Marasa: A Special Issue and a Working Group for the Environment.

This special issue on Haiti's environment and a recently created working group within the Haitian Studies Association (HSA) share a birth year: 2020. The pair had their conception during HSA's 2016 conference in Cap-Haïtien, "Haiti's Eco-systems: Focus on Environmental Realities and Hopes." The meeting in Cap-Haïtien demonstrated a significant interest in the environment of Haiti and its challenges. Members responded to the call with papers, panels, and a plenary session, all of which examined Haiti's ecosystems through the lenses of education, economics, visual and performing arts, spirituality, natural science, communications, literature, archaeology, agriculture, and health—to name a few. Following up from the interest generated, members responded again in 2020 to a call for working-group proposals. The lanbi (conch shell) sounded, and HSA's Working Group on Haiti's Ecosystems (WGE, also Konbit) answered. As the special-issue and working-group projects took shape together, we might think of them as Marasa, named after the sacred twins of Haitian Vodou who dramatize the ultimate unity in dualisms that might help us think through our human-nature divisions. The Marasa also represent new beginnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]