Whose fault is the crisis in Puerto Rico? A lot of people are inclined to blame President Donald Trump: Right after Hurricane Maria made landfall, instead of maximizing the federal resources directed to the island, Trump spent the weekend golfing and tweeting about the National Football League. He later launched a sexist and racist Twitter tirade against the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, and against the people of Puerto Rico more generally. Still, no matter how despicable Trump might appear, historian Jacob Remes warns that we can't limit our assessment to a single person's incompetence. Rather, we've got to look at a long history of colonialism that has placed Puerto Rico in such a precarious position. Trump could resign tomorrow, and Puerto Rico, along with so many other places, would still be subject to structural forces that magnify the consequences of the disasters yet to come.
Remes, a clinical assistant professor of history at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, applies the tools of the historian to the study of disasters and the people who respond to them. He's part of a field known as "critical disaster studies," in which scholars from the humanities and interpretive social sciences look at the human factors linked to disaster.
Maria is, of course, the third major storm to strike the United States and other parts of the Caribbean so far this hurricane season. In this hot new world, we're likely to see more and more episodes like this, so Remes' insights into how human systems interact with the natural world become more urgent every day. Pacific Standard chatted with Remes in a series of emails.
[For more on this story by DAVID M. PERRY, go to https://psmag.com/economics/th...no-natural-disasters]
Photo: The U.S. Naval Hospital Ship Comfort in the Port of San Juan, arriving on October 3rd, 2017, after Hurricane Maria swept through the island of Puerto Rico. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
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