After Maria
Gone are the months of walking up ten flights of stairs, every
day, in the dark, carrying three gallons of water so I could have something
to drink, hydrate the dogs, and be able to clean up a bit. Gone the oppressive
heat that enveloped us as Hurricane Maria traveled north and sucked every gasp
of air away from Puerto Rico for weeks on end. Gone are the endless mounds of
debris on lightless roads, and intersections with slow, cautious traffic that
no one dared drive in after sunset. Gone the block-long lines to get inside the
few cash-only supermarkets with empty shelves, the self-winding line at the ATM
machine, or the mile-long lines to buy rationed gasoline. Gone, the constant
drone of generators spewing sulphurous fumes in an incessant and costly battle
to keep refrigerators and air conditioners operational. Gone, the constant fear
of losing or needing medicines that were unavailable. Gone, the sleepless,
sweaty nights. Gone is the milling around in front of buildings with free WiFi
or driving around to find high ground where a weak cellular signal might get
through. At least I made it, even if I lost my job because of the storm. So
many of us didn’t make it.
Twenty four months after Hurricane Maria, most people have electricity, internet, and cellular signal. Most roads are clear, and most street
lights are on, but one still does not feel safe. Supermarkets have restocked and are accepting
credit cards. Restaurants are open, although too many of them quietly closed
their doors forever. Gasoline prices have risen from pre-Maria .52 cents a
liter to up to .74 cents a liter (roughly from $2.08 to $3.00 a gallon), but it
is readily available. About 10% of the population flew off the island with one-way
tickets costing from $500 to $1,200; and about one third of those have come
back because they could not make it wherever they went. In middle-class
neighborhoods, every other house is either abandoned or for sale. In tourist areas and high-end
communities, hipster restaurants and expensive home remodels are rampant. In
poor areas, foundations of homes destroyed by the storm lay denuded, upwind of their
debris fields. Blue tarps still cover 30,000 homes. Commercial flights have resumed, and Isla
Grande Airport, San Juan’s small regional airport, is doing a brisk business in
private jet services for the ‘Vulture Capitalists’ that have descended on the
island in droves.
As with any disaster, there are many newly minted disaster-relief
corporations that are cleaning and rebuilding our cities. Most are foreign,
because after a decade of economic depression, the locals have no up-front
money, and no credit. Airline pilots, once a bulwark of middle-class income, are
making poverty wages, and thankful to have a job; so are many lawyers and
doctors. Billionaires are taking advantage of generous tax breaks and buying up
as much prime real estate as they can. Half of the hotels are open, the rest are
still closed, taking this opportunity to rethink, remodel, or upgrade their
facilities after the storm. $15-dollar alcoholic drinks are the norm. Last month for the
first time ever, there was a posse of exotic cars on the expressway: an orange
Lamborghini, a neon green McLaren, and a red Ferrari, followed by a coterie of
Porsches and BMWs, although why they would submit such thoroughbred vehicles
to our potholed streets is beyond comprehension. The shopping malls, as always,
are full; but people visit them to sit in the air-conditioned common areas, while
most stores are hemorrhaging money for lack of sales.
We have gone through the July 2019 Summer Revolution, when citizens of all ages and walks of life said 'Enough' and in an unprecedented show of solidarity, protested for 12 days until they peacefully ousted governor Ricardo Rossello from office. Pedro Pierluisi briefly became governor until the Supreme Court decided that transition was unconstitutional, and finally settled on Wanda Vazques, the Secretary of Justice, as the next governor. While the governorship has been decided, it is clear that both parties and all acting politicians need to rethink their goals and strategies.
There is just enough recovery to make it seem as if everything is
back to normal. But scratch the surface, and you find a mass of people that
have lost their jobs and their homes and are frantically trying to regain their
economic footing, in an economy where there is no secure foothold. Nature has
rebounded, somewhat; Wall Street has rebounded, somewhat. But to the majority
of Puerto Ricans, there is no recovery – just one long, protracted, never-ending catastrophe. And to add insult to injury, we are surrounded by jet-set outsiders
buying up what is left of our natural resources, our real estate, our culture, and our history - for
cents on the dollar.
Naomi Klein’s “Disaster Capitalism” is thriving in Puerto Rico.
The people who lost their jobs have found there are no other jobs to replace the ones they lost, and those jobs that do exist pay $7.50/hr to $10/hr, and people are scrambling to become entrepreneurs and offer home-based services in a market where no one has any discretionary income. Flea markets and
consignment stores have sprung up physically and virtually, as everyone rushes
to sell their belongings. These stores have become the archives of a time when
consumers filled their homes with goods that demand a level of care and
maintenance that only full-time servants are able to provide, at a time when hardly anyone has that luxury any more.
Fifty-something women who used to be bankers are starting dog-sitting
businesses or catering businesses, and one woman I know is doing both.
Millennials are working for minimum wage in cavernous call centers inside repurposed
warehouses. Everyone is ‘making do,’ and, counterintuitively, finding that while
the situation is bad, it’s not as bad as they thought it would be. The 'New
Normal' is not easy, but it's not as bad as I thought it would be. It has forced me to simplify and refocus, and that is a good thing, and something I would have never done voluntarily to this level of minimization.
Maria has come and gone. But the economic depression compounded by
the austerity measures will continue to reverberate throughout our crippled economy for a generation, according to economist Heidi Calero. And that carries
negative consequences we will all have to suffer through, compounded by the many other
challenges we must also solve during that time.
For Baby Boomers, that means that whatever wealth they have left is all they are going to have for the rest of their lives unless they keep working and that
they are dependent on a bankrupt government for their quality of life.
For Gen X-ers and Y-ers that means they will have to lower their expectations
and adapt to a world that will never be as easy or as cheap (not that it was ever easy or cheap) as the one they grew
up in. For Millennials it means embracing the concepts of ‘Less is More’ and
living in a hotter, angrier world. This “new normal” is will not be easy to
live with.
The solution is reaching out and building alliances, and working together for a better future. The island government won't be able to help. The federal government is unwilling to help. We must help ourselves.
Not a single proposed fiscal plan or legislation in the past two
years is anywhere near sustainable, either financially, socially or
ecologically. And that is because they all start from the wrong place: “how do
we get money out of this moribund economy without spending any money to help
the local economy get back on its feet?” At a time when Fiscal Austerity
Measures have been proven not to work, politicians in Congress and Puerto Rico
have decided to pay down a crippling debt before allowing or helping the local
economy to recover from the many forces outside of their control, without
changing those forces so they work for the people of Puerto Rico, instead of
against them. And what of the much-needed FEMA money? Of $95 billion needed to
restore the island’s infrastructure, only $30 billion is earmarked for disaster
relief, of which only $1.8 billion has so far reached the island.
Hidden Opportunity
Catastrophes lead people to seek sustainability. Sustainability
demands individuals make decisions from a broader perspective, one which not only
includes economic solutions, but also social and ecological solutions. It
demands we build resilience into our recovery. The times demand we look at the
world with a gimlet eye and ask ourselves: with all that we now know, what is
the best way to solve all these problems holistically?
Sustainability requires we drop the old arguments based on
religion or myth, politics or economics, self-interest or greed, for why we do the
things we do. It forces us to start from a science-based analysis that
clarifies the situation and the limits we face (environmental, economic and
social), within a framework of ethics and collective health and wellbeing. There
is a global consensus by 97% of all scientists, and by most nations outside of the
United States, that to survive, we must stop any and all activities that extract, burn, or use fossil fuels
within the next 20 years, leaving trillions of dollars in the ground.
We must transition to a circular economy that eliminates or
minimizes waste and creates no toxic wastes. We must embrace business
inefficiencies and incentivize small entrepreneurial markets that redistribute
wealth and keep it local. We must transition to a decentralized clean energy
grid and must focus all agriculture back into organic and permaculture programs
as quickly as possible and do away with all industrial farming and industrial animal
farms. We must set aside 50% of our land and oceans as protected wilderness, so
all other species have enough space to live well, and stop the mass extinction
now underway. We must concentrate population density in well-planned, walkable
cities with ample mass transit.
We must dismantle wealth-concentrating business
models and spread money around as if it were manure on a barren cornfield. We
must clean up the land, air, and waters, and treat them with the respect they
deserve as a living part of our habitat. And we must take care of the section
of the population that has lost their revenue streams due to global or
historical ‘Forces of Exclusion’ and offer them access to the necessities of
life (secure housing, food and water, health and mobility), as well as finding
ways of re-inserting them into a productive economy, instead of leaving them to
their own devices in an economy that has passed them by. Most important of all, we must work towards lowering population growth and supplant limitless economic growth with static economic growth, while cultivating a society that grows health and well-being for all instead of concetrating wealth for a few.
Puerto Rico has enough sunlight and wind to power its households
via photovoltaic systems, wind generators, batteries, and decentralized microgrids. By
transitioning PREPA’s (the local energy company) existing electrical generating
plants to locally produced organic algae oil, which is 98% equivalent to the ‘Bunker
C’ oil currently used, it can supply all the power needed by the commercial and
industrial sectors, and the algae oil can be grown on non-agricultural land
here in Puerto Rico, with ‘waste products’ of organic shrimp and fish, organic
fertilizer, and organic animal feed. This could be the first step to creating a circular economy, and stop
depending on outside sources for our food and our energy supply. That is the
crux of sustainability: using what we ourselves can produce, and whose profits
stay in our local economy because they are locally owned.
Industrialization and globalization have given us many benefits and
made a few people very wealthy. But it’s time to realize that the costs of that
development model far outweigh the benefits they bring to the majority of
society, and both are based on an exclusionary mindset that systematically
leaves large portions of the population out of the better opportunities enjoyed
by a lucky few. As long as there are only ‘a lucky few,’ and as long as
society continues to want to emulate them, we will perpetuate an
untenable, and unsustainable, pyramid-scheme development that serves only the
rich.
Skeptics will say this means the economy will collapse. Open your
eyes, skeptics! The economy has already collapsed, and is on life support, no matter how high the Dow
Jones has risen. All the variables that underpin that growth rest on quicksand.
They will say we are incentivizing laziness. Wake up. It’s not laziness if the
private sector hasn’t enough jobs to cover 100% employment participation and 60% of the population is unemployed or underemployed. Money
alone will not get humanity out of the problems of Climate Change. Technology alone
will not get humanity out of Climate Change. ‘We the People’ need to change our
minds about how we can live on this earth without killing it (or ourselves).
Climate Change’s greatest challenge? Teaching people we must learn to downsize and love each other. Teaching people we need to live in towns and cities with fewer people,
less consumption, less mobility, and less overall wealth. More family, more happiness, more
wisdom, more health.
Developing countries, and I count Puerto Rico as one, by virtue of
its status as one of the last remaining colonies in the world, have an immense opportunity
now. So does every nation, city and county that has been decimated by economic
forces outside their direct control. We have been forced to downsize; we must
now choose to rebuild in a sustainable way, as opposed to mimicking the excess
and obscene opulence of 18th-century kings.
This is the 21st
century. There is no need to aspire to own everything or control everything
around you, like kings of old. That lifestyle model has run its course and
proven insufficient, both emotionally and economically, for most people.
Now we must do something much harder: get everyone on the same sustainability
page and moving in the right direction, together. It means learning
self-discipline, not only individually, but as communities, regions and nations. It means talking to
each other and including everyone in decision-making. It means having small
families, in small homes, in small and self-sufficient communities or small to
midsize cities. There are limits to growth, and we have reached them. Now let’s
live within them in a way that benefits everyone, not just a few lucky ones.
For over ten thousand years,
the population growth bell-curve of the planet lay almost flat at around one billion
people. In the last 100 years, it has risen exponentially to almost 8 billion,
and is expected to reach 10 billion within the next two decades. The carrying
capacity of the planet before Climate Change was one billion people. The fact
we are now consuming almost twice as much as the earth can replenish in a year,
tells us that the bell curve is hitting its apex, and all we have left is a
downward slide. It can be a controlled slide, or it can be a chaotic slide. But
the slide down cannot be stopped.
Add to that the catastrophic effects of Climate Change, which will
make every piece of land that is within 2,500 miles north or south of the
equator too hot to grow food in by 2040, and the mass migration north that fact
will cause in the next couple of decades. Add rising sea levels and how that
will impact all the major cities of the world by 2050, because they were all
built on or near water. Add to that the more frequent and larger storms, and
the more frequent and longer droughts, in places where they did not exist a
decade ago. Add to that the fact we have fished out the oceans of 33% commercial
fish and 90% of apex predators (tuna, cod, swordfish, sharks), many of them species
that have been living for hundreds of
millions of years, and once extinct, will be gone forever. Add to that the
fact we are demolishing all that is left of pristine forests in the Amazon, the
Congo, and Malaysia, which constitute the lungs of the planet. Add to that the
fact there will be more plastic in the oceans by 2030 than there are fish. If
the planet were a family home, it would be bursting at the seams with too much waste
and too many people.
This is our chance to start living a simpler, more natural life. With
right-size aspirations that have more to do with loving than hoarding, with a
healthy respect for our world and all the living things in it. If all of us
decided to start on the path of living sustainably, respectfully, and
consciously today, right now, we will have a chance to survive the next 1,000
years of climate change. If not, our species won’t make it. Period. We could be condemning our grandchildren to unspeakable heardships; let's not do that.
We have been handed an opportunity in the guise of a catastrophe.
Life is giving us a lesson, and a push towards becoming radically better human
beings, something the human race has avoided dealing with for centuries. Here’s
hoping we choose to create a better world rather than being smothered by
petroleum and greed. That is the challenge we face, the greatest challenge the human species has ever faced.
