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Executive Summary
The Caribbean continues to face increasingly powerful hurricanes driven by warming oceans and climatic disruption. These storms expose structural weaknesses in our societies — not only in physical infrastructure, but in the erosion of community bonds, ecological buffers, governance accountability, and our shared sense of responsibility for one another. The question is no longer whether storms will come, but whether we will continue to suffer preventable harm when they do.
This essay reinterprets prayer as a practice of reorientation and responsibility, rather than a plea for exemption or selective divine favor. To say “When we pray, we must all move our feet” is to recognize that spiritual intention must be joined to material action. True prayer commits us to build systems that sustain life, not merely to hope for protection from harm.
Using John McMurtry’s Life-Ground framework, the essay identifies the core ethical principle that the value of any society must be measured by how well it safeguards the ecological and social conditions required for life. It then draws upon Jacque Fresco’s design principles for circular, resilient, resource-based urban systems to illustrate how our built environments can be redesigned to withstand storms rather than collapse under them.
Finally, the essay outlines practical pathways for regenerative resilience, including:
- Reweaving community relationships as essential infrastructure,
- Restoring mangroves, reefs, and wetlands as living storm defenses,
- Implementing distributed renewable energy micro-grids,
- Adopting hurricane-resistant, flexible architectural design,
- Embedding resilience and ecological literacy in education,
- And transitioning governance from patronage to stewardship.
The central message is clear:
Resilience is not merely the capacity to rebuild after destruction, but the ability to live in coherence with the forces of the living Earth.
To pray today is to commit to that coherence.
To move our feet is to build it — together.
