By sTACY LEE KONG

This whole week, I’ve been thinking about what it means to have more than one home. Partially, this is because I’ve added a new job to my roster of jobs, where our mandate is literally to think about storytelling through the lens of identity. (I love this.) And partially, it’s because Hurricane Beryl has been crashing through the Caribbean, wreaking havoc wherever it lands, and I’ve been worried about what this means for my homeland of Trinidad and our neighbouring islands. (I hate this.) I’ve also been paying close attention to how North American journalists have been talking about Beryl, and how travel writers, influencers and even regular tourists who visit, and create content around, this region haven’t been talking about what’s happening to the Caribbean countries they profess to love. (I extra hate this.)

And okay—I know this topic isn’t strictly pop culture. But stay with me, because in addition to the conversation about climate change, which is hugely important, there’s one to be had about colonialism, imperialism and internet culture.

Hurricane Beryl is a totally expected consequence of our ongoing climate crisis

Some background: hurricane season in the Caribbean runs from June 1 to November 30, with peak activity happening between mid-August and early October. This has everything to do with ocean temperature. As BBC explained earlier this week, “strong storms only develop later in the season, after the seas have heated up through the summer. Hurricanes generally need the sea surface to be at least 27C in order to have a chance of developing… All else being equal, warmer seas mean more powerful hurricanes, because the storms can pick up more energy, enabling higher wind speeds. In the main Atlantic hurricane development region, the ocean heat content—the energy stored throughout the water column—is at levels not usually seen until September.”

The result? Beryl is breaking all sorts of terrible records. Per The Atlantic, the storm “transformed from a tropical depression to a Category 4 hurricane in two days, faster than any hurricane has ever done before the month of September [according to] Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami… It is the easternmost hurricane to emerge in the tropical Atlantic Ocean in the month of June. It’s the first storm to strengthen to Category 4 in the Atlantic in June, and now the earliest on record to hit Category 5. Hurricane Beryl ‘is not normal, in any way, shape, or form,’ [says] Ryan Truchelut, a meteorologist in Tallahassee, Florida, who runs the consulting firm WeatherTiger.”

Unsurprisingly, its impact has been catastrophic. It hit Grenada on Tuesday, killing seven people and leaving thousands more homeless. Grenadian Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell told journalists that on Carriacou and Petite Martinique, two of Granada’s smaller islands, 98% of the buildings have been damaged or destroyed, including Carriacou’s main health facility, airport and marinas. The island’s mangroves, which act as a natural barrier for Caribbean islands’ coastlines during hurricanes, were also totally destroyed. And that’s just in one country—Beryl also affected St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and the Cayman Islands, among others, causing between $1 billion and $1.5 billion in damage. In Venezuela, its outer rings were powerful enough to kill 10 people and damage more than 10,000 homes. And it’s still going, making landfall as a Category 2 hurricane in Mexico on Friday morning. (Which is still bad, btw—CNN says it’s “unloading damaging winds, torrential rainfall and dangerous storm surge over a significant portion of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.”)

And literally no scientist is surprised. These abnormally warm waters are partially caused by last year’s return of El Niño, a naturally-occurring weather pattern that happens every two to seven years and is associated with warming surface temperature in the Pacific Ocean. But climate change is also playing a huge role. As Andra Garner, a hurricane expert at New Jersey’s Rowan University told NPR, “in terms of the science, it’s unfortunately kind of right in line with what we expect when we’re warming the planet and we’re warming our oceans, especially.” 

All of this means hurricanes are only going to get worse as the summer goes on, of course.

The Caribbean always bears the brunt of these climate emergencies

And… the math is just not mathing. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Latin America and Caribbean region represented about 6.7% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, and only a tiny fraction of that came from Caribbean countries. Grenada produces 2.62 metric tons of CO2 emissions per capita, while it’s 2.1 metric tons per capita in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, 3.9 metric tons per capita in Barbados and 2.07 metric tons per capita in Jamaica. Trinidad tops the region with 10.16 metric tons per capita, which can largely be attributed to its oil and gas sector. Meanwhile, Luxembourg (which is tiny; literally half the square kilometres of Trinidad) produces 12.46 metric tons per capita. The U.S.? 13.03 metric tons per capita. Canada produces 13.6 metric tons of CO2 emissions per capita. Australia produces 14.78 metric tons per capita. Qatar produces 31.73 metric tons per capita.

And yet, there is an inverse disparity in climate impact. Earlier this week, the Atlantic Council, a U.S. think tank that promotes close political, economic and defence alliances between North American and European countries, explained that the Caribbean is the most vulnerable region in the world when it comes to climate change. Most people in the region live or work on a coast, which means hurricanes regularly disrupt people’s lives and business activities, not to mention government operations. They also prevent foreigners’ planned vacations, which has an outsize impact on Caribbean economies, which are largely dependent on tourism dollars. And, they damage existing infrastructure, and require investment in new projects, like burying power lines to protect against wind damage and building sea walls to handle storm surges. (Which Caribbean countries can’t really afford, btw. These projects would cost $100 billion across the region—but according to the IMF, Caribbean countries have only been approved for about $800 million in funding from various climate funds, including Green Climate Fund, Global Environment Fund and Adaptation Fund.)

It would not only be irresponsible to ignore the link between climate change and colonialism; it would be stupid. Unfettered and reckless extraction of resources is a major cause of climate change, and also the fundamental framework of colonization. A 2022 article out of Columbia University’s Climate School explains that when French colonizers arrived in North and West Africa, they banned subsistence farming and clear-cut forests to make room for cotton plantations and other cash crops, which caused the soil to lose moisture and, subsequently, the land to lose vegetation. The French came up with the term ‘desertification’ to describe this environmental degradation and (of course) pinned the blame on Indigenous peoples’ land management practices, even though it was actually the direct result of their resource extraction. And this is a dynamic that has played out in countless other countries, including right now in Palestine. What’s more, these same Western powers now spend less time investigating climate impacts in the Global South, which makes it harder to develop effective and equitable climate solutions, as the Columbia article points out.

As academic Farhana Sultana, professor of geography at Syracuse University, wrote in the journal Political Geography in 2022, “climate coloniality reproduces the hauntings of colonialism and imperialism through climate impacts in the post-colony (located primarily in the tropics and subtropics where climate-induced disasters and shifts have been prevalent for some time). Climate change lays bare the colonialism of not only of the past but an ongoing coloniality that governs and structures our lives, which are co-constitutive of processes of capitalism, imperialism, and international development. The uneven and unequal vulnerabilities and marginalizations, of deaths and devastation taken for granted, draw attention to continuities from the past and into the future. It is a slow violence” (emphasis mine).

Journalists, travel influencers and regular tourists are also part of this colonial structure

It's probably not surprising, then, that I’ve been thinking about what it means to live in the Global North, with all of the privilege and distance that implies, but to be from the Global South, where the realities of climate change are much closer because hurricane season comes every year—and gets worse as the world continues to warm. However indirectly, I contribute to, and am complicit in, this disparity. To me, this demands action. I think it’s important to donate money, advocate for the Canadian government to disperse humanitarian aid and amplify the ways diasporic Caribbean communities are trying to support their loved ones back home.

And… I’m annoyed that people who don’t ‘belong’ to this region, but who have benefited from it, don’t feel a similar responsibility. I’ve written about this before, a bit. Back in 2021, I looked at the celebrities who were vacationing in the Caribbean despite COVID, and how irresponsible that was. At the time, I argued that “Westerners still view this region as a resource, it’s just not about coffee, rum or sugar anymore. Now, it’s about leisure and luxury… But in all the ways that matter, the land and its people are still being mined for someone else’s benefit.”

I think that’s true in this context, too. Journalists talk about the records Beryl is breaking as if they’re ticking boxes, with a disturbing lack of care for the humans who will have to navigate losing their homes, businesses and sometimes lives. Influencers, travel writers and regular tourists are very happy to profit from, and build their brands via, visits to the Caribbean. They love using these islands as a backdrop for their content. But they don’t seem to have much to say now, when these ‘exotic’ paradises need material assistance—and will for years to come. (In 2017, Hurricane Maria damaged or destroyed 95% of the homes on Dominica; as of last June, the island still hadn’t recovered.) And to be clear, I’m not only talking about white people here. I’ve seen a shocking number of people who say they’re part of the Caribbean diaspora, but whose main concern over Beryl seems to be whether they’ll get to wine up on somebody at one of the region’s upcoming carnivals, which… gross.

To me, this is all part of the same dynamic we see over and over again, where the Global North as a whole makes selfish decisions that negatively affect post-colonies, but when those post-colonies suffer the climate (and economic, and sociopolitical) consequences, Western governments, companies and individuals pretend there is no context and they hold no responsibility. Instead, they leave these less powerful nations to fend for themselves—all the while continuing their capitalism-induced extraction around the world.

Which is fucked up, for the record.

And Did You Hear About…

Author H.K. Choi’s slightly devastating essay about being diagnosed with autism in her 40s.

The people who used to help you search for things on Google.

This excellent Twitter thread about how genocide is normalized, and how to resist.

The recent ‘Manny Jacinto is actually really hot’ discourse, which a) duh, but b) means more Manny Jacinto content on our timelines.

One Million Checkboxes, which is pointless but weirdly appealing.

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