Ecological disaster is not so much a consequence as a necessary condition of European colonization in the Caribbean. On many islands, the near or total decimation of the indigenous Amerindian population went hand in hand with the cutting down of forests. As Antonio Benítez-Rojo has written in an essay entitled "Sugar and the Environment in Cuba," the Caribbean "plantation machine" was "one of the most powerful and devastating to the environment of any the world has seen." On Saint-Domingue,

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... nists wrote in the eighteenth century of the environmental damage caused by plantation agriculture. By the end of the century, planters had already observed how deforestation had led to a drastic decrease in rainfall, which in turn lowered the levels of nearby rivers. Thus was set in motion a cycle of environmental decay that makes Haiti an extreme instance of the ecological crisis of the Caribbean, a crisis felt to varying degrees in all the islands of the region. For better or worse-but in this case surely for worse-Haiti is often seen as a precursor, an outrider, and what happens there tends to be repeated in other places, near and far. John Walsh similarly argues that Haitian literature has "long anticipated epochal thought with stories from the echo-archive that challenge the neocolonial and neoliberal political economies that undergird the dominant narratives of the Anthropocene" (p. 10). He reads a broad range of fiction and nonfiction from before and after the earthquake of 2010 in order to show how the various political and environmental problems that the earthquake highlighted have a long history, one that is told in the "echo-archive" of modern and contemporary Haitian writing. The long history of migration and refuge is part of that archive. In an almost counterintuitive way, Walsh, instead of being pulled along by the future-oriented discourse of disaster and climate change, turns to the past in order to show that "the global ethical questions [the earthquake] raised concerning poverty, political corruption, and ecological degradation have long been treated in Haitian literature" (p. 11). Haitian authors have long written about issues that are just now being seen as urgent, locally but also globally. Walsh's study reaches back to the early 1980s and the remarkable work of Jean-Claude Charles, and ends with Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey's Rapatriés (2017), though the story he and the works tell has no real beginning or end. The corpus is in effect a multivolume work that preceded the earthquake and that continues to play out in the urgent literary production of this country, where literature is produced in the most difficult circumstances yet remains an essential means of understanding the nation's past,