After a category 5 hurricane, nature saved me. It has the power to save us all | Michael Lees

Maria devastated Dominica. But the islanders’ connection to the natural world gave them a resilience the west can’t match

In June 2017, I packed up some basic tools, religious texts and my camera gear, and headed back home to the Caribbean island of Dominica. A year earlier, while living in New York, a simple question had started to dominate my thinking: what if the life we humans were happiest in was back in the so-called ‘“Garden of Eden?’” When we lived in sync with nature and were not on the brink of destroying it.

I decided Dominica would be the perfect place to test this hypothesis. Known as the Nature Isle of the Caribbean, it is sparsely populated, boasts crystal clear rivers, and a mountainous terrain, and is heavily cloaked in tropical rainforest.

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