Ready for the Storm
By Hayden Kirby
Commentary
Winslow Homer’s 1899 painting “The Gulf Stream” remains one of the most mystifying pieces in American art. The protagonist is a few short moments from disaster. The only ship that could save him is too far away. As he looks ahead, is he accepting that he will meet death or does he see his salvation?
In the days before the trip it was hard not to be cynical. Sixteen students who attend Washington and Lee University in America were going to take a six-hour carbon emitting plane ride to witness an issue we’ve known about for years but are refusing to admit is our fault. Our lifestyles are totally unsustainable and killing the place we were going to visit before letting it waste away.
I figured, inevitably, one day I’d see the news that a catastrophic weather event hit Barbados. It’s no longer a question of if, but when Barbados will be critically impacted from climate change. Its goals of carbon neutrality and sustainability seemed noble. But its people were still beholden to higher emitting countries, like the one that my peers and I were coming from.
Before we landed in Barbados I kept thinking to myself, this is a country on the verge of catastrophe, how are the people there coping?
Andre Ferguson is a corner store owner by day, but by dawn he’s known as the “King of Spearfishing.” He’s a giant of a man who willingly chooses to sink 80 feet in the ocean each day just for the thrill, and also a little bit for the money.
When I asked him why do something as dangerous as spearfishing rather than line fishing, he said, “For me, the excitement, the scenery. Line fishing for me it seems boring. It doesn’t compare to spearfishing. Spearfishing, you know, you can hunt the fish, you can run them down.” When I asked him if he ever got nervous before a dive he laughed at me, put his mask on, and dove backwards into the water.
Forty-five minutes later he came back up and plopped a string of 10 brightly colored fish on the boat. He wasn’t happy. He told us how after spearfishing in Barbados for years, he had started to see the fish slowly disappear.
I asked Ferguson if he was angry. I asked him if he was nervous about his future. As much as I pried, he always seemed relaxed. Ferguson seemed prepared for climate change. He has a plan.
“They’re called FADs. F-A-D,” he said. In his spare time Ferguson has been building Fish Aggregating Devices, using pieces of palm trees, coconut leaves and wool string designed to attract fish. Several other line and spearfishermen in the Pile Bay community have been taking out FADs five to 10 miles offshore, just to make enough money for the day. It’s an adaptation that is starting to become necessary.
I couldn’t understand why Ferguson wasn’t furious. His passion in life is about to be reduced to nothing because of countries like the United States. But still, we sat on his boat and he asked us about our lives there.
He wanted to know what our five-year plan was. Most of us didn’t have an answer. I wanted to know what his five-year plan was. He said he was going to sit on his porch, drink coffee, read the newspaper and go sport fishing. That didn't sound like a bad plan.
Maybe it is harder to be upset about the future when you live in paradise. We all sat on his boat, looking at the reflective teal water, and I wondered how much longer things would be this way. Before he went under the water for his second dive he said, “We just fight through it, that's all. You have to survive, you can’t give up.”
When he came up with less fish than last time, he looked out at the water and said, “Have to just adapt.” I’m not sure he believed it.
Dr. Leonard Nurse was part of a team that won a Nobel Prize in 2007 for proving that climate change was driven by humans. When I asked him if he feels optimistic about the future, he said, "No."
That is not a comforting thing to hear from a climate scientist. He had confirmed all my suspicions. Countries and corporations that emit the highest amounts of CO2 will hurt nations like Barbados first. Everything from its health to food supply to water resources would be impacted in a chain reaction. But that’s not the only reason he was cynical about the future.
“Even if every single country went climate neutral right now, we’d still have to deal with rising sea levels for the next hundred years,” he explained to us. Damage is sure to happen for decades to come. And that’s considering the best case scenario of the U.S.’s stopping emissions now, which we are nowhere near.
Nurse is skeptical about the overall benefit even if Barbados were to adopt every sustainability measure it could. “In spite of all the adaptation measures you put in place, there's one fundamental issue that confronts us, and that is getting high-emitting countries to reduce the emissions.”
Neither individuals, countries nor corporations are willing to give way. He explained, “You fundamentally have to change the way we live.” The more believable part is, “Most people aren’t willing to do that.”
With U.S. President Donald Trump pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, our goal of carbon neutrality floats further away each day.
Is there any hope of salvation for countries like Barbados, or have they just accepted their fate?
Elizabeth Thompson, a former Barbados Ambassador to the United Nations, was blunt about how Barbados will get the money it needs to adapt. Her work involves trying to make polluters pay smaller countries that are suffering. “You should be willing to put money towards supporting our adaptation and mitigation efforts because you are the cause of our problem.”
It was disturbing to hear, but she wasn’t wrong. The United States is second to China in CO2 emissions, according to the World Fact Book. India and Russia are third and fourth.
Where do we go from here? Does an island nation like Barbados really have the power to make polluters pay?
“We can’t control what happens in the United States,” Thompson said. “And if there is policy in the U.S. that exacerbates impacts, we can't really mitigate against that. We have to adapt.”
We spent a week in Bathsheba on the island’s East Coast. There, I met Aly Allen, a field technician for the University of Miami. She’s been living in Barbados for the past 10 years, raising three daughters with her husband. We talked about her research on coral reefs in Barbados and across the world.
I asked her if it made her sad to know that her young daughters likely won’t experience the same coral reefs she did.
“Corals have been around for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years and they've withstood a lot of changes,” she said. “The rate of change is much quicker now than it has been in the past, which is an issue. But the corals are very resilient animals.”
In Barbados, resilience is a recurring theme.
“If you can help mitigate some of the pressures impacting corals,” Allen said, “it will make them more resilient, give them more energy to sort of withstand the other pressures that we can't control.”
But Allen said she is not optimistic. “The future isn’t going to get better unless there’s an economic reason for it to,” she said. “At the end of the day, it's not going to do anything, from a global perspective. Right. Because Barbados is a tiny little dot.”
When we landed in Barbados, I was skeptical of whether the country could survive climate change. But I am more optimistic now because of the determination of the Barbadian people to adapt.
We met Harry Harris in Bathsheba. He’s an Australian native who has been living in Bathsheba since the mid 1990s. I asked him, “In your heart of hearts, do you really think Barbados is gonna be okay in the future?”
“I do,” he said without missing a beat. “I really do.”
I believe him.
Why is it that despite agreement that climate change will be destructive, people in Barbados feel optimistic about their future?
Ferguson, Nurse, Thompson, Allen and Harris recognize that the island’s future is in jeopardy. But no one is willing to admit defeat just yet.
Where is this optimism coming from?
The optimism stems from the resilience of the people, to be sure. But their confidence in adaptation is really the work of a government that cares. Maybe we in the states have become cynical because we can’t remember what a humanitarian government is anymore. We can’t imagine bureaucracy caring about its people. But Barbadians know better.
The government is a leader in advocating for solar hot water heaters, electric powered buses, a new elder care system for those at risk from the heat, and regional Caribbean alliances that collaborate to get the best from one another. The government also is exploring sustainable practices like preparing hospitals to provide quality healthcare after a natural disaster and using marine spatial development planning for fishing.
The future in many ways has been determined. Sea levels will rise. Temperatures will get hotter. But the people of Barbados are as ready as they will ever be. They are resilient, optimistic and ready for the storm.
“After the Hurricane” is considered by some to be a sequel to Homer's "The Gulf Stream.” Both paintings were created during his time in the Bahamas and are regarded to be some of his greatest works. While the fisherman's boat is demolished, he seems to be unscathed, resting peacefully on shore.