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environmental fate of the Caribbean has been intimately connected to the po-
litical economy of the world system and to the political ambitions of successive
colonial and imperial powers Spain, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands,
and the United States. This connection has been a major factor in shaping and
constraining environmental movements, programs, and policies in the region. A
second contextual factor noted by several contributors to this volume is the di-
versity of the region s physical landscapes, ethnic and linguistic groups, and gov-
erning bodies. While this diversity is responsible for the remarkable cultural
productivity of the region, it can impede concerted environmental action. The
third contextual factor worth noting is the region s ecological fragility and its
vulnerability to natural as well as human-induced disasters.
Structural Context
A weakness of the environmental movement based in the global North has
been its emphasis on agency and its relative neglect of the structures of eco-
nomic and political control. We ignore such structures at our peril. Since 1492,
decisions and policies made elsewhere have had enormous environmental and
economic consequences for the Caribbean. Sidney Mintz (1985) provides ample
evidence of the socially and environmentally transformative role of sugar pro-
duction to feed the industrial revolution in Europe and America, and the liter-
ary critic Raymond Williams (1973) notes how the gentle lifestyle of Jane
Austen s heroines was supported, albeit invisibly, by the brutal economy of the
Caribbean sugar plantation.3 Even after the abolition of slavery, plantation ag-
riculture continued to define the region as a massive labor camp.4
Today the structures of dependency take different forms. For example, the
chapters by García-Martínez et al., Miller, and Burac indicate that transnational
capital flows to core economies without creating the backward linkages that
160 Barbara Deutsch Lynch
would propel endogenous economic development. The negative environmental
consequences of these flows are not offset by the myriad environmental pro-
grams undertaken by bilateral and international assistance agencies. Miller notes
the preponderant power of international capital vis-à-vis small Caribbean states
and the impact of this imbalance on tourist investment. She argues that because
the tourist industry is designed to facilitate the expatriation of wealth, it is all
the more difficult for the Jamaican government to capture the resources needed
to address the nation s growing environmental problems.
Caribbean colonial wealth was created by migrants to the islands whether
as slave, contract, or free labor. Migration remains a noteworthy aspect of de-
pendent development in the Caribbean. On the one hand we find rural people
leaving the countryside in search of jobs in export platform industry, or expelled
from lands that have passed into the hands of tourism and real estate develop-
ers, agribusiness enterprises, or the state. Flight in the face of natural disaster
remains a feature common to the region. Because the economies of the islands
are small relative to the size of their populations, and because the backward and
forward linkages on the islands are slender, migration to Venezuela, Colombia,
and the cities of North America and Europe is common. As Soto-Lopez and
Minnite and Ness note in this volume, migrants often end up in the decaying
cities of the northeast, with their brownfields, aging infrastructure, waste trans-
fer stations, and hazardous worksites. But this is not the whole story. Migrant
income can provide island families with remittances that take the place of re-
sources that are no longer available to them. It may also finance development
on the islands and contribute to urban sprawl as it is invested in commercial
development, condos, and showy retirement homes. Politically, migration has
created new spaces for the sharing of information and the creation of
transnational networks.
A third aspect of dependent development that merits discussion is the role
of the international development community in shaping island environmental
agendas. The policy objectives of international institutions, bilateral assistance
agencies, and international NGOs do not always reflect Caribbean realities or
the interests of Caribbean people. However, these institutions carry a great deal
of weight because they fund the environmental programs of local governments
and organizations (Paniagua Pascual 1998). To a significant degree, the kind of
environmental research that gets done and the kind of science that gets taught
reflects the agendas of these international agencies.5 As a corollary, international
development discourse is adapted by local institutions seeking funds.
Diversity
Cuban-American literary scholar Antonio Benítez-Rojo (1992) sees the
island Caribbean as an infinite array of islands (in both the literal and the figu-
rative sense) that appear to be replicas of one another. Yet they are subtly differ-
ent, and these differences account for the region s remarkable diversity a
diversity that takes a number of forms. First of all, few can agree on where the
Toward a Creole Environmentalism 161
region begins and ends. The greater Caribbean can be seen as including not only
the Greater and Lesser Antilles, but also the nations on the Caribbean coast of
South and Central America, Mexico, and the Gulf states of the United States.
Do we include the sea islands of Georgia or other black Atlantic communities
in our definition? Do we include diaspora communities in New York, Hartford,
Miami, London, and Madrid? We can demarcate the region as we will, but the
way in which we define its problems and its solutions will depend upon where
we draw its boundaries. This fluidity poses challenges, but at the same time cre-
ates opportunities for Caribbean environmental problem-solving.
If the island Caribbean s history of colonial conflict and imperialist ad-
venture has left a legacy of continuing dependency, it has also given the region
an extraordinary ethnic and cultural richness. An island like Cuba can boast of
a population that is not only Taino, Afro-Cuban, and Iberian, but Mayan, Hai-
tian, Jamaican, Levantine, Arab, Chinese, and eastern European. South Asians
constitute a significant and active segment of eastern Caribbean populations.
Migrants and conquerors alike have brought diverse political traditions to the
islands; these have given rise to identity politics throughout the region. While
identity politics are not a central focus of this volume, they comprise a leitmotif
in many essays here. Can the search for identity give rise to a creole environ-
mentalism?
The anthropologist Viranjini Munasinghe (2001) distinguishes two versions
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