Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein
TODAY WE watch Hurricane Beryl pass southern Jamaica; a surreal experience of tracking a moving disaster minute by minute, our thoughts with the most vulnerable, and our hopes that it will be downgraded accompanying our prayers.
If you are a Caribbean person, you would know we are brought together by cricket, carnivals and hurricanes. That is when, across our many differences, our shared history and geography make our hearts celebrate with or break for each other as they do now for our sisters and brothers in Union Island, Mayreau, Petit Martinique, Canouan, Bequia, St Vincent, Grenada and Barbados, where individual homes, fishing boats, agricultural farms and livelihoods were all wrecked, in some places worse than others.
We've seen this before in The Bahamas, Barbuda, Dominica and Puerto Rico after Irma and Maria in 2017 and Dorian in 2019. Maria was the deadliest Atlantic hurricane in a century.
The Caribbean is becoming a postcolonial register of islands mutilated by storms that follow the same path as ships which once brought the enslaved and indentured. History comes to our shores again and again like the tides; the wealthy nations that profited from the slave trade and exploitation of indentured workers creating the climate crisis which threatens us today.
Beryl is the first June hurricane ever to reach category 5, the farthest east a storm has ever hit category 4, and the first storm before September to go from tropical depression to major hurricane in under 48 hours. It is the earliest category 5 hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic basin, and it decimated Carriacou in 'half an hour.' The satellite image of this tiny island, smaller than an iris in the eye of Beryl, is symbolic of how overwhelmed our nations will be.
There have always been hurricanes, named after the Taino god, Juracan. However, the sense of dread that now accompanies hurricane season, as it is expected to worsen because of man-made global warming, is something full of both greater terror and anger.
Anger at the fossil industry and governments that knew about global-warming predictions decades ago, invalidated science and assassinated activists, suppressed renewable technology from becoming mainstream and breaking global dependence on oil and gas, and threw corporate-social-responsibility pennies and PR at communities, creating dependence on and loyalties to fossil giants rather than resistance movements.
Such fury is vital to acknowledge as much as the mental distress and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that follows in the wake of hurricane destruction. We feel for each other. We are more than debris.
Significant activism to stop fossil production through direct action and disruption, and legal challenges, has grown. Governments typically act as if these are fringe movements that don't understand economics and are opposed to development, or are partisan and cannot be trusted, but ordinary people are mobilising to prevent planetary-scale, irreversible harm because we wi
