Res­i­dents of Puer­to Rico are con­fronting the prospect of a fresh hur­ri­cane sea­son, which will like­ly bring five to nine hur­ri­canes, includ­ing one to four major hur­ri­canes. The island, bad­ly bat­tered by last year’s Hur­ri­cane Maria, still has­n’t recov­ered. We con­tin­ue to learn more about how dire the dis­as­ter has been.

This vicious cycle—in which racial, economic, and other forms of inequality are both a cause and a consequence of environmental devastation—needs to be broken with powerful movements that confront the systemic roots of these inequalities.

A recent aca­d­e­m­ic study showed that the death toll from Maria was like­ly about 4,700 — or more than 70 times the ​“offi­cial” count of 64. This was no mere ​“nat­ur­al” dis­as­ter. The impacts of Hur­ri­cane Maria were to a large extent attrib­ut­able to inequal­i­ties of race, income and — crit­i­cal­ly — access to polit­i­cal power.

The major­i­ty of deaths in Puer­to Rico weren’t from peo­ple being hit by fly­ing debris or drown­ing in floods. The largest num­ber of deaths occurred because hos­pi­tals and clin­ics lost pow­er, ren­der­ing them unable to pro­vide treat­ment to crit­i­cal­ly ill patients. Oth­ers died because water treat­ment facil­i­ties shut down, increas­ing the risk of poten­tial­ly fatal water­borne diseases.

This sit­u­a­tion per­sist­ed for unac­cept­ably long. Only 43 per­cent of the island’s res­i­dents had access to elec­tric­i­ty even two months after the hur­ri­cane — bare­ly half the glob­al aver­age. That’s on par with the 41 per­cent share in Benin, and con­sid­er­ably less than the 76 per­cent share in Bangladesh.

In one of the wealth­i­est coun­tries in the world, then, access to elec­tric­i­ty fell to the lev­el of some of the world’s poor­est coun­tries. Even today, thou­sands of Puer­to Ricans remain with­out elec­tric­i­ty.

Puer­to Rico is a 99 per­cent Lat­inx island. Its 43.5 per­cent pover­ty rate is near­ly 3.5 times the nation­al aver­age, and its medi­an house­hold income is bare­ly one-third of the U.S. medi­an. Can we stop pre­tend­ing these facts had noth­ing to do with the scale of the dis­as­ter and the inept offi­cial response to it?

Turns out, it wasn’t just the after­math of the storm, but what came before.

The delay in restor­ing elec­tric­i­ty was part­ly because the island’s grid hadn’t been main­tained over a decade-long reces­sion—a cri­sis wors­ened by Wash­ing­ton-imposed aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies that pri­or­i­tize loan repay­ments over the needs of Puer­to Ricans. The hur­ri­cane ​“lift­ed the veil on the pre-exist­ing cri­sis,” says Jesús Vázquez of Orga­ni­zación Boricuá, a Puer­to Rican food sov­er­eign­ty orga­ni­za­tion. ​“But we knew it was there, because we were liv­ing it constantly.”

Puer­to Rico is effec­tive­ly a U.S. colony, with no rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Con­gress. Philip Alston, the UN’s Spe­cial Rap­por­teur on Extreme Pover­ty who recent­ly toured the Unit­ed States, explic­it­ly linked the ter­ri­to­ry’s eco­nom­ic and envi­ron­men­tal dev­as­ta­tion to its colo­nial sta­tus. ​“Polit­i­cal rights and pover­ty are inex­tri­ca­bly linked in Puer­to Rico,” he said. ​“In a coun­try that likes to see itself as the old­est democ­ra­cy in the world and a staunch defend­er of polit­i­cal rights on the inter­na­tion­al stage, more than 3 mil­lion peo­ple who live on the island have no pow­er in their own capital.”

This isn’t the first time the UN has paid atten­tion to U.S. colo­nial­ism in Puer­to Rico, either. It holds hear­ings on decol­o­niza­tion of Puer­to Rico every year and pro­duces lengthy reports. The Unit­ed States doesn’t both­er to attend the hear­ings, blow­ing one off as recent­ly as this month.

What of the storm itself? The inten­si­ty and fre­quen­cy of hur­ri­canes are increas­ing because our economy’s addic­tion to burn­ing coal, oil, and gas is warm­ing our world. Sci­en­tists have warned about this for decades, but our polit­i­cal lead­er­ship has failed to act.

Every activ­i­ty of the fos­sil fuel indus­try—pro­duc­tion, trans­porta­tion, pro­cess­ing, com­bus­tion and waste dis­pos­al—is dirty and dan­ger­ous. Expo­sure to these haz­ards and their con­se­quences fall across strik­ing race and income dis­par­i­ties every­where in the U.S. and world­wide.

It’s a prob­lem that infects the main­land, too. From res­i­dents of the 95 per­cent Black town of Port Arthur, Texas, who con­front extra­or­di­nar­i­ly high can­cer rates because of oil refin­ery pol­lu­tion, to the Indige­nous Alaskan vil­lages at risk of dis­ap­pear­ing because of sea lev­el rise, poor peo­ple and peo­ple of col­or dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly bear the costs of our unhealthy addic­tion to fos­sil fuels. And the con­se­quences of cli­mate change are expect­ed to make pover­ty and inequal­i­ty worse.

Our unequal polit­i­cal sys­tem places greater val­ue on the prof­its of pol­luters than on the basic needs, or even the lives, of most of human­i­ty. Our polit­i­cal lead­er­ship gets away with this immoral cal­cu­lus because of the sys­tem­at­ic dis­en­fran­chise­ment of vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple at the bot­tom and legal­ly sanc­tioned bribery at the top.

This vicious cycle — in which racial, eco­nom­ic, and oth­er forms of inequal­i­ty are both a cause and a con­se­quence of envi­ron­men­tal dev­as­ta­tion — needs to be bro­ken with pow­er­ful move­ments that con­front the sys­temic roots of these inequalities.

The great news is that these move­ments are hap­pen­ing. Peo­ple in Puer­to Rico and in the Puer­to Rican dias­po­ra in places like New York have been demand­ing a just recov­ery led by Puer­to Ricans and for the ben­e­fit of all Puer­to Ricans, and work­ing to build com­mu­ni­ty resilience from the ground up.

Here on the main­land, affect­ed com­mu­ni­ties includ­ing Indige­nous peo­ples are at the fore­front of resis­tance to pol­lut­ing fos­sil fuel infra­struc­ture in Min­neso­ta, Louisiana, and else­where. Indeed, short­ly after the lat­est death toll fig­ures in Puer­to Rico were released, thou­sands marched on state cap­i­tals across the coun­try, demand­ing solu­tions to pover­ty and envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice as part of the new Poor Peo­ple’s Campaign.

For Puer­to Ricans brac­ing them­selves for more storms and black­outs this sum­mer, Pacif­ic Islanders watch­ing ris­ing seas drown­ing their home­lands, and count­less oth­er mar­gin­al­ized peo­ples in the Unit­ed States and world­wide pay­ing the price for our dirty ener­gy and eco­nom­ic sys­tems, these move­ments could­n’t come sooner.

This arti­cle was pro­duced in part­ner­ship with For­eign Pol­i­cy In Focus.