I REMEMBER A severe drought in 1964 when I was a child. First the grass became crisp and brown, as it always did in the summer. Then the soil cracked, as if there had been an earthquake. Slowly, the grass died in irregular patches, revealing the earth beneath. I watered the grass with used dishwater, but there was not enough. I heard the grown-ups talking about something called cloud seeding and I imagined a cloud with a small plant growing inside it. Some of my parents’ friends were all for the cloud seeding, but others said the rain, perhaps, would be too heavy. A few months later, I heard that although the seeding had been done, the clouds had dropped their rain over the sea. Or, maybe, had caused flooding in Haiti. The drought in Jamaica eventually broke, the cracks in the lawn closed and the grass reached out to itself. Cloud seeding was no longer talked about. I am sure no one on my parents’ veranda had heard the word geoengineering.

I have been an environmental activist as director of the Jamaica Environment Trust since its formation in 1991. My job, my vocation, is to address the way we humans have treated our homeplace at every stage of our history. I am therefore familiar with the word geoengineering, ‘the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change’. That is one definition; another might be hubris – the human arrogance found in Greek tragedy, the kind that brings ruin and catastrophe.