The harrowing response to Hurricane Maria could set a dark precedent
With the media maelstrom surrounding the Mueller Report, Joe Biden’s fresh controversy and 2020 fundraising still swirling, there’s been one story detached from the U.S. mainland that’s been making waves. The President’s feud with the government of Puerto Rico has escalated the tensions between the disaster-afflicted island and the colonial power still exerting rule over them.
The New York Times reported that President Trump has continued to lash out at the leaders of Puerto Rico, most notably San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz. This time, the outrage was born out of a failed bill intended to provide relief to flood-stricken Midwestern states, since the proposed $600 million for nutritional assistance was deemed insufficient. Meant to help rebuild their nutritional assistance program, Senators sent the bill back because of the lack of funds allocated to help rebuild the island’s infrastructure.
In response to this legislative blow, President Trump unsurprisingly lied, saying that Puerto Rico had received roughly $91 billion dollars in aid. The Office of Management and Budget says that FEMA has only spent around $11.2 billion, but what’s a near $80 billion difference between fact and fiction to a man who isn’t honest about where his father was born? The lies are nothing new, but the intent behind them could be indicative of a long term strategy that will lead to immense injustice.
Ever since Hurricane Maria hit the island of Puerto Rico in September 2017, the Trump administration’s response has been, to put it lightly, inadequate. With power still unavailable to large swathes of the population, and the U.S. blocking supplementary aid from countries like Cuba and Jamaica, it’s clear the U.S. wants to keep a stranglehold on how the island is allowed to recover, even if what they offer isn’t enough. President Trump’s patronizing behavior doesn’t help, but that’s par for the course.
What’s truly troublesome is that the response to Hurricane Maria clearly shows the difference in priorities when it comes to responding to natural disasters. Recovery isn’t as urgent when the lives on the line are the lives of people of color. A cursory read of history should make this reality an unsurprising one, but as climate change exacerbates disasters around the world, what can the developing world expect when asking for help from superpowers. If history and our current political moment is anything to go off of, the answer is not much.
For instance, although Africa has contributed a minute amount to global C02 emissions (approx. 4 percent), the continent is right in the crosshairs for ecological destruction. The massive flooding in Mozambique is just a precursor of what is to be expected if we don’t chart a new course to climate justice. A current and valid fear is that once things start to get too bad in and around the global South, Western nations will begin to simply stop sending aid. With rising xenophobia due to the refugee crisis in Europe and the isolationist ethos radiating from the White House, refugees of climate change could find themselves with nowhere to go.
Of course, the argument could be made that these disadvantaged regions are economically hindered through histories of colonialism and the expansion of global capital. After being dealt a bad hand largely due to the Industrial Revolution — the true start of our descent towards an uninhabitable planet — these same countries may pay the price for climate change well before the Western nations of the world see an impact on the same scale.
The response, or lack thereof, to Hurricane Maria, may portend a gloomy future that compounds upon the injustices of the past. What’s worse is that the natives of these countries, who have contributed incomparably fewer carbon emissions, will be punished for the lavish lifestyles we live in America. The change must come from within the United States and Europe, as well as superpowers like China. Looking back on the last 3 to 4 centuries, it means there would have to be a monumental change in approach to the global South.
For the sake of billions of lives, lives that imperialism has already set back, we need to reckon with our exploitative history with developing nations and right our wrongs. The first way to do that is to have an unflinching dedication to climate justice.
