5 - Paradise in Peril: Environmental Violence in Everyday Island Life

Summary

In this chapter I focus on another form of EV as a hazard: extreme weather events – specifically tropical cyclones or hurricanes. Where the Sonfon mining example runs the risk, if we don’t apply the EV model, of being portrayed as a local problem, largely driven by local, or at most national, corruption or lack of regulation (whereas the EV model makes clear that the causal process is a global one, and the impacts are wide-ranging), the case of extreme weather sometimes risks being seen as too global to easily assess. Here I explore the cases of three different islands recently struck by storms exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change: Hurricane Lane in Hawaii (2018), Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico in the United States (2017), and Hurricane Dorian, Abaco Island in the Bahamas (2019). I argue that the human processes and practices that beget EV in the form of toxic pollution as discussed in Chapter 4 – practices such as excess and disproportionate consumption, unequal power dynamics and distribution of impacts, and the like — also precipitate this nontoxic, greenhouse gas-based form of EV and mediate its outcomes.