“Agua dulce,” literally “sweet water,” is the Spanish-language term for fresh water in Puerto Rico.
Although by the start of the rainy season in August the percentage of towns experiencing drought fell from a height of almost fifteen to thirteen percent, the numbers are still alarming. EFE. 2019. “Disminuye la sequía severa en Puerto Rico de 14.67% a 13.08%,” Hoy Los Angeles, August 1, 2019.
Threats on Tap: Drinking Water Violations in Puerto Rico (Natural Resources Defense Council, 2017).
Oliver Milman “Another Flint? Why Puerto Ricans no longer trust water after the hurricane,” The Guardian, August 8, 2018. Adriana María Garriga-López, Alexa Dietrich, and Claudia Sofía Garriga-López “Hurricane Maria Exposes Puerto Rico’s Stark Environmental and Health Inequalities,” Items (Social Science Research Council, 2017).
Danica Coto, “US to cut water monitoring because of Puerto Rico debt,” Fox News, June 10, 2016. Office of the Law Revision Counsel, “Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, And Economic Stability,” United States Code 48, ch. 20, ➝.
Susana Maria Cortina de Cadenas, “Does private management lead to improvement of water services? Lessons learned from the experiences of Bolivia and Puerto Rico” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2011). Maia Brown, “Stopping Veolia: A Report from Seattle,” Liquid Utility (e-flux Architecture and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, 2019).
Food and Water Watch, “Water Privatization Adds Insult to Injury in Puerto Rico,” 2018.
Diálogo, “Escasez de agua en Puerto Rico: vínculos entre la mala planificación y la sequía,” University of Puerto Rico (2015).
Belinés Ramos Negrón and Patricia Noboa Ortega, “Comunidades sobre cuerpos de agua: ¿Quién las ayuda?,” PRTQ – Puerto Rico Te Quiero: Desarrollo en Solidaridad, July 19, 2019
Nicole Acevedo, “FEMA has either denied or not approved most appeals for housing aid in Puerto Rico,” NBC News, July 17, 2018, ➝.
Rubén Maldonado Jiménez. “A 146 años de la abolición de la esclavitud en Puerto Rico,” KaosEnLaRed.net, March 25, 2019.
Glorimar Rodríguez González, “Bajo la sombra de la libertad: estudio general sobre el cimarronaje en el Caribe español durante los siglos XVI y XVII,” Alborada 11, no. 1 (2016). For those enslaved indigenous and African people who sought to liberate themselves from the brutalities of the Spanish colonial system by means of physical escape, the islands presented opportunities in the form of interior mountain ranges that contained caves, forests, and plenty of nourishment from fish, crab, greens, and many fruits.
Javier Arce-Nazario, “Resilience and community pride after a hurricane: counter-narratives from rural water systems in Puerto Rico,” Alternautas 5, no. 2 (2018): 16. On the concept of the wake see: Deborah Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2019) and Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016).
Arce-Nazario, “Resilience,” 13–28.
Alejandro Torres Abreu, “¿Satisfacer o manejar la demanda? Perspectivas dominantes en torno al debate sobre el consumo de agua en Puerto Rico,” Revista de Ciencias Sociales 20 (2009): 176–205.
Catalina M. De Onis, “Fueling and delinking from energy colonialism in Puerto Rico,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 46, no. 5 (2018). Javier Arce-Nazario, “The Science and Politics of Water Quality,” in Rebecca Lave, Christine Biermann, Stuart N. Lane eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Maricarmen Rivera Sánchez, “Tres años de cárcel por pillos de agua y luz,” El Vocero de Puerto Rico, January 9, 2017, ➝.
Alexa Dietrich and Adriana Garriga-López, “Small-Scale Food Production and the Impact of Water Shortages in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria: An Early Status Assessment,” QR 282 (Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado, 2018) ➝.
Patrick Skahill, “Hurricanes Yield ‘Fundamental Change’ in Puerto Rico’s Watershed,” Connecticut Public Radio, December 12, 2018; William H. McDowell, William G. McDowell, Jody D. Potter, Alonso Ramírez, “Nutrient export and elemental stoichiometry in an urban tropical river,” Ecological Applications 29, no. 2 (March 2019): E01839; and Mekela Panditharatne, “Small Water Systems in Puerto Rico Badly Affected by Maria,” Natural Resources Defense Council (2019).
Hilda Lloréns, “Imaging Disaster: Puerto Rico Through the Eye of Hurricane María,” Transforming Anthropology 26, no. 2 (2018): 136–156; Bradford C. Lister and Andrés García, “Climate-driven declines in arthropod abundance restructure a rainforest food web,” PNAS 115, no. 44 (2018): E10397-E10406; Isabel C. "azo, “Severe Weather and the Reliability of Desk-Based Vulnerability Assessments: The Impact of Hurricane Maria to Puerto Rico’s Coastal Archaeology,” The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 0 (2019): 1–20.
Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (Between the Lines, 2001).
Jessica Cattelino, “Stakeholders, Gender, and the Politics of Water,” American Anthropologist (2019), ➝.
Ana Campoy, “Hurricane Maria hit women the hardest,” Quartz, September 22, 2018, ➝.
EFEUSA, “Asignan 1 millón para mitigar efectos de sequía en el ganado en Puerto Rico,” Agencia EFE, July 2, 2019, ➝.
US Global Change Research Program, “Chapter 20: US Caribbean,” Fourth National Climate Assessment Report (2018), ➝.
Matthew C. Larsen, “Analysis of 20th Century Rainfall and Streamflow to Characterize Drought and Water Resources in Puerto Rico,” Physical Geography 21, no. 6 (2013): 494–521.
Chelsea Harvey, “Here’s What We Know about Wildfires and Climate Change,” Scientific American, October 13, 2017.
Adriana Petryna, “Wildfires at the Edges of Science: Horizoning Work amid Runaway Change,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 4 (2018): 570–595.
US Global Change Research Program, “Chapter 20: US Caribbean,” Fourth National Climate Assessment Report (2018), ➝.
Ibid.
Azad Henareh Khalyani, William A. Gould, Eric Harmsen, Adam Terando, Maya Quinones, and Jaime A. Collazo, “Climate Change Implications for Tropical Islands: Interpolating and Interpreting Statistically Downscaled GCM Projections for Management and Planning,” Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology 58, no. 7 (2016): 265–282.
Lisa Nicole Jennings, Jamison Douglas, Emrys Treasure, and Grizelle González, “Climate change effects in El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean region” (United States Department of Agriculture and US Forest Service, General Technical Report, Southern Research Station, 2014), ➝.
US Global Change Research Program, “Chapter 20,” ➝.
Lijing Cheng, John Abraham, Zeke Hausfather, and Kevin E. Trenberth, “How fast are the oceans warming?,” Science 363, no. 6423 (2019): 128–129.
Aurelio Mercado-Irizarry, “Sea Level Rise: A Projection,” Report to the Puerto Rico Climate Change Council (March 2017).
Paula Ezcurra and Isabel C. Rivera-Collazo, “An assessment of the impacts of climate change on Puerto Rico’s Cultural Heritage with a case study on sea-level rise,” Journal of Cultural Heritage 32 (July–August, 2018): 198–209.
Rivera-Collazo, “Severe Weather and the Reliability of Desk-Based Vulnerability Assessments,” 1–20.
On salinization in Puerto Rico, see Jaime A. Collazo, Adam J. Terando, Augustin C. Engman, Paul F. Fackler, and Thomas J. Kwak, “Towards a Resilience-Based Conservation Strategy for Wetlands in Puerto Rico: Meeting Challenges Posed by Environmental Change,” Wetlands (2018). On the health effects of salinization see, Paolo Vineis, Queenie Chan, and Aneire Khan, “Climate change impacts on water salinity and health,” Journal of Epidemiology and Global Health 1 (2011): 5–10.
Félix I. Aponte-Ortiz, “La problemática de los Acuíferos del Sur,” Claridad, ➝.
Bill Weir, “20,000 pallets of bottled water left untouched in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico,” CNN, September 20, 2018.
Hilda Lloréns, “The Race of Disaster: Black Communities and the Crisis in Puerto Rico,” Black Perspectives, April 17, 2019, ➝; Carlos García Quijano, John J. Poggie, Ana Pitchon, and Miguel H. Del Pozo, “Coastal Resource Foraging, Life Satisfaction, and Well-Being in Southeastern Puerto Rico,” Journal of Anthropological Research 71, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 145–167.
María Suárez Toro, “Mortal Embrace: Conflicting forces of nature, alongside the ecological intervention of traditional fishermen, helped mitigate the destruction wrought in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria,” Samudra 78 (January 2018).
Alexa Dietrich, Adriana Garriga-López, and Claudia Garriga-López, “Hurricane Maria Exposes Puerto Rico’s Stark Environmental and Health Inequalities” Items (Social Science Research Council, October 3, 2017), ➝.
Carmen H. Rodríguez, “El Sistema de agua potable de Puerto Rico vuelve a la normalidad con lentitud,” Kaiser Health News, June 14, 2018.
Déborah Berman Santana, “Resisting toxic militarism: Vieques versus the U.S. Navy,” Social Justice 29, no. 1 (2002), 37–47. See also, Carmen Concepción, “The Origins of Modern Environmental Activism in Puerto Rico in the 1960’s,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 19, no. 1 (1995): 112–128.
Ingrid Padilla, Celsys Irizarry, and Katherine Steele, “Historical Contamination of Groundwater Resources in the North Coast Karst Aquifers of Puerto Rico,” Revista Dimension 3 (2011): 7–2. See also, John Hunter and Sonia I. Arbona, “Paradise Lost: An Introduction to the Geography of Water Pollution in Puerto Rico,” Social Science and Medicine 40, no. 10 (1995): 1331–1355.
Omar Alfonso, “Arroyo Barril: Coal Ash and Death Remain 15 Years Later,” Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, December 20 2018, ➝.
Rick Karlin, “SUNY Chancellor Johnson resigns from AES Corp. Board,” Times Union, March 7, 2019, ➝.
Omar Alfonso, “Damage by coal ash to the southern aquifer cannot be undone,” La Perla del Sur and Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, March 25, 2019, ➝.
Omar Alfonso, “Toxins from AES’s ashes are contaminating groundwater in Puerto Rico,” La Perla del Sur and Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, March 15, 2018, ➝.
“Puerto Ricans Block Waste Dump, Attacked by Police,” Telesur, August 2, 2019.
CyberNews, “Denuncian supuesto intento del gobernador de tirar cenizas toxicas de carbón en todo Puerto Rico,” La Perla del Sur, November 26 2018, ➝.
Gavin Bade, “EPA moves to give states more leeway on coal ash,” Utility Dive, March 2, 2018.
James Schultz, James P. Kossin, Marshall Shepherd, Justine Ransdell, Rory Walshe, Ilan Kelman, and Sandro Galea, “Risks, Health Consequences, and Response Challenges for Small-Island-Based Populations: Observations from the 2017 Atlantic Hurricane Season,” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness 13, no. 1 (2018): 5–17.
John D. Sutter and Omaya Sosa Pascual, “Deaths from bacterial disease in Puerto Rico spiked after Maria,” CNN, July 3 2018, ➝.
Omaya Sosa Pascual, “Puerto Rico tuvo un brote de leptospirosis tras el huracán María, pero el gobierno no lo dice,” Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, July 3 2018, ➝.
Richard Porter, “After the Storm Comes the Rainbow: Love, Home, and Permaculture in Puerto Rico,” Voices of Reform 1, no. 1 (2018): 106.
Eliván Martínez Mercado, “Puerto Rico Gives Away Over $519 Million to Multinational Seed Corporations Including Monsanto,” Center for Investigative Journalism, July 13, 2016.
Zaire Dinzey-Flores, “The Development Paradox,” NACLA Report on the Americas 50, no. 2 (2018): 163–169. See also, Déborah Berman-Santana, “Geographers, Colonialism, and Development Strategies: The Case of Puerto Rico,” Urban Geography 17, no. 5 (1996): 456–474.
One frustrating case is that of the Salinas Aquifer Storage and Recovery Project, which was to be the first ever “hazard mitigation” project of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in Puerto Rico. The project involved the construction of a canal between the Patillas Reservoir (which collects more ambient water than it can contain, draining sixty percent of the water it collects out to sea) and the nearby Salinas Reservoir (which suffers frequent water deficits). The project was funded in August of 2017, one month before Hurricane Maria. Yet nearly two years after Maria there is no public update, and FEMA not made any new information available on the agency’s website.
See ➝.
Daniel Christian Wahl, Designing Regenerative Cultures (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2016).
Ana Gabriela Serrano Ocasio, El movimiento agroecológico como actor del desarrollo en Puerto Rico: un estudio sobre el rol de las cadenas productivas cortas en la promoción de la agroecología como modelo alternativo de desarrollo local, (Georgetown University, 2018).