Get Up, Stand Up: Environmental Situation, Threats, and Opportunities in the Insular Caribbean

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!Get up, stand up: don’t give up the fight!Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!Get up, stand up: don’t give up the fight!

  Excerpted lyrics from the song   Get Up, Stand Up,   by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh

The meaning of these lyrics can be interpreted in many ways, but they certainly advocate for taking action. Every individual has the right to a basic standard of living and to live within sustainable human, social, economic, and environmental conditions. Getting up and standing up to demand and reach such conditions will promote human development, which in turn gives way to sustainable development, and facilitates safe guarding the environment. This Special Issue addresses different aspects regarding the environmental conditions of the islands that compose the insular Caribbean (Figure 1); the threats that these conditions pose to the region’s inhabitants, and also possible opportunities and actions that can be taken to overcome such threats, to reach a balance between environmental and human systems, and to integrate these systems and their particular perspectives to management at various scales.

As a region, different factors unify and define the insular Caribbean. On the one hand, the region can be geographically defined as the islands which meet the Caribbean Sea¹ and which lie in a position within the tropics (except for the northern Bahamas), which contributes to regional environmental conditions such as exposure to similar types of natural hazards, rainfall distribution, water availability, and potential impacts of climate change. On the other hand, the region can be defined by common histories of decimation of indigenous peoples, colonialism, slavery and sugar cane plantation in their earlier economies, with more recent trends of changing population dynamics and high levels of urbanization (Boswell 2009; Levine 1981). Within abandoned agricultural lands and green spaces in urbanized areas the combination of historically introduced and native plants continue to maintain, and in some cases increase, the region’s high plant diversity (Lugo et al. 2012). Histories of dependencies, demographic trends and resource use are elements that can influence the way people resist, cope, adapt to, and manage current environmental conditions within the region. Global change, including environmental change and economic globalization, also influences people’s vulnerability in a variety of ways and is expected to have major impacts on social, human, economic, and environmental systems (Barker et al. 2009). Global change can also complicate environmental management and development due to uncertainty and surprises associated to potential climate change.

Figure 1.

The insular Caribbean.

Beyond the similarities in geographical, historical, and demographic terms, there are many factors that differ and vary within the region—islands with varying sizes, geologic formations and topographical conditions. Also, there is variety in terms of countries’ political systems and ideologies, political status, social transformations, economic structure and linkages, ethnicity, cultural background, and linguistic differences, among others (Skelton 2004). This “carnival of abundance” (Levine 1981:275) makes the region rich, diverse, and complex.

Such differences can influence environmental management efforts at local and regional levels in many ways. Differences in language, for example, can become a barrier in terms of collaboration among Caribbean countries. In terms of the number of islands, English is the most widely spoken language in insular Caribbean, followed by Spanish, Dutch and French (Table 1). In terms of numbers of people speaking a specific language, however, there are more Spanish speakers, followed

Table 1.

Languages spoken in the insular Caribbean.

by French-, English- and Dutch-speakers.² Another example of differences in the Caribbean is country political status and independence. The Caribbean is among the sites with the largest number of non-independent states in the world (Skelton 2004:5), with about half being independent states and the rest of the territories having some type of dependence status (Figure 2). In terms of government types, the range is large in the insular Caribbean...