ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the data that both brings attention to and silences the historically and economically rooted environmental degradation and vulnerabilities that contributed to the scope of the Haiti disaster and that are essential to address in order to alleviate the impact of future disasters. The authors invoke the strengths and limits of a sustainable disaster recovery lens, arguing that in the analyzed discourses, the idea of sustainability was equivocated or conflated with self-sufficiency and continuity of relief and early recovery efforts after foreign actors have left. They draw parallels between extraction of natural resources for development and industrial production purposes and somewhat similar disaster recovery solutions in Haiti that extracted land, labor, and livelihoods. They also argue that many approaches to disaster recovery in Haiti were fixated on the short term and focused on quick-fix, temporary, and extractivist solutions and adapting, controlling and “managing” rather than transforming the disaster setting. The authors suggest that these practices with embedded obsolescence lead Haiti into a developmental dead end, betraying the promises of a better, sustainable Haiti.
