I think it’s kind of funny when western science catches up with indigenous science. Take the example of the Jaguar, within innumerable indigenous nations of the Americas this powerful feline has been deified and was often considered to be the bringer of rain. But much of this cultural science was shunned, and even outlawed by colonial powers. The new cultural norm became ranching, monocultures, and predator removal. Now our most visionary ecologists tell us that Jaguars are keystone species, in another words they hold in balance a vast food web. For example, herbivores without predators, can denude an ecosystem of complex vegetation which in turn leads to the decline of countless species that depend on those plants. The re-introduction of the Yellowstone wolves is a great example of this phenomenon that has gotten some great press in recent years.

It is also coming to light that this landscape scale loss of biomass has led to a marked decrease in historic rain patterns. This has been well chronicled by the Spanish atmospheric scientist, Millan Millan. The nutshell explanation is that plants evapo-transpire, moisture in sufficient quantities to make rain farther inland, usually down wind. No plants = no rain.

It is no wonder that it is becoming all too common in areas of conventional industrial ranching and farming, the indigenous food web is collapsing, which in turn causes the soil carbon sponge to dry out which inevitably leads to an increase in catastrophic wildfires. Thus the whole system starts to spiral into a grotesque oversimplification of its ecological potential, born from the morally weak position that, without industrial monocultures, we can’t feed the world.

So there you have it, Jaguars, bring the rain. Let’s re-wild our indigenous food web and reinstate the honor and dignity of the cultural science that stewarded this cornucopia of ecosystem function for millennia.