24 years ago this October, my wife Beret and I were living on the Micronesian island of Saipan, waiting for Category 4 Typhoon Wilda to make landfall.  Everyone had hunkered down and stocked up on spam and beer.   Our windows featured “typhoon glass” rated to 150 mph; but predicted gusts were higher than that, and there was a huge spreading tree just outside our apartment, with branches liable to come through the living room window if it toppled.  I figured we’d move to the back bedroom if that happened, or, worst case if all hell broke loose, the bathroom.  Just before the power went out, CNN International announced: There’s a big typhoon out in the western Pacific, but it isn’t threatening any populated areas.

Excuse me? I sputtered. Wilda was on a direct track to whack us in 12 hours.  So we waited.  Our daughter Paige, not yet 2, tottered around the dim rooms in her batik-print gecko dress, babbling the new syllables she had just learned: ty-FOO. The living room window bowed against a strong gust.  Beret suggested we move into the bathroom.

I was reminded of that experience last week, as the US media whirled incessantly about the possible storm track of Hurricane Florence, still days away from arrival, while at that same moment 217,000 US citizens on Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands were bearing the brunt of Category 4 Typhoon Mangkhut, completely unnoticed.   “We are now in Typhoon Condition I,” my friend Cinta Kaipat posted on Facebook last weekend from Saipan.  “Pray for us.”

We should do more than pray.  We should remember that the storms we rightly worry over when they hit our shores — and whose climate-change-fueled intensity owes largely to our own carbon-consuming profligacy – are far more lethal when they hit less-developed places.  On Saipan, locals admonished us to stay indoors during typhoons, not just for the reasons you’d do so in the US, but also because houses built of corrugated tin turn into flying guillotines.  When Donald Trump dismissed the official death toll from Hurricane Maria – statements that must have felt to Puerto Ricans like utterances of Holocaust denial — he showed no concept of what would make Maria so much more deadly than a hurricane on the mainland.  The average Puerto Rican household went 84 days without electricity, 68 days without water, and 41 days without cellphone coverage after Maria.  People couldn’t get necessary medicines or reach hospitals. On the mainland, you can travel to an unaffected area, get away, or get help.  The seriously ill can be moved to a place with power to run their life support equipment. But on an island, there’s nowhere to go.  And so, a lot more islanders died.  The death rate went from 8.8 per thousand before the storm to 14.3 per thousand afterwards.

In days of yore, a major disaster in a developing country would engender an outpouring of international aid, led by the US and a host of multinational agencies.  Now, we are failing even to provide adequate storm recovery assistance to US “possessions” – that strange euphemism for our neo-colonial empire — the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, or the Marianas.  For foreign countries the coffers are mighty shallow; the USAID Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance has a budget of only $1 billion to address a panoply of disasters worldwide.

As a matter of global environmental justice, this isn’t nearly enough, especially when you consider that the people who have contributed the least to the atmospheric carbon causing these superstorms and rising sea levels stand to lose the most — in some cases, to lose everything — from them.

So when a truly catastrophic storm — like Hurricane Mitch, which killed 11,000 Central Americans in 1998 – devastates another country to the point that it is unable to support its population, a wave of migration occurs.  Those whom we fail to aid will end up coming to us, seeking refuge and new life.  As storms intensify and sea levels rise, our national borders will become soaked and diaphanous with suffering.

Back 24 years ago, Typhoon Wilda decided not to smack us after all – it stalled menacingly off Saipan’s shores for a few hours, and then veered away.  Another bullet dodged.  Last week, Mangkhut too tracked south and largely spared Saipan on its way to the Philippines.  The neighboring island of Rota, a tropical gem where the islanders traditionally survived typhoons in caves, took the biggest hit.  The game of roulette goes on; one place gets lucky, another gets nailed, with the stakes a little higher each time.  But as the planet warms, in the end we’re all islanders.  And there’s really no place to go.