I have nothing new or particularly insightful to say about the experience of watching storm after storm ravage Caribbean and circum-Caribbean communities this year: Barbuda, Dominica, Puerto Rico, the USVI, the Bahamas, St Martin/St Maarten, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Florida, and Houston – all have, to greater or lesser degrees, been severely affected. It’s all been said: climate change is real and happening now; these are human disasters, made of poverty, inequality, inadequate infrastructure, poor planning; the poor suffer first, most, and longest (and that applies to nations as well as individuals); this is only the beginning; it’s hard not to despair. Someone, somewhere, suggested that in places like Barbuda it may not even make sense to rebuild, because the next super-hurricane is only a season or two away, and the society doesn’t have the capacity to keep rising from the ashes of each one, year after year after year. The idea of Caribbean climate refugees – something I had imagined to be fifteen or twenty years off, and even then I worried: who would take them in? – becomes instead a proximate reality.

So it is, clearly, very easy for a Caribbean person to despair – even one living far away from the region, as I do. It’s hard to find much cause for optimism. There are a few small points of light: Guyana making the offer of land in its considerable interior to climate refugees from Caribbean nations is one of them (although it’s worth asking whether that land is really available for the government to dole out, or is already occupied by indigenous people). Mostly, there is cause to re-double our efforts, to press for a future (a near future) free of fossil fuels; for funds to help the poorest, most vulnerable nations mitigate the disastrous effects of climate change and implement strategies for resilience; for debt forgiveness. For reparations. All of these might seem politically impossible, but surely the only benefit of living in unthinkable times is that they radically re-shape our ideas of the possible.

Update, 9/26/17: Prof. Sir Hilary Beckles’ statement on Irma-Maria and reparations is worth reading, as is this disturbing report on (attempted?) changes to the land-tenure legislation affecting Barbuda.