Sustainable Use of the Littoral by Traditional People of Barbados and Bahamas

Abstract

This paper is about the traditional people of Barbados and The Bahamas, in the Caribbean and their sustainable adaptations to the littoral, which included both marine and terrestrial components. Traditional people are defined as having lived in a sustainable way in an environment for five generations, the littoral is described here as an ecological zone at the sea’s edge, which is composed of hundreds of medicine and food plants and animals, and resilient adaptations are understood with the environmental multiplicity model. The analysis is based on more than a thousand site intercept interviews conducted by the authors and their research teams. These data argue that culturally based patterns of sustainable food use and environmental preservation can be understood from generations of successful adaptations of traditional people.