Riverbank Communes

So-called 'riverbank communes' are a regional peculiarity in some parts of Mevhettar, arising early in the Migration period over disagreements on best practices for settlement of the new continent. The culpability of agricultural clearing and damming for irrigation was assumed by all for the old world's destruction, but some rejected the development or return to better, less destructive practices, instead insisting that land clearing must be entirely rejected. As such, these radicals searched Mevhettar for especially lush and fertile environs where a community could be built without dependence on grain and its fields, instead partaking in the riverine bounty once lost to their ancestors.    Namely, salmon, rich harvests of which can be made without fail each year, and without depletion so long as the rivers are allowed to flow and respectful restraint given for the gifts brought by the sea and sweet waters. These communes are hardly the biggest consumers of salmon, typically living deep inland and away from the cosmopolitan coasts or lakeshores, but they depend on the fish for a large part of their daily intake, preserved in varying ways and enjoyed through the year, a diet emulated by some of the more health-conscious burghers. In the absence of the field systems communally practiced, or sharecropped, by most other agricultural Mevhan, the riverfishing communes instead grow dense, varied fruit and vegetable gardens along the banks and clearings, on a far greater scale than a grain-growing village would, while living on stilt-houses or anchored rafts and boats at the banks, leaving the rivers free for navigation and using as little of their arable land for housing as can be done. Some communes even manage to grow fens of black rice along the banks, layering their crops and weaving them between the trees, cultivating what was already there without clearing and planting anew, but most prefer to simply trade for what little grain or rice they do eat, a hearty diet of fish, riverweeds, vegetables and bush or half-wild orchard fruits being most common.    While some would assume they simply live off the uncultivated land, lucky to have found such a bounty and merely eating a share of it, the communes would strictly disagree and take great pride in their knowledge, and ability to shape themselves into the natural forms without rewriting and replanting a facsimile of natural symbiosis, a better example of how to live beyond the ancestral sins. Most will however admit that they must keep their communities small, and a city could not be fed as they are without the destruction of mass agriculture, but it remains that perhaps there is more to learn from these radicals, and there is always a way to lessen the harms of clearing and cropping.