On Hurricanes

Writing the weather is an important way to keep from being gaslit about what is changing.

September doesn’t bring a cooling reprieve to San Juan. The market has no greens, no herbs, so I pounce on a bag of verdant basil. There are boxes and bowls and tables overflowing with carambola, avocado, and breadfruit. What is the earth telling us? That in this heat we only need fruit, fat, and starch? Or is it a warning, like when the avocados fall from trees before a hurricane? Is it a desperate plea for attention? Is it just what happens during this time? I don’t know, but I know that we’re not eating as much salad and, as a result, my body has demanded I make beans for more fiber. I know that farmers are recovering from Tropical Storm Ernesto, which caused destructive landslides. 

This wasn’t a piece I wrote because I wanted to write it. When I put out a reading list after Hurricane Fiona in 2022, an editor replied to my newsletter asking me to expand upon one line in my essay: “Living in Puerto Rico right now is like practice for the future in a world where no real steps are taken to move toward sustainable energy, to sustainable anything.”

I turned this opinion piece around immediately, but never got a reply to it. It’s been sitting in my Google Drive ever since, until I decided to unearth my killed or ghosted weather-writing pieces this month to mark the fall anniversaries of Hurricanes Sandy, Maria, and Fiona.

Writing the weather—it’s important, as I wrote last week, and it’s important because we continue to experience the media trying to normalize extreme changes by giving us pieces on how to adjust to and survive high temperatures and humidity that test the capacities of our bodies. And yet, the super-rich build out bunkers: Whose bodies will have to learn to withstand the heat?

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I lived in Huntington Village when Hurricane Sandy knocked out 90 percent of Long Island’s power in 2012, just about a decade ago [now 12 years]. As I finished my workday at the dining room table, the rain and winds began to hit, whipping the power lines against my apartment windows. The panes rattled and the bulbs overhead flickered. It didn’t take long for the lights to go out completely, and they stayed that way for five days. Hurricane Irene had done the same the year prior, but when Sandy came rushing in late in the season, it pointed toward a new normal: Warmer oceans would be causing more catastrophic storms, and we were not prepared to withstand them. 

Hurricane Katrina, the category 5 storm that had grave impacts on New Orleans in 2005, was a turning point in the public understanding of what constitutes a “natural” disaster. Funding for levees that could have prevented flooding had been diverted and local National Guard had been deployed to the Iraq War. There was also no plan in place to evacuate those residents, mainly poor, in the most flood-prone areas, and the federal response to the ensuing disaster moved at a snail’s pace. All of this was exacerbated by sea level rise and increased rainfall owing to warmer waters off the coast—effects of climate change. 

In the intervening years, it has become more and more apparent that severe weather events are exacerbated by man-made negligence around building and energy as well as warming caused by anthropogenic climate change. Sandy in New York in 2012, Maria in Puerto Rico and Harvey in Houston in 2017, and 2022’s Fiona and Ian have all devastated the lands and people who have suffered them. As Fiona proved by moving all the way north to the eastern coast of Canada after knocking out Puerto Rico’s power and moving on to the Dominican Republic, those in cool climates that had previously considered hurricanes a warm-weather phenomenon are now vulnerable. Each hurricane season seems to bring an upping of the ante, and I don’t believe we are rising to meet the ever-increasing level of the sea in our collective response.

Will the extended path of Fiona change how governments respond? Sandy, like Katrina before it and Maria after, devastated mainly lower income coastal areas. A 2013 analysis by Enterprise Community Partners and NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy showed that disproportionately, lower income families of color were the ones who had the most difficult time recovering from Sandy’s impact, specifically. This was also true of 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, which hit Houston. As Hurricane Ian bore down on Florida’s western coast as a category 4, with Governor Ron DeSantis already warning residents of coming power outages and hospitals moving patients out of the path, one must wonder whether it might be the storm that forces a deeper reckoning with climate change. The extreme weather will only be getting more extreme, more frequently.

The question is will that be ok so long as the people affected continue to be the poorest people—the people with the least power to begin with. The 2022 International Panel on Climate Change report was the first to name colonialism as a driving force behind warming, noting “Vulnerability of ecosystems and people to climate change differs substantially among and within regions, driven by patterns of intersecting socio-economic development, unsustainable ocean and land use, inequity, marginalization, historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism,” it read. Caribbean countries, specifically, which have been and continue to be extracted from by imperial powers first for natural resources and now for finance, are finding it difficult to build the infrastructure necessary to withstand increased hurricanes, causing a cycle of destruction from which escape is proving a Sisyphean task. 

It has long been clear, though, that the nations who have done the least to cause climate change are the ones experiencing its most drastic impacts, and will have the most difficult time rebuilding and creating resilient infrastructure in the aftermath. To expect power outages as a matter of course will not be a sufficient response when these become annual, widespread events, as people lose medicine and food stored in refrigerators. To lose access to running water during hot months, without fans or air-conditioning to cool down, will cause dehydration and death. (Perhaps the pandemic has simply been practice for the normalization of death on a mass scale?)

To live in a colony such as Puerto Rico during a hurricane is to have a preview of the future of the planet if climate change is not taken seriously as a calamity because right now, it is only hitting the least affluent the hardest. There are many science-fiction dystopia elements to this vision of coming decades, where electricity comes and goes, along with access to the internet and cellular data. How do we work under such conditions? I suppose we don’t, because we’re too busy spending our days ensuring a supply of clean water to wash ourselves and our homes, as well as to drink and cook anyway—that is, if we can cook, because we have gas-powered stoves. If we run out of gas and the United States government doesn’t see fit to let in a shipping vessel flying a foreign flag (as has occurred with diesel, in the aftermath of Fiona), I suppose we will have to burn wood. A silver lining is the ongoing local prioritization of agroecological farming practices, which protect crops and soil, and don’t rely on expensive imported items like pesticides or commodified seeds. This is the kind of climate-resilient infrastructure that doesn’t require approval and billions of dollars, only land and knowledge, and so there will be food.    

Those rich regions and nations that have contributed the most to global warming must prioritize a collective shift toward green energy and consumption habits that are in line with planetary limits if they would not like to suffer the same fate going forward. It is already happening, though, with Fiona hitting Canada and now Ian making landfall in Florida—a state that has seen a hurricane per year every year since 2000, a marked increase over earlier periods.

I believe everyone would prefer not to see their lives stuck in the powerless, waterless purgatory of poorly managed infrastructure after a storm, even if only for a few days. And a few days is a stroke of luck, in many cases. I was lucky during Sandy and have been lucky after Fiona, but I don’t believe for a second that I will always escape the worst weather, because I know it is yet to be seen.

Today, we celebrate the return of the Weekly Salon. I will open up a thread for a paid subscriber chat at 3 p.m. EST this afternoon. We will discuss Christina Sharpe’s essay “The Shapes of Grief” and Kate Schapira’s “Between the Lines.” And as always, offer up our recent readings, listenings, viewings, and work to share.

This Friday, there’s the return of The Monthly Menu for paid subscribers, a blog on what I’ve been cooking and where I’ve been eating, with links to recipes and notes on how I cook my most recurring meals.

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This month, on Friday, September 27, we will have the first part of the Desk Book Club discussion of Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction. We are reading this one in three parts because it’s long, but quite relevant to conversations on writing the weather. For the first session, we’ll read through page 130. Pick it up from Archestratus, the 2024 Desk Book Club partner.

A recent blackout with no inciting weather event.

News

My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating is now out in paperback.

Reading

Annie Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story.