TEK, access, and health disparities: 40 years of land use change in a traditional Maroon rainforest community

Across many Caribbean islands, like other Small Island Developing States (SIDS), unique political and geographic characteristics mediate the access many communities have to the natural resources and ecosystem services that a) supplement absent infrastructures and services and b) improve health outcomes. Insularity, diseconomies of scale, proneness to natural disasters, and smaller natural resource bases produce and exacerbate health-deteriorating conditions for denizens of Caribbean islands; particularly in vulnerable communities with even less access to already-limited resources. Tropical, montane forests in the Caribbean are often shaped by their topographical complexity; the microrefugia (pockets of refuge and resource abundance created by microhabitats and microclimates) scattered across these complex landscapes are particularly difficult to access. The traditional knowledge-holders with the skill, knowledge, and ability to access densely-resourced microrefugia are among those in the forest communities that are able to mitigate some of the health challenges posed by resource scarcity and natural disasters. This article examines this differentiated access in a traditional Maroon community, who call as their ancestral home a tropical rainforest in the west-central uplands of Jamaica – a forest so notoriously topographically-complex, that its inaccessibility changed the course of the nation's colonial history. Revisiting a land use survey conducted in the village 40 years ago, this article explores how changing patterns of land use has led to decreased access to the forest core and the microrefugia contained within it. Changes in land use and engagement in traditional practices has also created unevenness in this access across the community, creating and exacerbating health disparities.