By Monica Perez Nevarez
Right now, under a tropical heatwave and prolonged drought, a quiet war of attrition is being waged. Look at our coasts. Puerto Rico's beaches are public by law—a principle reaching back to the Ley de Puertos of 1886; yet again and again communities watch access narrowed, blocked, or effectively privatized by the development surrounding them.
Look at our towns. Some centers have been hollowed out. Housing prices have risen beyond the reach of many of the people born here. Basic necessities—a bag of groceries, a monthly utility bill—have become sources of anxiety.
We are told this is the price of “growth.” But what exactly are we growing—and at whose expense? Because this is not simply bad luck. These are predictable consequences of the choices, incentives, and policies we have accepted.
We destroy mangroves and then wonder why storm surge reaches farther inland. We pave wetlands and then spend fortunes managing floods. We replace living coastlines with concrete and expensive real estate, then discover that the ocean does not negotiate with property boundaries.
Economists have a word for costs like these: externalities. But calling something an externality does not make it disappear. It simply means the suffering has been moved off somebody's balance sheet and onto somebody else's life. The cost still exists. Someone loses a home. Someone pays a higher insurance premium. A fisher loses part of a marine nursery ecosystem. A town loses affordable housing. A family leaves the place where generations of its history were made. The accounting may exclude those losses. Life does not.
From Local Squeeze to a Larger Pattern
And Puerto Rico is not alone. Around the world, land, housing, water, forests, fisheries, energy, and even people's attention are increasingly treated as assets from which the maximum possible financial return should be extracted. The problem is not investment itself. Communities need investment. The question is what kind of investment, toward what purpose, and who benefits after the investment arrives?
There is capital that builds. And there is capital that extracts. There is development that strengthens a place. And there is development that consumes the very qualities that made the place valuable in the first place. At the same time, we are weakening natural defenses at the very moment that a hotter climate is increasing the stresses our communities must withstand.
For people with little wealth or political influence, the result can be an enormous loss of agency. People can be priced out of the places they call home and then find themselves forced to serve an economy increasingly designed for people wealthier than they are. That is why the phrase “sacrifice zone” feels painfully appropriate. A sacrifice zone is a place whose people, ecosystems, health, or future are treated as acceptable losses so that benefits can accumulate somewhere else. But a community is not an acceptable cost. Neither is a coastline, nor a forest, nor a human life.
Luxury or Purpose?
Part of the difficulty is that we have been taught a very particular definition of success. We “ooooh” and “aaaaah” at the fashion, the cars, the private planes, the yachts, the enormous houses, even the underground bunkers of the very rich. I think of this as Hedonic Luxury: success measured primarily by status, exclusivity, accumulation, and the ability to consume more.
But there is another kind of abundance. Eudaimonic Purpose. A good life built around meaning. Useful work. People who know you by your name. Food worth eating. A landscape worth protecting. Enough security that fear doesn't govern your decisions. Enough privacy to be yourself and enough community that you don't have to face everything alone. The ability to leave something healthier than you found it. That kind of wealth is harder to display on Instagram. But it is far more valuable to me.
The Clear-Eyed Reality
Changing an extractive system is not only a financial challenge. It requires us to question the habits that system has cultivated in us. Hyper-individualism tells us freedom means needing no one. Consumer culture tells us every problem has a product we can purchase individually. Growth culture tells us that if something is profitable, the obvious goal is to make it bigger, faster, and more profitable.
But human beings have never survived that way for long. We survive through relationships: with one another, with the land beneath us, with water, food, other living things, and the generations that come after us. That does not mean surrendering individuality. It means developing interdependence. And it asks something difficult of us: to stop reacting long enough to consider the consequences of our choices—intended and unintended—and then choose with empathy.
A World Reimagined
What would happen if we measured progress differently? What if we built our future around three simple ideas? Interdependence - Recognizing that my well-being is connected to yours. Ecological Stewardship - Treating our coasts, reefs, forests, soil, water, and living systems as trusts we pass forward rather than commodities we simply liquidate. Local Agency - Giving communities meaningful power over the systems that shape everyday life - food, housing, energy, water, land, care, and the local economy.
None of this is imaginary. Every time neighbors organize a community kitchen, people protect a mangrove, farmers rebuild local food systems, residents restore an abandoned building, or a mutual-aid network helps someone through a crisis, they are already practicing another way of living. They are not waiting for someone to save them. They are building capacity together.
From Sacrifice Zones to Sacred Communities
We do not have to accept the role of being a sacrifice zone. Extractive systems may have enormous capital, but communities have something capital alone cannot manufacture: roots. Relationships, memory, knowledge of place, mutual responsibility, culture, people willing to show up for one another. When damaged, those roots can be regenerated. And from them we can create a fabric of solidarity that speculative capital cannot buy.
So this month, I am asking you to look around your immediate community. Find one local initiative, a community garden, coastal-defense organization, local farm, neighborhood group, mutual-aid network, food pantry, cooperative, watershed project, or something else that is making your little corner of the world healthier. Then offer something of yourself: a little time, a skill, a connection, a pair of helping hands. Because agency does not begin when we have enough money, enough power, or the perfect government policy. Agency begins when we discover that there is something we can do together that we could not do alone.
That is how sacrifice zones become sacred communities: not all at once, but every time we choose to protect what sustains us and build something better together.
