🌊 Never Turn Your Back on a Wave
By Tina Winterlik aka Zipolita
📍 July 2025
A hurricane just tore through Zipolite and Huatulco. Its name was Erick. It spun up out of nowhere and became a monster in 24 hours — not even time to breathe. Floods, landslides, people cut off, infrastructure washed away.
Then — poof — it’s “downgraded,” no longer a hurricane. The media drops it. But the storm didn’t stop. It carried on — across Mexico, into Texas, where more than 30 people died in catastrophic flash floods around the Guadalupe River. Most people didn’t even know the storms were connected.
Because the system is broken.
🌍 We Are Not Islands
When the storm leaves Mexico, Mexico breathes a sigh of relief: “Thank God it's gone.”
But does the U.S. care? Not really.
And when the leftovers crawl toward Canada? Crickets.
There’s no real cooperation. No shared system that tracks a storm from birth to death. Everyone is busy with their own borders and bureaucracy. The U.S. cuts the EPA, the NOAA gets slashed, the satellites aren't maintained — and everyone wonders why we didn’t see it coming.
But we did.
We just weren’t listening.
We weren’t talking to each other.
And some people don’t want us to — because when we know the truth, we demand better.
💥 The EPA Was Gutted — And It Matters
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) once helped track pollution, protect clean water, and warn about ecological collapse. But under past U.S. leadership, it was stripped down, scientists silenced, and climate programs slashed.
What happens when you fire the experts?
When you muzzle the people sounding alarms?
When you say climate change is fake while the skies fall?
You get people swept away in rivers.
You get mudslides burying towns.
You get hurricanes that nobody tracks from one country to the next.
You get a global system acting like a bunch of strangers in the dark.
🌀 “Never Turn Your Back on a Wave”
I have a saying. It comes from the beach — from life:
Never turn your back on a wave.
Because that wave might just splash you,
maybe even smack you on the butt and make you laugh —
but it might just as easily knock your legs out,
slam you into the sand, and break your neck before you even know what happened.
That’s what these storms are like.
They don’t care about politics.
They don’t care about state lines.
They don’t care about your forecast app.
They’ll build in the tropics,
explode over the ocean,
rip through poor communities,
and then travel thousands of kilometers inland to flood your home —
long after the name is gone and the news cycle has moved on.
🧠 What Needs to Change?
- We need to track storms through their whole lifespan, not just while they’re “official.”
- We need cross-border coordination between Mexico, the U.S., and Canada.
- We need to restore the EPA, fund climate science, and respect Indigenous knowledge about weather and land.
- We need to wake up before the next wave drags us under.
This isn’t just about hurricanes.
It’s about how disconnected we’ve become — from each other, from the Earth, from the truth.
We have to do better.
Because the wave is coming — whether we’re watching or not.
🌀 Stay aware. Stay connected. Never turn your back on a wave.
— Tina Winterlik / Zipolita
