Susan Chan is an agro-environmental scientist who does research in the area of crop pollination and pesticide impacts on bees and teaches sustainable agriculture at Trent University. To bring balance to her scientific life, Susan writes poetry that brings together the social and environmental aspects of human existence on a beautiful planet. She lives in Peterborough County, Ontario on a small farm where her family raises animals, grows cut flowers, and learn the lessons that Nature teaches.
I am sitting in my home office, surrounded by art, books, paper for scribbling notes, and a bouquet of pussy willows in a blue pitcher on my desk. I live on a farm that depends on the light of the sun to produce crops and to feed my animals. I love the landscape I inhabit, a landscape of fertile farms, clear lakes and rivers, wetlands, and small towns. In fact, I depend upon my landscape for strength, optimism, and courage to face each day. Today the sky outside is grey, a typical grey for April. A day that brings much needed rain.
Where I live, the sky is not black. The day has not become shrouded in night. We are all at home, safe.
The ongoing eruption of La Soufriere volcano has made the day night in St Vincent and the Grenadines, a small island nation in the Caribbean, home to about 110,000 people. Sixteen thousand (~14% of the total population) of those people have found themselves in the path of Soufriere’s fury, their towns and farms swallowed up by a dry river of flowing ash.
They have left behind their homes, their crops, their beautiful tropical forests, piling into trucks and vans and busses and cars, fleeing to evacuation centres, out of harm’s way.
I think about that term I have used, “out of harm’s way” and it seems trite, silly, insulting to Vincentians who are refugees within their own country. Environmental refugees.
Within the zones directly affected by flowing ash river, Vincentians are frightened and bewildered, running away from their homes and livelihoods, running to cramped quarters with many other bewildered people, all of whom run the risk of being exposed to Covid. Children must be crying, mothers frantic, men sullen with despair. All of them angry with a god who doesn’t care. Some of them praying that he might. All are shaken. That is harm.
All over the island of St. Vincent ash is falling like snow from Soufriere’s eruption plume that reached almost many kilometers into the atmosphere. The ash is covering the landscape and bodies of water putting drinking water supplies at risk. Vincentians are lining up to fill water bottles and pails with the one thing that matters—clean water. Before them looms the fact that 50% of St Vincent’s stored water has already been used up just six days into the crisis—that is harm.
The leaves of crops, wild plants, and forests are covered in ash, making it impossible for plants to photosynthesize and exchange gases such as carbon dioxide and oxygen. This means crops will not produce, food will be scarce, and livelihoods will be compromised. It means surviving animals, both wild and domesticated, will go hungry. It means insects will be harmed and biodiversity will decrease causing a spiralling downward cycle—that is harm.
I live in an environment, not one with a volcano, but one subject to droughts and floods, one subject to climate change. I could become an environmental refugee. It is a real possibility that I tend to ignore, just as I’m sure Vincentians have ignored their volcano. We are all people who bury our heads in the sand. What other strategy is there for coping with all the possible lurking disasters?
Vicentian people once independent and free will become enslaved to the economic ruin of a volcano. People are looking around them, seeing a tropical paradise, their home, turned into a lunar landscape. As my Vincentian friend Nan puts it, “things are dread”.
And the falling ash has cast a curtain over the sky, blocking the sun’s light and warmth. Turning day into night, turning hope into dread. I have sent my paltry donation to emergency funds but nothing I do can take away the bewilderment, can part the curtain of ash, can purify the water. These people of St Vincent have just begun a long journey into night with no promises to a return to their way of life. Their lives have been divided on a single day into pre-eruption and post-eruption. It could so easily be me.