Hispaniola’s Environmental Story: Challenging an Iconic Image

[Errata]

One of the sad aftermaths of Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, which left over 300,000 dead and initially 1.5 million homeless, was a widespread perception in the media and the collective imaginary that the country somehow had deserved it. Amid vivid reminders that Haiti is “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere,” it has long been portrayed as the “bad” side of the two-nation island of Hispaniola, with the Dominican Republic portrayed as the “good” side, even if the detractors are not always fully conscious of their biases. Challenging these long-held stereotypes is especially important as the international community has raised hopes for a comprehensive, sustainable rebuilding effort in Haiti.¹

This binary is evident in the iconic 1987 National Geographic photo of the Haitian-Dominican border, in environmental pleas such as Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, and, most especially, in Jared Diamond’s 2005 bestseller Collapse.² Days after the earthquake, columnist David Brooks added himself to the list of Haiti detractors, saying that the Haitian-Dominican border “offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth” and Haiti suffers from “a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences” (A27). Once again Brooks perpetuates the image of Hispaniola as a territory shared by the environment-degrading Haitians and the environment-supporting Dominicans. This article’s intent is not to dispute the grim statistical comparisons between the two countries evidenced recently, for example, in the 2010 Environmental Performance Index (<http://epi.yale.edu>); on this index, the Dominican Republic ranks 36th for overall sustainability while Haiti ranks 155th out of 163 countries. Rather, the point is to provide a significantly more nuanced understanding of the ecology, history, politics, and culture of the island to explain what set the two nations on divergent paths centuries ago. “One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories,” the chapter on Hispaniola in Collapse, is useful as a loose guide for this discussion because of the undeniable and widespread success of Diamond’s books, at least in the United States. He can distill simple points from complex issues and his work is used extensively in high schools and colleges throughout the country (McAnany & Yoffee 2–5). Collapse’s broad thesis is that societies either fail or succeed in rising to the challenges of their environments. If they fail, it is due to collective self-delusion; leaders and followers “’choose’… courses of action leading to collapse or resilient adaptation” (Woodson 276–77). For many educators and researchers, Collapse has become a guide for a general understanding of the consequences of environmental degradation generally and for the Haitian-Dominican comparison more specifically.³

Not being an area specialist before embarking on his Hispaniola research, Diamond concludes in Collapse that the Dominican Republic has apparently achieved a relatively positive developmental trajectory while Haiti has suffered the catastrophic opposite. A more nuanced analysis, however, would suggest that Dominicans are not environmental paragons, nor are Haitians the victims of collective self-delusion. In fairness, Diamond has presented a slightly more subtle Haiti-Dominican Republic comparison, emphasizing the long-term consequences of Haiti’s colonial and postcolonial history in a 2010 essay, “Intra-Island and Inter-Island Comparisons” (Diamond and Robinson 120–41).

As a collective response to Collapse, the contributors to the volume Questioning Collapse have already characterized Diamond’s facts as “decontextualized,” arguing that he has not acknowledged that the inequities of colonialism remain an ongoing process both domestically and internationally. This volume also contains a chapter specifically focusing on Haiti (Woodson 269–98). Our discussion, however, will add to the critique primarily by examining the Dominican case more fully and thus further contextualizing the Haitian-Dominican comparison.

Problems with the Dominican-Haitian Comparison

Misplaced Historical Emphases

In his discussion of the Dominican Republic and Haiti in Collapse, Diamond provides essentially accurate facts, but specialists would regard his emphases as misplaced or, at the least, simplistic. He chooses to emphasize similarities between the two societies while most area specialists would be likely to focus on the colonial historical differences and their lasting consequences. For example:

… the two countries share the...