Museum, Hōkūleʻa. Record ↗
A Hōkūleʻa navigator retraces the voyage, at Harvard
Kaleomanuiwa Wong sails on the Hōkūleʻa. At Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, he takes the story up from the launching of the canoe, in March 1975, to the round-the-world voyage undertaken forty years later. The passage that carries this card is in the middle of the lecture: the portrait of Mau Piailug, the Satawal navigator who held the course without instruments, then the aerial photograph of the Papeete quay, black with people, on arrival in June 1976. University lecture, in English, with no author chapters.
You do not aim at the island: you aim at a box four hundred miles wide
An atoll can only be seen from seven to ten miles. Aiming at a ten-mile target from two thousand four hundred miles away is beyond any system, with or without instruments. The method therefore consists in not aiming at the island : you aim at a screen of islands four hundred mileswide, between Manihi in the Tuamotus and Maupiti in the Leeward Islands.
Inside that box, the clues add up: the brown noddy, which rarely goes beyond forty miles from its nest and returns every evening; the white tern, up to a hundred and twenty miles; the cloud held above high ground; the green tint at the base of a cumulus above a lagoon. The target goes from ten miles to four hundred.
Island screen aimed at (Manihi → Maupiti)
White tern (manu-o-Kū)
High island visible to the eye
Brown noddy (noio)
Low atoll visible to the eye
A range of 7 to 10 miles for the atoll, taken as 8.5 for display. Polynesian Voyaging Society, Locating Land.
Sources — Polynesian Voyaging Society, Locating Land. Page ↗ · Thompson, N., On Wayfinding. Text ↗
The star compass: the tool the widened target comes from
Chad Kālepa Baybayan is captain and navigator of the Hawaiian canoes Hōkūleʻa, Hawaiʻiloa and Hōkūalakaʻi; he was initiated in 2007 into the pwo order by Mau Piailug. At the W. M. Keck Observatory, he sets out the method in order: the Micronesian sidereal compass, the one Mau taught, then the Hawaiian star compass — that circle of star houses which gives a direction, and nothing else. The lecture does not take up the figures on this card, neither the four hundred miles nor the tern’s hundred and twenty; it shows the tool they follow from. When all you hold is a bearing, you cannot aim at an island: you have to aim wide. Public lecture at an observatory, in English, with no author chapters.
The genomes date the crossings
An international team reconstructed the Polynesian expansion from the genomes of 430 living individuals from 21 island populations. The successive-founder model dates each stage: Rarotonga around 830, the Society Islands around 1050, the Tuamotus around 1110, the Marquesas around 1140, Rapa Nui around 1210. About three hundred and eighty years to link archipelagos separated by thousands of kilometres of empty ocean.
An independent meta-analysis of 1,434 radiocarbon dates gives a compatible framework, though slightly later for the first phase. The two methods do not coincide exactly — this must be said — but they agree on the essentials: these crossings took place between the 9th and the 13th century, and the populations came back often enough for the gene flow to remain traceable.
Rarotonga, Cook Islands
Society Islands
Tuamotu archipelago
Fatu Hiva, Marquesas
Rapa Nui, Easter Island
Total of all the voyages of Hōkūleʻa since 1976
Mālama Honua world voyage, 2013-2017 — 150 ports, 18 nations
Circuit of the Earth along a meridian — reference
The 21,600 nautical miles are not an estimate: it is the definition of the nautical mile, 360° × 60 minutes of arc. Polynesian Voyaging Society.
Sources — Ioannidis, A. G. et al. (2021), Paths and timings of the peopling of Polynesia inferred from genomic networks, Nature 597. Full text ↗ · Wilmshurst, J. M. et al. (2011), High-precision radiocarbon dating shows recent and rapid initial human colonization of East Polynesia, PNAS 108(5). Record ↗
The horizon is divided into thirty-two houses of 11.25° each, grouped into four named quadrants. A given star always rises in the same house and sets in the symmetrical one: it is a fixed bearing. Since each star is usable only for a few hours near the horizon, the navigator strings a succession of them together — Nainoa Thompson speaks of two hundred and twenty memorised bodies. It is not an object, it is a grid applied mentally to the horizon — and that is precisely what makes it teachable.
A ground swell keeps its direction for days and crosses the compass diagonally. The navigator memorises the angle at which each swell train strikes the hull, and, lying in the canoe, feels it in his body. In the Marshall Islands, this knowledge was pushed further: swells refracted and reflected by an island make interference patterns that signal land before it can be seen. The stick charts are the teaching support for this — they are not taken to sea, they are memorised ashore.
That leaves dead reckoning. The Carolinian system ofetak tracks not one’s own progress, but that of a lateral reference island which is made to slide from one star house to the next: each new bearing opens a stage, and the voyage breaks down into countable segments. “You must constantly remember your speed, your direction and the time elapsed. Everything has to be done in your head. And you have to remember it for a month.”
The navigator of 1976 was not Polynesian, and that is the central fact. Mau Piailug came from Satawal, in Micronesia, more than five thousand kilometres from Hawai‘i, and practised a related but distinct Carolinian tradition. If he had to be fetched, it is because in 1976 there was no longer a single living deep-sea navigator in Hawai‘i: the Hawaiian chain of transmission was broken. The voyage therefore does not demonstrate the survival of a Hawaiian body of knowledge, but the robustness of an Oceanian one preserved elsewhere — robust enough to be re-taught to another people in a few years. The formal restitution took place in March 2007, at Satawal: Mau there initiated five Hawaiians and eleven Micronesians to the rank of master navigator. Completing a crossing does not say how the ancients did it. Hōkūleʻa is an informed reconstruction, not an archaeological canoe: plywood and fibreglass hulls, a 20th century Carolinian method applied to a Polynesian route. The voyage proves the possibility, not the identity of the techniques used around the year one thousand — that point is settled separately by genetics and radiocarbon. The canoes that never arrived are not counted. A peopling in successive waves over four centuries implies attempts with no return, of which no trace remains; the real success rate is unknown and probably unknowable. The contemporary revival has paid its price too: in 1978, when the canoe capsized, crew member Eddie Aikau set off on a surfboard to get help and was lost at sea. Finally, this revival is also a cultural and political project, inseparable from the Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970s. That invalidates nothing — an established fact does not stop being a fact because it suits someone — but an honest dossier does not present it as a pure verification exercise.
- Finney, B., for the Polynesian Voyaging Society. 1976: Hawaiʻi to Tahiti and Back. Hawaiian Voyaging Traditions. Account ↗
- Thompson, N. On Wayfinding. Polynesian Voyaging Society. Text ↗
- Polynesian Voyaging Society. The Star Compass. Page ↗
- Polynesian Voyaging Society. The Mālama Honua Worldwide Voyage. Page ↗
- Polynesian Voyaging Society. Kū Holo Mau: 2007 Voyage for Mau — initiation into pwo, March 2007. Page ↗
- Ioannidis, A. G., Blanco-Portillo, J., Sandoval, K. et al. (2021). Paths and timings of the peopling of Polynesia inferred from genomic networks. Nature, 597(7877), 522-526. Full text ↗
- Wilmshurst, J. M., Hunt, T. L., Lipo, C. P. & Anderson, A. J. (2011). High-precision radiocarbon dating shows recent and rapid initial human colonization of East Polynesia. PNAS, 108(5), 1815-1820. Record ↗
- Genz, J., Aucan, J., Merrifield, M., Finney, B., Joel, K. & Kelen, A. (2009). Wave Navigation in the Marshall Islands. Oceanography, 22(2), 234-245. PDF ↗
- Goodenough, W. & Thomas, S. D. (1987). Traditional Navigation in the Western Pacific. Expedition Magazine, 29(3), Penn Museum. Article ↗
Coastlines recounted for seven thousand years
Can a society without writing keep archives? The question seems rhetorical until you go and sound the sea floor at the exact spot the story describes — and find the hill it speaks of.
World Heritage Nomination — Budj Bim Cultural Landscape
5 min 55 — Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation.
The video accompanies the nomination of the Budj Bim cultural landscape for world heritage status, obtained in 2019. It is carried by the Gunditjmara themselves: they film, comment and present their own territory — the channels, weirs and eel traps cut into a lava flow, worked for at least six millennia.
It is the direct illustration of this case’s argument: the landscape serves as the support for memory, and memory as the instructions for the landscape.
Three verifications, by three different methods
None of these three verifications rests on the other two. It is their convergence, not their addition, that makes the demonstration.
Budj Bim: trapping eels in volcanic rock for six thousand five hundred years
Australian public television films the Gunditjmara’s channels, weirs and stone houses. The aquaculture system predates the pyramids — and it took dating for people to stop taking it for an accident of the terrain.
Simeulue, 2004: the song of the smong emptied the island before the wave
A sung account, handed down since the 1907 tsunami, says what to do when the sea withdraws: climb, at once. In December 2004, the people of Simeulue climbed. Seven thousand years of Australian memory are verified by bathymetry; here, a hundred years of memory are verified in human lives.
The 1700 earthquake dated by Japanese archives
A tsunami with no felt earthquake, recorded by Japanese scribes in January 1700; three centuries later, the rings of dead cedars on the Cascadia coast give the same date. The complete demonstration, in thirteen minutes: the stories, the sediments, the trees, then the dating. It is the reasoning of point ④ of this case, unfolded step by step.
Patrick Nunn: how a seven-thousand-year-old story is tested
The author of reference 1 in this case sets out his own method: collecting Aboriginal accounts of inundation, tying them to a precise place, then comparing the coast they describe with measured depths and sea level curves. A long lecture, before the History Council of New South Wales — you see the work, not only the result.
The story describes a hill. The sounding finds a hill
A geographer and a linguist gathered Aboriginal oral traditions describing, at 21 sites spread around the whole rim of the Australian continent, a sea covering land that was once dry. For each account, they compare the geographical detail given — an island that was a hill, a gulf that was a lagoon plain — with present-day bathymetry, then read off the post-glacial sea level curve the date at which the sea stood at that depth.
The corpus spreads between 7,250 and 13,070 years. At twenty-five years per generation, seven thousand five hundred years make nearly three hundred successive transmissions. Chinese whispers would fail after three.
Cairns region, Yidindji — 13,400 to 12,600 years
Spencer Gulf, Narrangga — 12,450 to 11,150 years
Kangaroo Island, Ngarrindjeri — 10,650 to 9,800 years
Rottnest, Carnac and Garden Islands — 8,900 to 7,500 years
This chart dates the event described, not the story itself. Median values of the published ranges. Nunn & Reid, 2016.
Source — Nunn, P. D. & Reid, N. J. (2016), Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago, Australian Geographer 47(1). Record ↗
An island where the story had survived
The island of Simeulue lies forty to fifty kilometres from the epicentre. Waves of more than ten metres reach the north of the island less than ten minutes after the shaking stops. The field survey published in Earthquake Spectra establishes that only seven people died on the island in the December 2004 and March 2005 tsunamis combined, out of some seventy thousand inhabitants.
Every survivor interviewed knew the smong : the story of the tsunami of 4 January 1907, passed on in nursery rhymes, lullabies and evening tales, which prescribes running for high ground after a long tremor. At the same date, the household survey carried out in nine stricken districts of Aceh — 1,653 households, 10,063 people recorded before the tsunami — finds 17% dead or missing.
Aceh Jaya, west coast of Sumatra
Banda Aceh and Aceh Besar
Meulaboh (Aceh Barat and Nagan Raya)
Island of Simeulue — where the smong was still circulating
The two measurements are not strictly comparable: the Aceh survey covers only the flooded zones, the Simeulue figure the whole island. Even with the higher toll of 44 deaths used by another study, Simeulue tops out at 0.06%. Doocy et al., 2007; McAdoo et al., 2006.
Sources — McAdoo, B. G., Dengler, L., Prasetya, G. & Titov, V. (2006), Smong: How an Oral History Saved Thousands on Indonesia’s Simeulue Island, Earthquake Spectra 22(S3). Article ↗ · Doocy, S. et al. (2007), Tsunami mortality in Aceh Province, Indonesia, Bulletin of the World Health Organization 85(4). PDF ↗
The stories say 1701. Japan says 26 January 1700
On the north-west coast of North America, a team led by the seismologist Ruth Ludwin gathered 40 Indigenous accounts from 32 independent sources mentioning tremors and marine floods. Nine contain enough genealogical information to be dated: all the estimates cover the interval 1690-1715, and the mean of the medians gives 1701.
Yet the exact date of the last great earthquake in the Cascadia subduction zone — 9 p.m., 26 January 1700 — was established independently by Japanese archives of an “orphan” tsunami, then confirmed to the year by dendrochronology of the cedars killed by the subsidence of the ground. Two archiving systems with no contact whatsoever produced the same date.
Indigenous accounts gathered on the Cascadia coast
sources independent of one another
genealogically precise enough to be dated
the interval covered by all the estimates
Source — Ludwin, R. S. et al. (2005), Dating the 1700 Cascadia Earthquake: Great Coastal Earthquakes in Native Stories, Seismological Research Letters 76(2). PDF ↗
A story does not belong to the one who tells it: its transmission is a duty attached to a kinship position, and other positions have the right and the obligation to check it. The account is not passed in a straight line from a father to a son, but before witnesses who received the earlier version and are entitled to correct it. It is a structural redundancy — the social equivalent of an error-correcting code.
None of these accounts is abstract. They say: this island was a hill, this gulf was a lagoon plain. The geographical object is present, visible, named: it constantly recalls the story attached to it and makes silent drift costly — to alter the story is to contradict yourself in front of the terrain. It is this property that makes dating possible: the description is precise enough for someone to go and sound the described point.
A manuscript that is not recopied is lost as surely as a story that is not told. What preserves the information, in both cases, is an institution that organises its replication and penalises deviations. The societies discussed here built that institution on kinship and territory rather than on parchment. At Simeulue, the form is lighter but of the same nature: rhymes and refrains, short rhythmic forms, learned before being understood — and therefore resistant to paraphrase.
You do not date the story, you date the event it describes. Nothing in the methods used dates the narration itself. What is dated is the geographical configuration described, assuming that the story formed at the moment that configuration disappeared. That is an inference, and it carries a risk of circularity: you pick on the sea level curve the moment that matches the story, then present the match as a confirmation. The published ranges are wide — often one thousand to one thousand five hundred years — precisely for that reason. The scientific community is divided, and saying so is part of the file. The historian David Henige argues that oral traditions hardly survive intact beyond eight hundred years. The archaeologist Peter Hiscock judges the work “fanciful and not credible” and reproaches it for presupposing Aboriginal societies isolated and unchanged for fifty thousand years. Conversely, Elizabeth Barber recalls that traditions attested elsewhere refer to verified events three to five thousand years old. Not every oral tradition is an archive, and only the successes are counted. Simeulue is famous because the island was right; the traditions that fell silent or got it wrong are not counted. And even at Simeulue, the story does not explain everything: other researchers invoke a broader “disaster subculture” — village siting, steep relief offering immediately accessible high ground, the short interval between the tremor and the wave. The story is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. Finally, the figures circulating about the Moken of the Surin Islands are backed by no verifiable primary source: we have not taken them up.
- Nunn, P. D. & Reid, N. J. (2016). Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago. Australian Geographer, 47(1), 11-47. Record ↗
- Reid, N. J., Nunn, P. D. & Sharpe, M. (2014). Indigenous Australian Stories and Sea-Level Change. Proceedings of the 18th FEL Conference, 82-87. Record ↗
- McAdoo, B. G., Dengler, L., Prasetya, G. & Titov, V. (2006). Smong: How an Oral History Saved Thousands on Indonesia’s Simeulue Island during the December 2004 and March 2005 Tsunamis. Earthquake Spectra, 22(S3), 661-669. Article ↗
- Doocy, S., Rofi, A., Moodie, C. et al. (2007). Tsunami mortality in Aceh Province, Indonesia. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 85(4), 273-278. PDF ↗
- Rahman, A., Sakurai, A., Sutton, S. et al. (2022). Smong means more than tsunami: The understanding of tsunami in the Indonesian context. E3S Web of Conferences, 340, 03010. PDF ↗
- Gaillard, J.-C., Clavé, E., Vibert, O. et al. (2008). Ethnic groups’ response to the 26 December 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia. Natural Hazards, 47(1), 17-38. Article ↗
- Ludwin, R. S., Dennis, R., Carver, D. et al. (2005). Dating the 1700 Cascadia Earthquake: Great Coastal Earthquakes in Native Stories. Seismological Research Letters, 76(2), 140-148. PDF ↗
- Matchan, E. L., Phillips, D., Jourdan, F. & Oostingh, K. (2020). Early human occupation of southeastern Australia: New insights from ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar dating of young volcanoes. Geology, 48(4), 390-394. Record ↗
- Bower, B. (2015). Handed-down tales tell of ancient sea level rise — the objections of Henige, Hiscock and Barber. Science News. Article ↗
The last word does not belong to the expert
In many societies with long deliberation, the specialist sets things out but does not decide: the assembly decides, and takes as long as it needs. Here at home, we have started again to draw citizens by lot to arbitrate difficult questions. What that produces has been measured, with a control group to back it up.
Aluna: the Kogi ecological warning
Alan Ereira, 2012, 1 hr 29 — Aluna The Movie / Sunstone Films, full French version.
Twenty-two years after a first film shot for the BBC, the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta take the initiative back: they train their own film crew and decide the film’s arrangement.
What interests us here is not the ecological message but the form of the decision: mámas who do not decide alone, who consult, who come back, and a collective word that takes its time before it settles. It is a document made with those concerned, not about them.
What deliberation shifts — and what it does not
The first two figures say that it works. The third says on what condition: an assembly with no institutional outlet changes nothing.
The Customary Grand Council of French Guiana speaks
An Amerindian and Bushinenge customary body, recognised by the French Republic, speaks collectively after deliberation. Deciding together until consensus is not a European invention of 2016: it is an old institution, still alive inside our own borders.
Behind the scenes of the Citizens’ Convention lottery
The institution that hosted the Convention films its own selection machinery: one hundred and fifty people drawn by lot, and not one hundred and fifty volunteers — that difference is the whole design. What they proposed, and what remained of it, is quantified further down this case.
The Irish assembly filmed from inside
Citizens drawn by lot, experts who set things out without deciding, whole weekends of deliberation before a secret ballot: the film follows the assembly that preceded the 2018 Irish referendum. It is the arrangement described in this case, seen from the room rather than from the report.
The OECD counts the assemblies: a deliberative wave
The Irish case is not isolated. The OECD has surveyed the citizens’ assemblies held since the late 1980s in its member countries, and draws from them conditions for success: selection by lot, long timescales, contradictory information, and a commitment made in advance by the commissioning authority. The full launch session, for anyone who wants the method rather than the summary.
Twice, an assembly drawn by lot preceded a referendum
In 2013, a constitutional convention of 66 citizens drawn by lot, 33 parliamentarians and an independent chair recommends opening civil marriage to same-sex couples. The referendum of 22 May 2015 approves it by 62,07 %.
In 2016-2017, a citizens’ assembly of 99 citizens drawn by lot sits for five weekends on the constitutional article prohibiting abortion, receives more than twelve thousand submissions from the public, and votes 87% against keeping it. A joint parliamentary committee takes up the file, recommends repeal, and the referendum of 25 May 2018 approves it by 66,4 %, with 64.13% turnout.
What makes the Irish case demonstrative is not the assembly’s own virtue: it is the explicit institutional chaining — assembly, then parliamentary committee, then referendum. Each link had an obligation to respond.
Citizens’ Assembly 2017 — 79 votes to 12, out of 91 voting
Referendum of 25 May 2018 — 2.16 million voters
Constitutional Convention 2013 — 79 votes to 18
Referendum of 22 May 2015 — 1.95 million voters
Careful: the bases are not comparable — the vote of 91 deliberators does not have the same meaning as that of two million electors. The chart shows a sequence, not an equivalence.
Sources — The Citizens’ Assembly (2017), First Report and Recommendations: The Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. PDF ↗ · Referendum Ireland, official results of 25 May 2018. Results ↗
The two referendums told by the man who designed the assemblies
David Farrell led the research team of both Irish citizens’ assemblies. In this lecture given at University College Dublin’s centre for public ethics, he unfolds the whole chain: the “We the Citizens” trial of 2011, the Constitutional Convention, then the Citizens’ Assembly — and, each time, the referendum that followed. The last part is the most useful here: he lists the weaknesses held against the design before drawing from them the conditions for success. University lecture, chaptered by the author.
Four days of discussion, and the fault line recedes
This is the most solid proof in the file, because it isolates deliberation’s own effect. In September 2019, in Dallas, 526 voters drawn by lot from a national probability sample deliberated for four days on documents reviewed by a bipartisan committee, in small moderated groups, facing opposing experts. 844 others formed the control group, with no deliberation.
On the 26 most polarised proposals, 22 saw Republicans and Democrats move closer, 19 of them to a statistically significant degree. And the most telling measurement is not on opinions but on how the other camp is viewed: declared warmth towards the opposing party gains 13.1 points among Democrats and 14.5 points among Republicans. The control group barely moves.
Democrats → Republicans
Republicans → Democrats
526 deliberators, 844 controls. Stratified national probability sample. Gaps of 13.07 and 14.47 points, p < 0.001. Fishkin, Siu, Diamond & Bradburn, 2021.
Source — Fishkin, J., Siu, A., Diamond, L. & Bradburn, N. (2021), Is Deliberation an Antidote to Extreme Partisan Polarization? Reflections on America in One Room, American Political Science Review 115(4). Full text ↗
The study on the card, set out by the man who ran it
This lecture bears, word for word, the title of the article cited below. James Fishkin gives it at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm and unfolds the whole chain: what an ordinary poll really measures, how deliberative polling changes the question, what “America in One Room” is, then the Dallas results — at 30:06, he projects the answers of the 526 deliberators and those of the control group side by side, question by question. The last part discusses the objections and the effect measured a year later, on voting. Research lecture, chaptered by the author.
One hundred and fifty people, nine months, one hundred and forty-nine proposals — and 3.3 out of 10
The Citizens’ Convention on Climate brought together 150 people drawn by lot — 255,000 telephone calls to recruit them — for nine months, from October 2019 to June 2020. It adopted 149 proposals across 43 objectives. The government states that it kept 146 of them.
On 28 February 2021, the members met to mark the follow-up given to their work. Not one of the six themes reaches the pass mark. Overall assessment: 3.3 out of 10. Ability of the measures to reach the target of a 40% cut in emissions: 2.5. For its part, the High Council on Climate judged unsubstantiated the government’s claim that the law arising from the Convention would secure “between half and two thirds of the way”.
The pass mark — reference
Governance
Consuming
Travelling, eating, producing
Housing
Overall assessment
Reaching the − 40% target
Vote of the members meeting by video conference on 28 February 2021. The only mark above the pass level, not shown here: the reform of article one of the Constitution, 6.1.
Sources — CESE (2020), The proposals of the Citizens’ Convention on Climate, final report. PDF ↗ · High Council on Climate (2021), Opinion on the Climate and Resilience bill. PDF ↗
What political scientists made of the outcome
Once the 149 proposals had been handed over, the French Political Science Association brought together three researchers — including Loïc Blondiaux, who sat on the Convention’s governance committee, with Alice Mazeaud and Simon Persico — to ask exactly the questions on this card: what concrete results, and how to measure the success or failure of such a design. At 16:40, the phrase that sums up the stakes: the usual fate of participatory exercises is “political insignificance”. It is the only French-language academic resource we found on this precise point. Research webinar, with no author chapters: the markers below were noted while viewing and are approximate (± 20 s).
A formal result established by Lu Hong and Scott Page: a group of problem-solvers drawn at random from a large population can outperform a group made up of the best, as soon as the problem is hard. The reason is simple — the best resemble one another, were selected by the same filter, apply the same heuristics and stop at the same dead ends. This is not a plea against expertise: it is a thesis about its place in the chain of decision.
Election produces candidates, therefore campaigns, therefore funders, therefore debts. Selection by lot breaks that chain at both ends: nothing to obtain upstream since you did not apply, nothing to preserve downstream since there is no re-election. Athens, the Italian republics and medieval Aragon practised it on a large scale, always for the same function: removing a decision from those with a permanent interest in controlling it.
The architecture is always the same: the experts set things out, on documents reviewed by opposing sides, with a right to question; the citizens arbitrate. The decisive variable is time — five weekends in Ireland, nine months in France, eighteen-month terms in German-speaking Belgium. It is that time that allows the movement measured in Dallas. An isolated expert opinion does not have this property, not because it would be less sound, but because it shifts nothing in those who will have to live with the decision.
A citizens’ assembly is not a Kogi assembly. What is attested among the Kogi: the ceremonial house is the place where people gather, at night too, to discuss the village’s affairs; the mámas hold specialised knowledge passed on through a long apprenticeship; important decisions go through a collective consultation; the system has been inscribed since 2022 on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list. What is interpretation, and what we do not assert: that deliberation goes on “until an agreement holds”, or that there is a formalised consensus rule. A difference in kind remains: the Kogi decision is framed by the Law of Origin and by the authority of the mámas — it is neither a lottery nor an egalitarian procedure in the modern sense. The comparison bears on one precise point, the specialist does not decide alone, and on nothing else. A further caution: the reference ethnography dates from the 1950s and an abundant fictionalised literature has been grafted onto it. Recommendations are rarely binding. The OECD, which surveyed 289 deliberative processes up to 2019 and more than 600 since, has no consolidated adoption rate — it merely states that “in most cases” at least half the contributions are implemented, which is not a measurement. There is therefore no robust quantitative proof, to date, that citizens’ assemblies change public policy. Ireland is the documented exception, and it rests on the institutional chaining, not on the assembly’s virtue. Framing is the real lever for manipulation. An assembly deliberates on the question it is asked, from the documents it is given and the speakers it is shown: whoever controls those three inputs largely controls the output. Add to that participation and attrition biases — 255,000 people called to retain 150 volunteers in France, 91 voting out of 99 members in Ireland. The group that deliberates is never exactly the one that was drawn by lot.
- The Citizens’ Assembly (2017). First Report and Recommendations of the Citizens’ Assembly: The Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. Dublin. PDF ↗
- Referendum Ireland (2018). Official results of the referendum of 25 May 2018. Results ↗
- Referendum Ireland (2015). Official results of the referendum of 22 May 2015. Results ↗
- Fishkin, J., Siu, A., Diamond, L. & Bradburn, N. (2021). Is Deliberation an Antidote to Extreme Partisan Polarization? American Political Science Review, 115(4), 1464-1481. Full text ↗
- CESE (2020). The proposals of the Citizens’ Convention on Climate, final report. PDF ↗
- High Council on Climate (2021). Opinion on the “Climate and Resilience” bill. PDF ↗
- OECD (2020). Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave. Paris. Report ↗
- Parliament of the German-speaking Community of Belgium (2019). Decree of 25 February 2019 establishing a permanent citizens’ dialogue. Page ↗
- Landemore, H. (2020). Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press. Record ↗
- UNESCO (2022). Ancestral system of knowledge of the four Indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta — representative list of the intangible cultural heritage. Record ↗
Removing a variable to see what it was producing
Some societies circulate goods without a generalised currency of exchange. Observing them amounts to removing money from a social system and watching what still holds. Here at home, the symmetrical experiment can be run: putting money back in, unconditionally, and measuring.
Baka Pygmies, the great turn
Laurent Maget, 2013 — IRD and CNRS Images. Version posted online by the Musée de l’Homme, 1 hr 08.
In eastern Cameroon, the Baka have gathered by the roadside, at the edge of a receding forest. Semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers now settled, they enter within a few years a monetary economy for which nothing had prepared them.
A team from the CNRS and the IRD spent six years in the village of Moangue-Le Bosquet. The film shows precisely what this case seeks to establish: not an idealised gift society, but the tipping moment when money arrives — with what it brings and what it disorganises.
Three manipulations of the same variable
The first figure observes societies where money weighs little. The other two measure, by random allocation, what the arrival of unconditional money produces.
Kela presents the results of the Finnish basic income
The public social security body that ran the experiment sets out the results itself: two thousand unemployed people drawn by lot, an income paid unconditionally for two years, and a clear gap in psychological distress with the control group. This is the source, not a commentary on the source.
Two hundred and ninety-five villages drawn by lot in Kenya
The research director describes the design: whole villages drawn by lot, unconditional transfers, measurement spread over twelve years. As the organisation is an interested party, the figures used in this case come from the research paper, not from the video.
What you offer a stranger depends on how you produce your food
Twelve anthropologists applied the same game in fifteen small-scale societies across twelve countries: hunter-gatherers, slash-and-burn horticulturalists, nomadic herders, settled farmers. One player receives the equivalent of one to two days of local wages and proposes an anonymous split to a second, who may accept — both are paid — or refuse — both leave with nothing.Homo economicus would offer the minimum.
The result is not that these societies are more generous across the board. It is that the gap between them is enormous — from 0.26 to 0.58 of the stake — and that it is predictable : two structural variables, the degree of market integration and the importance of cooperation in daily production, on their own explain 68% of the variance. The Machiguenga of Peru, horticulturalists self-sufficient at family level, offer 0.26. The Lamalera of Indonesia, whose whale hunting requires the coordination of twelve rowers and is shared according to a precise code, offer 0.58 — more than half.
Machiguenga, Peru — horticulturalists, family production
Hadza, Tanzania — small camp
Hadza, Tanzania — large camp
Students from industrial societies — reference
Aché, Paraguay — almost total meat sharing
Lamalera, Indonesia — hunting coordinated among twelve
Identical protocol everywhere, anonymous one-shot game, stake calibrated on one to two days of local wages. Henrich et al., 2001.
Source — Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., Gintis, H. & McElreath, R. (2001), In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies, American Economic Review 91(2). PDF ↗
The protocol, then the chart: the societies side by side
Joseph Henrich led the study from which the figure on this card comes. In this University of British Columbia lecture, he begins with the methodological problem — human psychology described from Western students — then explains on the board the exact protocol of the fairness games, before projecting the average offers society by society. It is that chart which carries the argument: the gap between groups is larger than anything observed inside any one group. University lecture, chaptered by the author, slides legible.
Basic income does not reduce work: it changes its nature
Randomised trial at village level, in western Kenya. 295 villages allocated by lot to four groups: control, basic income over twelve years, basic income over two years, one-off payment of about 500 dollars. About 23,000 adults receive 0.75 dollars a day, individually and unconditionally.
Total labour supply does not fall — the gap is indistinguishable from zero in all three arms. But it shifts: wage employment falls by about a hundred hours a year and non-farm self-employment rises by as much. And the net income of village businesses almost doubles in the long-term arm as in the one-off payment arm. The short-term arm, which had nonetheless received the same cumulative capital at that point, does not move: it is the certainty of duration, not the amount, that makes the difference.
Control group
Short-term basic income — 2 years, gap not significant
Long-term basic income — 12 years
One-off payment — about $500
Aggregates at village level, in dollars. 295 villages, about 23,000 eligible adults. Final survey from October 2019 to January 2020. Banerjee, Faye, Krueger, Niehaus & Suri, 2023.
Source — Banerjee, A., Faye, M., Krueger, A., Niehaus, P. & Suri, T. (2023), Universal Basic Income: Short-Term Results from a Long-Term Experiment in Kenya. Working paper ↗
In Finland, employment barely moves. Everything else moves a lot
2,000 unemployed people drawn by lot received 560 euros a month, tax free, unconditionally and with no obligation to look for work, from 1st January 2017 to 31 December 2018. Over twelve reference months, they worked 78 days against about 72 for the control group: six days’ difference, a marginal effect.
The end-of-experiment survey tells another story. Self-reported psychological distress: 16.6% against 25.0%. Life satisfaction: 7.3 against 6.8. Confidence in their own future: 58.2% against 46.2%. What the transfer buys is not first of all activity — it is security.
Days of employment over twelve months
Self-reported psychological distress
Confidence in their own future
Employment: administrative records. Well-being: end-of-experiment survey, 23% response rate, with no baseline survey. The value of 72 days is derived from the published 6-day gap. Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and VATT, 2020.
Source — Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health (2020), Results of the basic income experiment. Press release ↗ · VATT (2020). Press release ↗
A hunter’s catch is an event of very high variance: long empty runs, then a carcass too large for one family and hard to keep. Compulsory sharing turns that individual lottery into a smoothed collective income. It does three things our institutions have separated: it insures against chance, it maintains the bond with those you will need tomorrow, and it produces status. The measurements give the order of magnitude: among the Aché and the Hiwi, women give away about 55% of everything they gather.
Where variance is high and storage impossible, the marginal share of a big catch is worth far more in the hand of someone who has not eaten for three days. Sharing is not a sacrifice, it is an exchange favourable to both parties across time. The logical corollary: an insurance system without obligation is a system the good risks leave. Hence the fact that these societies punish withholding — mockery, reputation, exclusion — far more harshly than they reward generosity. The correlation between what a household gives and what it receives is 0.46 for meat among the Hadza: this is not altruism, it is an account kept in memory.
Money solves three problems the gift does not: it makes things comparable, it makes exchange deferred and transferable, and it allows exchange with strangers. The price of those three gains is the same: settlement extinguishes obligation. A debt paid is a relationship closed; a gift returned is a relationship that continues. The counter-intuitive finding, measured: market integration does not destroy the sharing norm, it displaces it — the most integrated societies offer more to an anonymous stranger, because they have learned a fairness norm valid outside the circle of close kin.
This is not proof that a society without money would be an egalitarian paradise. Among the Au and the Gnau of Papua New Guinea, generous offers are rejected in 40% of cases: to accept a lot is to place yourself in dependence. The compulsory gift creates debts, creditors and debtors, and competitions in generosity — the potlatch being the textbook case — serve to crush a rival. Removing money removes neither debt, nor constraint, nor inequality: it changes their unit of account. Basic income is not the modern equivalent of the gift. A monthly transfer is anonymous, one-way and calls for no return: no identifiable giver, no relationship, no obligation to reciprocate. The Kenyan and Finnish trials measure what unconditional access to liquidity produces, not the reactivation of a gift economy. These are two distinct ways of manipulating the same variable, not two versions of the same design. The results are short-term and fragile. The Kenyan paper calls itself “short-term results”: it measures two years of a design planned for twelve. The Finnish experiment has no baseline survey, its response rate is differential — 31% among recipients against 20% among controls — and a concurrent unemployment insurance reform blurs the interpretation of the employment effect; the Finnish institutions say so themselves. Finally, caution about the narrative itself: the thesis that generalised barter is a myth rests on a solid ethnographic base but remains contested on its theoretical side. The debate is not settled, and these societies are not earlier states of ours: they are contemporary societies, caught in contemporary power relations.
- Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., Gintis, H. & McElreath, R. (2001). In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies. American Economic Review, 91(2), 73-78. PDF ↗
- Banerjee, A., Faye, M., Krueger, A., Niehaus, P. & Suri, T. (2023). Universal Basic Income: Short-Term Results from a Long-Term Experiment in Kenya. Working paper ↗
- GiveDirectly (2023). Early findings from the world’s largest UBI study. Summary ↗
- Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health (2020). Results of the basic income experiment: small employment effects, better perceived economic security and mental wellbeing. Press release ↗
- VATT Institute for Economic Research (2020). Press release on the final results of the basic income experiment. Press release ↗
- Gurven, M. (2004). To give and to give not: The behavioral ecology of human food transfers. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27(4), 543-560. PDF ↗
- Dwyer, R., Palepu, A., Williams, C., Daly-Grafstein, D. & Zhao, J. (2023). Unconditional cash transfers reduce homelessness. PNAS, 120(36). PDF ↗
- Mauss, M. (1923-1924). The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. L’Année Sociologique. Full text ↗
- Selgin, G. (2016). The Myth of the Myth of Barter — the reasoned rebuttal of Graeber’s thesis. Cato Institute. Article ↗
Take up the principle, not the scenery
The ten previous cases go and find a practice far away, then look at what it produces when a Western institution takes it up. This one starts from the other end: a farm in the Haut-Diois refounded a thousand hectares, from 2012 on, on the principles of synergy with the living world observed among the Kogi of Colombia. Nothing is copied — not the plants, not the rites, not the social organisation. What crossed the Atlantic comes down to one rule: you do not manage plots, you take care of an ecosystem for which you are co-responsible. Thirteen years later, the farm has figures to show. They are its own, and that is both a great deal and not enough.
GAEC de Montlahuc — rethinking a territory
On passe à l’acte, 9 September 2025, 16 min 21 — Tour de France des rencontres, no. 5.
Marco Forconi recounts the 2012 turn: one of the oldest farms in the Drôme, built up over forty years to nearly a thousand ewes on a thousand hectares, leaves its monoculture behind and becomes a five-species farm again. He describes a line of reasoning, not a recipe — why put the cattle behind the sheep, why slow the water down instead of draining it away, why one lead person per enterprise rather than a boss.
The film also shows what cannot be quantified: a place that is repopulating, six partners who have held together for thirteen years, and that sentence from Thierry Geffray, the founder, which Marco Forconi says took him a long time to understand — it takes ten years to be inhabited by a territory.
Three figures, only one of which can be verified from outside
The three do not have the same status, and this must be said at the outset: the acreage is public and can be cross-checked; the commercial shift and the absence of any break-up between partners are declared by those concerned, with no third party to examine them. We publish them as such.
From the cooperative to the village, in thirteen years
When the new team arrived, 100% of production went to the cooperative, and therefore to the supermarket. The farm today declares 100% direct sales, of which about 80% consumed by the inhabitants of the two or three neighbouring villages. This is not a commercial detail: it is the condition that makes the rest possible. A five-species farm produces small, irregular volumes, unsellable through long supply chains — leaving monoculture behind meant leaving the cooperative.
The figure is self-declared. It is consistent with what the farm sells on its own site: direct orders, goat dairy, honey, tree nursery.
2012 — at the takeover
2025 — of which 80% in the neighbouring villages
The farm’s own statement in the filmed interview (September 2025). No independent audit.
Sources — On passe à l’acte (2025), [TDF Rencontre#5] GAEC de Montlahuc. Video ↗ · GAEC de Montlahuc, Contact and orders. Page ↗
Slow it down instead of draining it away
The agronomy Marco Forconi was taught said drainage and irrigation: get the water away, then buy it back. Fifty years of that reasoning, he says, have produced dry landscapes. The farm does the opposite — swales dug along the contour lines, ponds, windbreak hedges, ramial wood chips at the foot of the trees — to hold the sheet of runoff long enough for it to infiltrate and reach the water table. One and the same trickle of water is used four to five times, where it used to be used once.
A technical visit in October 2024 records the concrete traces: a 20,000-litre tank fed from above the buildings, twenty centimetres of fragmented ramial wood at the foot of the plantings, and 95% survival of the trees planted on swales, with no watering at all.
Drained management — the water goes to the stream
Slowed management — redesigned sectors of the farm
Order of magnitude given by the farm, for its redesigned sectors. It does not hold for the thousand hectares.
Sources — On passe à l’acte (2025), filmed interview. Video ↗ · Hydrologie régénérative Belgique (12 October 2024), GAEC de Montlahuc: a model of regenerative and collective farming. Report ↗
What repopulated a hamlet
The point hardest to measure is also the one the farm puts forward: thirteen years together without a break-up, from three partners in 2012 to six today, two employees, and a permanent flow of trainees and volunteers. The rule they set themselves comes down to one sentence: one lead person per enterprise, chosen because they are the one passionate about it — the sheep, the cattle, the goats, the horses, the ecosystems, communications. No one arbitrates in anyone else’s place, but each answers for their own enterprise before the others.
Around them, the place has repopulated: a dozen inhabitants in 2012, some forty today, in a commune of about eighty. It is the most fragile figure in this case and the most telling: it does not measure agricultural performance, it measures whether a place becomes habitable again.
2012 — arrival of the new team
2025 — six partners, two employees, trainees
Orders of magnitude given by the farm. The commune of Bellegarde-en-Diois has about 80 inhabitants.
Sources — On passe à l’acte (2025), filmed interview. Video ↗ · GAEC de Montlahuc, The team. Page ↗
Nothing Kogi was imported: no plant, no tool, no rite. What crossed over is a starting position, carried by the École pratique de la Nature et des Savoirs, an association founded in 2006 in the same massif by the geographer Éric Julien — who has worked with the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada since the 1980s and created the Tchendukua association in 1997 to buy land back for them. That position comes down to an inversion: you are not the owner of plots to optimise, you are co-responsible for an ecosystem whose balance everything you do alters. The rest of this case follows from it.
The mechanism is agronomic and well known: livestock parasites are barely interspecific. Putting the cattle behind the sheep makes the former ingest the larvae that were parasitising the latter, and makes them eat different layers of vegetation. Animal monoculture does the opposite: thirty years of the same appetite let the plants that species disdains go to seed, the environment becomes impoverished for that species alone, and parasite pressure rises — hence the treatments. A diversified herd maintains the environment that feeds it. This is not exotic knowledge; it is knowledge that specialisation had made inapplicable.
Marco Forconi says it bluntly: here at home water comes under the water agency or the river board, the forest under the national forestry office, farming under a chamber of agriculture — whereas these are the same cycles. No one is in charge of the whole. Reasoning that starts from the entire ecosystem therefore has no interlocutor: it fits no service window and its performance shows up in no sector indicator. That is exactly why it took a private farm, and not a public policy, to try it — and why the Biovallée territorial project, which brings together three groupings of communes in the Drôme valley, is cited as the only framework where the question is posed at the right scale.
None of these figures is instrumented by a third party. That is the clear difference with cases 05 to 10: there is here no randomised trial, no instrumented catchment, no international jury that has verified a count. These are declarations by the farmers, consistent with each other, with the farm’s website and with a technical visit report — nothing more. The durations themselves float. The video’s presentation announces fifteen years without a single human tension, the interview says thirteen years without particular tension; we keep the lower wording, and note that an absence of conflict is not established as a measurement. This is not a Kogi farm. Speaking of Kogi principles designates a claimed inspiration, passed on by a French association, not a transfer documented item by item: neither the Kogi nor any researcher has validated this reading, and the case therefore attributes to them no result obtained here. One case is not a demonstration. A thousand hectares in a single block between 900 and 1,400 metres, inherited from forty years of pastoralism and taken over by people already trained and already funded, is not the situation of a farmer in debt on thirty hectares of plain. What this case establishes is that such reasoning has held for thirteen years somewhere in France. Not that it will hold elsewhere.
- On passe à l’acte (9 September 2025). [TDF Rencontre#5] GAEC de Montlahuc. Video, 16 min 21, Tour de France des rencontres. Video ↗
- On passe à l’acte. The site of your positive initiatives — a non-profit media outlet that has documented initiative-takers in filmed interviews for more than fifteen years. Site ↗
- GAEC de Montlahuc. Home — a thousand hectares from 900 to 1,400 m, including 600 of summer pasture and some forty arable; six farmers since 2012; Bellegarde-en-Diois, Haut-Diois. Page ↗
- GAEC de Montlahuc. The History — farm founded in 1982 by Thierry Geffray and Camille Brochier; meeting with Éric Julien in 2008; project taken over in 2012 by three young members of the association. Page ↗
- GAEC de Montlahuc. Territory Project — the claimed Kogi inspiration and the link to the Biovallée project. Page ↗
- École pratique de la Nature et des Savoirs. A 1901-law association created in 2006 in the Haut-Diois, at 1,300 m; its site bears the name Sezusumaké given by the Kogi. Site ↗
- Tchendukua — Ici et Ailleurs. History of the project — association created in October 1997 by Éric Julien and Jacqueline Bac to buy back and return land to the peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta; nearly 1,800 hectares by 2018. Page ↗
- Hydrologie régénérative Belgique (12 October 2024). GAEC de Montlahuc: a model of regenerative and collective farming. Visit report: 20,000-litre tank, swales, 95% survival without watering, 90 nest boxes. Report ↗
They are now online
A case is published only once its video is accessible and the Western application is sourced. The six pieces of work announced here are finished — here is where to find them.
Six more pieces of work are under way: the figure exists, the primary source is identified, the video is verified. They will appear in the same format as the previous ones.
Is there knowledge you are missing, or one you are documenting that has already proved itself elsewhere? Write to us.