hills. The roadside is ringed by pipe organ cactus, agave, and a ubiqui-
tous thorny shrub known here as “cassie.” It has sprung up where
sugar cane plantations once predominated—more than 160 of them at
one time, abandoned after a gradual price decline forced the colonial
owners out of business. Today, the old stone grinding mills dot the
island at intervals, resembling abandoned watchtowers.
Our next destination is Potworks Dam, primary source of drinking
water for Antigua. A scarcity of high hills and forest growth, as well as
its position relative to the equatorial rain belt, leaves the island with no
rivers and thus frequently subject to drought even before the advent of
climate change. In 1984, Prosper remembers, the situation got so bad
that freshwater had to be imported on barges from Montserrat and
Dominica. Shortly after that, a desalination plant was built to help take
up the slack. A layer of clay soil a couple of feet down at Potworks keeps
the water naturally near the surface but, with more water also being
pumped out to irrigate nearby farms—and particularly as a result of
the decline in rainfall—the dam is well below capacity.
Brian Challenger, who oversees the Antiguan government’s nas-
cent climate change project, described the situation like this: “2001
was our driest year on record and even that oversimplifies it, because
when you combine this with another dry year in 2000, the soil mois-
ture level is extremely, extremely low.” The moment the island was not
being slammed by annual hurricanes, in other words, the general
decline in rainfall was amplified. “This affects your biodiversity, which
affects your watersheds, which affects your touristic appeal,”
Challenger summarized. “When the groundwater or surface supply
gets used up, we have to rely solely on desalination—which, of course,
is much more costly, and passed on by the utilities to the consumers.”
The technical director for the Ministry of Planning, Daven Joseph,
elaborated that a rainy season which used to start in July has not been
arriving until October for the past several years. “Another thing we are
noticing,” Joseph added, “is a strong northeasterly [wind] we would
normally have from December into February has reduced significantly.
So the weather is warmer in those months.” A warming trend is espe-
cially noticeable, Challenger told me, in terms of higher nighttime
temperatures, year-round.
66 Dick Russell