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Cuba has had a large medical presence in Haiti since 1998, when Hurricane Georges devastated the country. Cuba responded by sending hundreds of medical staff to help with emergency medical support. It has also trained over a thousand Haitians to become doctors. Some 300 Cuban doctors remained there, and were present when the earthquake struck in 2010. This chapter analyses their role during that tragic period. A year later a cholera outbreak resulted, and again Cuban medical personnel played a major role in bringing it under control. An overview of the Cuban role is provided, and an assessment of 15 years of medical support is provided.

Chapter Eight considers the stories told in the process of place-making. It focuses on the history of land loss in the Lafourche Basin via personal accounts of recent storms and land loss and of the hurricanes that destroyed vibrant communities such as Last Island or Chenière Caminada. These are the stories people tell when they create place in Terrebonne-Lafourche; it has been so for generations. The stories are presented in the words of the residents themselves. The chapters shows how these stories invoke both land and language, and a subsequent showcasing of the stories told about language demonstrate that people speak of the disappearance of land and of the language in parallel ways; the disappearance of both has thrown this into sharp relief and demonstrates that place is both physical and aural space made meaningful.

The status of early (French-language) Louisiana literature within the larger corpus of French literature is examined initially in connection with the general questions of provincial or regional writing and of what is now called Atlantic literature. The literary worth of nineteenth-century Louisiana writing, viewed broadly, is assessed, along with its connection to Romanticism and its notable features. High culture in New Orleans— theatres, opera, schools, publishing, clubs—is reviewed. Neighborhoods and their features are sketched. The particular achievements of Free People of Color are stressed. The chapter identifies particular features of Louisiana writing: the role played by characteristic Louisiana landscapes and by hurricanes, and the significance of the French Quarter as a center of literary imagination.

This chapter offers a synthetic view of Cuba’s geography, including aspects such as location, insularity, topography, hydrography, climate, soils, sea and wind currents, natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, and natural resources. It also offers an overview of the Cuban archipelago’s geological evolution over millions of years. While this chapter does not subscribe to geographic determinism, it explores the ways in which Cuba’s geographic features have shaped its historical trajectory and the culture of its people. Geographical factors such as sea currents made Cuba a strategic location for a trade and military post, and its climatological, topographic, hydrographic, and soil conditions made the island an ideal location for sugar production.

This chapter takes a look at the various Louisiana communities that were affected by the state's gradual coastal land loss, including Jefferson, St. Bernard, Terrebonne, Plaquemines, Orleans, and Iberia. The communities have had to face several forms of natural crises during their time, but the gradual land loss over the years has formed part of the overall historical conceptions of place for the people who live there. This conceptualization of historical moment was changed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the communities' notion of the present moment was formed from the socio-political aspects that came from those storms, and the historical moments that preceded them.

Forty years ago a wise, visionary man, the Wisconsin wildlife biologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold, called for “an ecological interpretation of history,” by which he meant using the ideas and research of the emerging field of ecology to help explain why the past developed the way it did. At that time ecology was still in its scientific infancy, but its promise was bright and the need for its insights was beginning to be apparent to a growing number of leaders in science, politics, and society. It has taken a while for historians to heed Leopold’s advice, but at last the field of environmental history has begun to take shape and its practitioners are trying to build on his initiative. Leopold’s own suggestion of how an ecologically informed history might proceed had to do with the frontier lands of Kentucky, pivotal in the westward movement of the nation. In the period of the revolutionary war it was uncertain who would possess and control those lands: the native Indians, the French or English empires, or the colonial settlers? And then rather quickly the struggle was resolved in favor of the Americans, who brought along their plows and livestock to take possession. It was more than their prowess as fighters, their determination as conquerors, or their virtue in the eyes of God that allowed those agricultural settlers to win the competition; the land itself had something to contribute to their success. Leopold pointed out that growing along the Kentucky bottomlands, the places most accessible to newcomers, were formidable canebrakes, where the canes rose as high as fifteen feet and posed an insuperable barrier to the plow. But fortunately for the Americans, when the cane was burned or grazed out, the magic of bluegrass sprouted in its place. Grass replaced cane in what ecologists call the pattern of secondary ecological succession, which occurs when vegetation is disturbed but the soil is not destroyed, as when a fire sweeps across a prairie or a hurricane levels a forest; succession refers to the fact that a new assortment of species enters and replaces what was there before.

As late as 1911, a leading American geographer could confidently assert that blacks in the United States would always live chiefly in “the warm, moist air of the Gulf and South Atlantic states,” “where they find the heat and moisture in which they thrive”; nature decreed that few would ever settle and fewer survive in the North because they could not withstand the cold. Events, though, were contradicting this blend of racial and climatic determinism. Black migration from the South to the colder states was already substantial. It intensified dramatically during World War I. A boom in labor demand in industry, along with a near-cessation of the immigration from Europe that had once filled it, drew black and white southerners alike in unheard-of numbers to the manufacturing cities of the North. The black exodus to Kansas in 1879 and 1880 had briefly looked as if it would become just such a mass interregional movement of population. But the pioneer Exodusters had suffered from the drastic change in climate, most of all because it affected their livelihoods in farming. Their skills, which lay in cotton growing, were useless in Kansas, and their experience did little to encourage others to follow. The great northward migration of the early twentieth century was a migration not to new farmlands but to the cities for factory and service employment. The difference in climate between southern origin and northern destination did not matter much to it. White southern farmers, fearing the loss of cheap labor, warned departing blacks that they would find the winters of the North too bitter to endure. The new exodus proceeded all the same, and it discredited in the process the long-held idea that either race or habit always imposed a latitudinal pattern on human movement. The change in climate from South to North did mean discomfort or worse for many who undertook it. They suffered especially from the unaccustomed cold that few could afford stoves and fuel to ward off—though they had suffered too from inadequate shelter and clothing in the southern winter.

The climate teleconnections related to El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events described in chapter 1 have global implications regarding agriculture. In many locations, ENSO events appear to account for a significant part of the climate variability that governs the responses of crops and livestock on a range of temporal and spatial scales. Teleconnections affect variations in production both within growing seasons and from one season or year to another. Precipitation, temperature, and other climate variables are key determinants of crop growth and livestock health, affecting all aspects of agroecosystems, including the survival and reproduction of both beneficial and damaging insects. An understanding of ENSO teleconnections may help farmers and regional planners assess changes in probable yield levels before the growing season and thus provide guidance for improved management. In this chapter we introduce agricultural responses to climate extremes in general and to ENSO climate teleconnections in particular. Subsequent chapters describe methods of analysis, use of ENSO predictions for agriculture, and regional aspects in more detail. Variability in agricultural production affects risk on at least five levels: individual farms, farming regions within nations, nations, groups of nations, and the global food system. Contributing factors and consequences of variability at successive levels differ in type and scale. Perhaps the most relevant example of these differences is the contrast between the effect of variability on a single farm and its effect at the national level for any country in which the agricultural sector plays a significant role in the overall economy. At the individual farm level, the aim is generally to produce high yields as consistently as possible. Hence, the main concern regarding climate is the occurrence of seasons with low yield levels that threaten subsistence or income. When regional or national yields are very low, overall food security may be threatened, necessitating relief efforts by donor countries and agencies. At the national level, however, problems may be caused not only by low yields but also by the opposite—unusually high yields. Whereas low national yields may cause food shortages and high food prices, high overall yields tend to lower commodity prices paid to farmers and create excessive surpluses that necessitate government intervention. High variability in food production at the national level thus can destabilize domestic prices, farm income, and national budgets.

Since the 1970s, there has been a growing global awareness of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, especially in regard to its impacts on humans, natural ecosystems, and agriculture. The three strongest events of these decades (1972–73, 1982–83, and 1997–98) each marked a milestone in this progression. To be sure, not all climate extremes during any given ENSO year are necessarily due to that phenomenon; for example, the intense drought that occurred in 1982–83 in the West African Sahel does not appear to be causally linked to the strong ENSO event of that period (Glantz, 1987). However, even unrelated climate anomalies can exacerbate the effects of an El Niño or La Niña on world food supplies. Here we summarize the major effects of the three most recent very strong El Niño events (see box 4.1) with a focus on their agricultural manifestations. Table 4.1 summarizes the effects by region and continent and for the world food system as a whole. Evolving understanding of ENSO (and its related phenomena) appears to be contributing to the development of improved resilience to such major climate shocks in some regions (see chapter 6 for use of ENSO predictions in agriculture and chapter 8 on building adaptive capacity). However, continuing progress in affected regions is needed for agriculture to withstand (or benefit from) very strong El Niño events in the future, especially since global climate change may be affecting conditions as well. The El Niño of 1972–73 awakened international attention to the ENSO cycle. Besides the failure of the fishery industry in Peru, there were droughts, floods, and food shortages in various locations around the world that also appeared to be associated with El Niño. Consequently, scientists and the public began to realize that El Niño teleconnections and their impacts could extend beyond the West Coast of South America (Glantz, 2001). During the El Niño event of 1972–73, the reduced anchoveta harvest, combined with overfishing, caused the collapse of the Peruvian fishmeal industry and the dislocation of entire fishing communities.