Black Jacobins, Green Jacobins
Western-dominated responses to ecological crisis in the Caribbean are intensifying neo-colonialism. A new book documents the region’s emerging climate left, rooted in a tradition of anti-colonial, socialist resistance.
Reading American and EU media coverage of the Caribbean, you’d conclude that the region is in a state of perpetual disaster in desperate need of foreign intervention. In response to the August 14th earthquake in Haiti, The New York Times mused: “the unsolved assassination, a leadership vacuum, severe poverty and systematic gang violence in parts of Haiti have left the government dysfunctional and ill-prepared for a natural calamity.” The Times then quickly pivoted to an assumed Western rescue: “the government is not really in control of the country, and the humanitarian relief coordination and delivery will be challenging.”
Coverage of the latest UN climate report echoed the Times’ paternalistic tone. An August 8th BBC article section titled “chaos in the Caribbean,” cited concern that current Caribbean climate adaptation plans will be unable to confront the increasingly powerful hurricanes predicted in the next several decades. News commentary catastrophizes the region as an “unstinting political turmoil and natural disaster.” Meanwhile, travel media continues to fetishize the region as a tropical refuge, refusing the idea of a Caribbean outside of its role as a haven for Western tourists (click for “6 Caribbean Vacations Where Hurricane Season Doesn’t Matter”).
The Global North is not only strident about its diagnosis of the Caribbean—it’s also sure of its solutions. The West plans to “save” the Caribbean from climate disaster primarily through corporate-propelled tech innovations and investment in climate finance. Proponents cite “The Caribbean’s Untapped Renewable Energy Potential.” In the last five years, the Inter-American Development Bank has loaned $4.89 billion in energy projects run by conglomerates like Phillips and General Electric to generate hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, and solar energy. Wealthy countries have pledged $100 billion per year in support of climate action in developing countries — a pledge they’ve continually failed to meet— though this figure pales in comparison to the world’s military expenditure, at just under $2 trillion. A green economy could yield an economic gain of $26 trillion by 2030, presenting a lucrative opportunity for private investors.
Lost in the conversation about flashy investment strategies, promising technological developments, and the saving power of humanitarian aid is the grim history of post-disaster interventions in the Caribbean. The US and EU have a long record of using political, economic, and environmental crises as an excuse for interventions which consolidate their control over Caribbean countries while displacing local economies and undermining political sovereignty. If the Caribbean is more than a quagmire to be “fixed” by charity and investments, as Westerners might believe, what other possibilities for a livable and just Caribbean future remain?
In her 2020 book Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene, sociologist Mimi Sheller draws from and expands upon her decades of climate fieldwork in Haiti to illustrate the challenges of preparing for a livable future throughout the entire Caribbean region. Sheller delivers an exhaustive critique of Western-led climate intervention. Instead of a US or EU-led Green New Deal or renewed pledges to pour private investment into the region, Sheller pushes for returning political and economic sovereignty to the Caribbean people, rather than foreign governments, businesses, and a handful of local elites.
Sheller begins by confronting cynical narratives about Caribbean crises and perpetual disaster. The US and EU, she points out, strategically omit any recognition of how Western intrusions both directly (discussed later) and indirectly through climate change have repeatedly derailed Haitian politics and society. Reports published by leading scientific bodies warning readers of the risks to “civilization” if “humans don't make deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions soon” often serve to erase Western accountability, ignoring the fact that a few select regions and powers are truly responsible for the climate crisis, while the entire country of Haiti, by contrast, contributes less than .03 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Sheller employs the encompassing term “coloniality of climate”: that is, the idea that climate change itself and predominant responses to it constitute a mode of colonialism. “Recognizing the coloniality of climate,” she writes, “can help us see that no amount of solar panels, electric vehicles, green capitalism, low-carbon growth, or even the Green New Deal will end the climate crisis unless we address and repair the ‘racially uneven vulnerability and death’ of the modern world” (166). In other words, it is Western countries’ relentless pursuit of power and capital that has driven the climate crisis; similarly, their favored “solutions” pursue a similar end.
Sheller is pessimistic about the potential of a Green New Deal-style international spending program to change patterns of human and environmental exploitation or shift the vast gap in power between the West and the Caribbean. Even progressive proposals by governmental and non-governmental organizations keep power in the hands of the wealthy (and mostly Western) elite while supplanting community leadership and grassroots resilience projects that don’t fit into modern paradigms of “green development.” Instead, the work to address and repair the region must be led by local communities in accordance with unique needs, relationships, and ecosystems. Sheller rejects the notions of progress promised by green technology and wonders at the potential for grassroots Caribbean democracy and resource management.
It’s not just foreign-operated climate mitigation projects that concern Sheller. In her decades of fieldwork, she has observed humanitarian aid repeatedly impede Caribbean political, economic, social, and environmental resiliency. Sheller notes eerie parallels between the cluelessness and domineering tendencies of colonial administrators and contemporary NGO workers; many of the projects they implement lack long-term viability and undermine the projects, practices, and strategies that local communities have built themselves. After the 2010 earthquake, Haiti received an outpouring of support from wealthy governments and NGOs alike in the form of investments for housing, public infrastructure, and hospitals. But, Sheller writes, the funds for reconstruction “were slow to be disbursed amid charges of corruption, red tape, title disputes over land, and lack of coordination among the plethora of organizations” (4). $500 million of the money that the Red Cross raised for aid never made it to Haiti. All of the $1.6 billion the US government committed to humanitarian relief bypassed Haitian institutions, and more than a third went directly to the U.S. military.
For decades, aid to Haiti has been predicated on the requirement that the U.S. military, under the guise of ensuring safe conditions for foreign investment, be lent greater control of Haiti’s population. During the first American military occupation in Haiti (1915–34), the Haitian constitution was rewritten to remove the provision that limited foreign nationals from owning Haitian land. Since then, farmers have been systematically displaced by foreign-owned industrial manufacturing parks and extractive industries. And, since 1995, the United States has provided significant support to local police forces which the Haitian government has, over the last two years, used to stifle anti-corruption protests—many aimed at the US-backed Moïse administration for misappropriating hundreds of millions of dollars from a Venezuelan aid program for subsidized oil.
The violence wrought by Western intervention isn’t limited to its military presence. Haiti was cholera-free until October 2010, when infected sewage traced to a United Nations peacekeepers camp contaminated a river. Since then, 10,000 Haitians have died of cholera and 80,000 have fallen ill. And in 2018, it came to light that Oxfam covered up a sexual misconduct scandal in 2011 involving Roland van Hauwermeiren, who was leading the organization’s post-earthquake recovery efforts in Haiti. These incidents, and others, have generated mistrust of foreign NGOs in Haiti; in the wake of the 2021 earthquake on August 15th, Reuters documented the popular call amongst Haitians for donations to Haitian organizations only.
Sheller wonders what repair might have looked like had past disaster aid money been given to and controlled by Haitian communities themselves. While transnational solidarity and aid are important to disaster response, the lack of substantial funds to rebuild and recover from centuries of neo-colonial violence — outside of humanitarian charity — leaves the region in a cyclical process of Western-determined reconstruction, limiting local capacity to determine themselves what systems may best provide climate resilience. Donors often call the shots, though they rarely have the local contextual knowledge to determine what’s most needed, urgent, and appropriate. Scholar Keston K. Perry argues that the bulk of Haiti’s $1.1 billion climate fund, financed primarily by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, is a compilation of misallocated donor priorities. For example, 70 percent of Haiti’s climate budget is slotted for sustainable energy improvements like hydroelectric and solar power, a sum that is disproportionately high for a country with such low carbon emissions and where just 20 percent of the population has reliable electricity.
Not only is disaster repair hindered by Western meddling—so are disaster responses. Sheller points out that the immobility of Caribbean populations impedes the ability of communities to respond to climate disaster. This immobility can be partially attributed to restrictive migration policies, like the US’s shameful detention policies for Cuban and Haitian migrants intercepted at sea, which punish those fleeing from economic, political, or environmental threats. Caribbean populations face issues of mobility injustice even greater than other low-income countries: confined to islands, they have fewer natural evacuation routes, as air or sea travel on short notice is usually more than they can afford. While highly mobile Americans can move at their leisure, often getting a visa on the flight to their Caribbean destination, many Caribbean residents face long waiting times and must prove ownership of property, or a high enough income, to travel internationally. These issues are compounded by what Sheller calls an “islanding effect” which makes individuals in the Caribbean region appear “immobile, cut off, and hard to reach” (69).
In addition to curtailing residents’ ability to evacuate, Sheller argues the islanding effect slows the arrival of resources and post-disaster aid. Caribbean “remoteness” is not about innate inaccessibility — when people or commodities need to be transported, rich countries find ways to do so: the EU, for example, is not considered particularly hard to reach from the United States, while wealthy tourists can take a short flight from Miami to Jamaica with ease. The perception of Caribbean inaccessibility instead reflects the production of racial difference as a way of justifying Caribbean underdevelopment and corresponding Western paternalism. As long as the Caribbean region remains in the popular imagination a collection of “underdeveloped” exotic peoples unable to manage their own affairs, Western powers can continue to rationalize political interference and resource extraction.
If the islanding effect is used to justify intervention when convenient, it can also be used to avoid it when it is not convenient. Sheller quotes former President Trump’s response to criticism of the slow arrival of aid after the 2017 hurricane in Puerto Rico. “It’s an island in the middle of the Ocean,” he said. “You can’t just drive your trucks there from other states.” Yet it’s easy to get to Puerto Rico by air. The “islanding effect,” illuminates not a geographic reality but a racist lack of concern for Caribbean survival, which becomes evident in post-disaster aid.
In the eyes of the West, the Caribbean, at times, is simply not worth helping, and when it is, it cannot be trusted to manage resources on its own. Sheller draws a throughline between these two patterns, showing that both are guided by the same racist and imperialist principles that dominate Western engagement in the Caribbean.
Island Futures, however, has greater ambitions than a withering critique of Western climate policy in the Caribbean. Sheller also presents concrete demands for accountability from foreign powers, alongside openings for a promising future grounded in Caribbean traditions of grassroots democracy and intra-regional economic cooperation.
The people of the Caribbean have endured genocide, labor exploitation, colonial violence, cultural repression, and natural resource extraction for over 500 years. Out of this, Caribbean communities have pioneered modes of resistance through cooperative agriculture, anti-colonial revolutions, post-colonial social movements, and new forms of democratic socialism.
Drawing inspiration from these visions for alternative development, local economies, and people’s assemblies, Sheller presents several interventions. The first, Sheller emphasizes, is monetary reparations to compensate the region’s indigenous and African-descendant communities for genocide, slavery, slave trading, and racial apartheid. The demand for reparations has made slow but significant progress over the past few decades; CARICOM (Caribbean Community, an organization of 15 Caribbean states) is currently spearheading a campaign for immediate repayment of climate and slavery reparations by the US, the UK, and the EU. But the road to reparations is long, and heavily steeped in denial and erasure. For centuries, Haiti struggled to pay France’s demand of 150 million francs for its claims of property lost through the Haitian Revolution, including slaves, in return for diplomatic recognition. In 2004, when Haitian President Aristide called on France to pay almost $22 billion to offset this, the demand received no recognition from the international community. And in July, the Jamaica Gleaner reported that the British high commissioner had dismissed Jamaica’s request for a 10-billion pound reparation payment.
Despite these setbacks, Sheller argues that the call for reparations is crucial to Caribbean residents’ creation of a livable future. Direct reparations to Haitian communities would entail decentralized, democratic control of development strategies: local community groups are best positioned to ensure the equitable allocation of funds and establish locally appropriate strategies for disaster response. Read alongside her scholarship revealing the damage and ineffectiveness of Western aid, reparations on these terms specifically are clearly politically necessary.
Sheller also advocates for policy that accepts and supports the right to survival and the right to movement. Her proposed future requires the easing of barriers to migration in place of existing policies that prioritize border surveillance and limit the rights of asylum seekers. In this, she echoes the growing call for open borders, an increasingly popular left-wing position that nevertheless remains a remote political possibility for the near future. In February 2021, the Biden administration signed an executive order to begin considering protections for climate-displaced persons under U.S. refugee policy—yet, his recent actions sharply contradict this sentiment. Biden has instead been using a Trump-era pandemic order to expel Haitian migrants from the Texas town of Del Rio in one of the quickest, large-scale expulsions in decades.
The systemic neglect of Caribbean people is one of the many reasons immigration policy alone cannot promise the region’s survival. While lessened border regulation likely promotes population evacuation when facing disaster, those with fewer resources will still be left behind. Sheller suggests partnerships between sister communities across all parts of the world that, when one community faces disaster, the other facilitates temporary evacuation, providing assistance and safety. These partnerships can take many different shapes, though most importantly, they hinge on community-to-community relationships established through solidarity and mutual aid, not Western charity.
Sheller also suggests learning from agroecological projects and indigenous knowledge to expand Caribbean food sovereignty and support agricultural resilience to climate change. She recommends the cultivation of root crops like cassava, which can survive hurricanes, and fast-growing Moringa Oleifera trees to stabilize eroded hillsides. (Their seeds can also be used to purify water.) In recent decades, support for sustainable, local agriculture in the Caribbean has crumbled as governments have faced pressure to implement reforms that prioritize multinational agribusiness over smallholder farms. Some of the largest post-earthquake plans in Haiti were to “improve” export agriculture through strategies like Coca-Cola’s purchase of mango plantations and the introduction of Monsanto’s hybrid seeds.
Demands to transfer power from large corporations to community growers invested in the future of their land and natural resources are reflected in popular calls for a people’s agenda in Haiti, though many are squashed by political and corporate collusion. On February 8th, 2021, the late Haitian President Jovenel Moïse issued a decree gifting 8,600 hectares of the country’s agricultural land reserves to Andre Apaid’s stevia production for Coca-Cola. It also created a free trade zone in Savane Diane that undercut the livelihoods of peasant farmers and hindered the work of the Haitian Women’s Solidarity (SOFA)’s Farm School, a key provider of agroecological farm training to hundreds of women in the region. SOFA continues to fight for food sovereignty alongside PAPDA, a coalition of nine Haitian organizations that works to support cooperatives and peasant organizations, fight land grabs, and call out the international communities’ punishing structural adjustment policies. PAPDA has delineated concrete anti-capitalist, justice-centered alternatives for Haitian agriculture, calling on the state to end agro-industrial free zones and to define policies that will strengthen the peasant economy, instead of playing into the hands of transnational corporations.
Countering the presence of the hugely powerful multinational agriculture industry takes substantial mobilization. But, as Sheller insists, there are Caribbean models to look to. In addition to the work of Haitian activists, Puerto Rican food sovereignty organizations Boricuá and el Fondo de Resiliencia worked to fill the gaps left by insufficient government assistance in the wake of Hurricane Maria. They mobilized to clear roads, rebuild farms, and deliver food through a system of “food sovereignty brigades”: highly coordinated mutual-aid systems that delivered food to communities and organized farmers around establishing disaster-resilient and environmentally sustainable agricultural systems. Other Puerto Rican organizations, like Guagua Solidaria, established seed-saving initiatives and led community reforestation efforts.
While these types of efforts are sometimes critiqued for their lack of scale, this is precisely where they draw their power. Sheller’s fieldwork illustrates the repeated exploitation posed by the massive projects of large-scale agribusiness and their perpetuation of racist, imperial forms of capitalism. Localized food production, owned and operated by regional communities, is much better positioned to reliably and fairly feed and nourish their people than the multinational companies which presently dominate Caribbean agriculture. Embedded in and owned by the communities they produce for, these cooperatives are more easily held accountable for fair wages, accessible pricing, and high-quality food.
Highly localized food systems do raise concerns about climate resilience. What happens in the event of a flood or a drought? Sheller doesn’t address this further than advocating for disaster-resilient crops that can better survive extreme weather conditions. However, the work of Boricuá and el Fondo de Resiliencia reveal the immense potential of co-operative networks to respond to food shortages in the wake of disaster: it wasn’t the multinationals that came to the rescue of communities, but instead local mutual aid networks that united to distribute food across the region.
Sheller encourages further work by Caribbean communities to determine how economies will replace incomes from tourism and foreign industry. This could mean community-controlled fisheries like those in Mexico, or the collective land ownership of post-slavery Black America or contemporary Barbados. It might include Puerto-Rican-inspired energy transitions powered by community credit unions or solidarity housing initiatives — both of which can build community resources and lessen economic dependence on international tourism and extractive industry. This future has crucial implications for democracy, too: a resilient local economy means local politicians can be less concerned with catering to the whims of foreign development interests as a source of revenue, enabling greater focus on maintaining local economic well-being alongside locally-appropriate climate adaptation. This approach, Sheller relays, is what Haitian activists have been calling for decades alongside significant repression and state violence.
Sheller, as much as anyone, knows that the program she presents is a tall order. Despite the prevalence of community organizing and reconstruction, Sheller recognizes that the path towards a community-controlled Caribbean future is likely rocky, messy, and far from utopic, as hopeful and promising as it is complicated and discouraging. Island Futures embraces these contradictions. There is no one political strategy that can promise Caribbean survival, but survival does require a hasty retreat of all forms of Western interference that undermine Caribbean sovereignty, US and EU accountability and reparation, and the space for Caribbean communities to build back cooperative models of political and economic sovereignty. Sheller doesn’t claim to have the tools or the immediate solutions to fix the climate crisis and ensure Caribbean survival. But her decades of fieldwork illuminate the complex challenges facing the region while equipping her with insights into what kinds of repair may generate a livable future. Ultimately, Sheller presents a future drawn up and built by local communities, reveals the ways this future is already germinating and calls for Western powers to retreat, pay reparations, and leave power in the hands of Caribbean communities.
Sheller presents an entire landscape of shifts, interventions, and actions necessary to ensure a livable Caribbean future. The Caribbean people, not Western NGOs or policymakers, must build this future. Sheller leaves Western audiences in the uncomfortable place of confronting their complicity in producing Caribbean disaster. Here lies a crucial part of her “solution”: Westerners must be more critical of their efforts to “help” the Caribbean. Left movements need to actively critique their governments’ intervention strategies; NGO staffers and policy advocates should restructure their work to respect Caribbean sovereignty; and media must propel less Western-centric and historically-divorced narratives.
Sheller is not necessarily suggesting that wealthy countries should never engage with the Caribbean, but she does insist on a critical and dramatic re-assessment of what engagement should look like. This book turns mainstream questioning of what highly-resourced countries can do for the Caribbean on its head, pivoting focus, power, and agency to the Caribbean people themselves. It also asks Westerners to listen. While Sheller believes Caribbean traditions of grassroots economies, cooperatives, and transnational solidarity are critical tools for a livable future, her ultimate refrain is: “let the Caribbean people determine their future themselves.”
Indeed, with the democratic and climate future of the US plunging into disorder and peril, Left movements in America may benefit from taking cues from traditions of grassroots democracy, food sovereignty, the call for reparations and open borders, and an end to corporate tyranny. “If we, humanity, are to survive the Anthropocene and its devastating events, from hurricanes to the coronavirus pandemic,” Sheller writes, “we need to learn from the revolutionary, decolonial, culture-building of the Caribbean.”
Sophie D’Anieri researches and writes about food, agriculture, labor, and climate issues across the Americas. She holds an MA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and lives in Minneapolis, MN.
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