Environment vs Development: Having Your Cake and Eating It Too? For Jamaica Blog Day

This year’s theme for Jamaica Blog Day is as powerful as last year’s – the inaugural Day. Much appreciation to the founders of Jamaica Blog Day (if “founder” is the right word – perhaps “instigator” is better!) for this worthwhile effort.

I feel that I have written (and thought) so much about this issue over the past year. Since last summer, to be precise, when our Environment Minister (now silent) let slip during a visit to China that he was considering allowing China Harbour Engineering Company to build a port on Goat Islands in the Portland Bight Protected Area. This is Jamaica’s largest, and a place of rich biodiversity, pristine mangrove forest and dry limestone forest, and including a fish sanctuary. We have waded through the months, further and further towards the obscure yet complex “logistics hub,” the subject of much pontification by Government ministers and their supporters. The hub hovered in the distance, a trembling mirage; but our ministers and their cohorts of bureaucrats and technocrats have finally talked it into being. We’ll see.

If you do a search for Goat Islands on my blog, you will find streams of articles and photographs over the past few months. But this topic is much, much wider and broader than those islands, the Great and the Little. I wanted to share with you my thoughts on a couple of ideas that Jamaican politicians love to push around from one to the other. They sound simply marvelous in speeches and sound bytes, but I believe that they are, frankly, nonsense.

Silliness # 1:  We can find “balance” between development and the environment. On the one hand, we can gouge huge deposits of bauxite, limestone etc out of the mountainside. On the other hand…? We can dredge the seabed at Old Harbour Bay, killing all marine life, dynamite the top of Great Goat Island to flatten it (destroying the remains of a Taino settlement in the process), chop down the pristine, healthy mangrove forest that now fringes the islands, concrete over large areas of the adjoining coastal lands. On the other hand…? We can build coal-powered plants on the north and the south coasts. On the other hand…? This is something that our politicians call “sustainable development.” No. There is no “balance.” How could there be?

Silliness #2: “Poverty is the worst destroyer of the environment.” No. I am sorry. In fact, to some extent the reverse is true. Greed, the quest for riches, the insatiable desire to exploit the planet’s natural resources…This is what is destroying the planet. Giving “the poor” the opportunity to live in harmony with the environment by teaching and enabling environmentally-friendly activities… That might be what you might like to focus on, dear politicians. But then, that is not very appealing. Far too long-term for our wise leaders. This is what they want: A lovely big project involving a great deal of concrete, a fleet of bulldozers and lots of Jamaicans engaged in temporary, low-paid laboring work. A ribbon-cutting, with the Prime Minister running joyfully down a highway that will hardly be used, sycophants and photographers in tow. A few months later, more announcements of yet another big “investment” project, and more trips to China, all smiles, designer suits and raised champagne glasses. Who are we kidding?

And then, there is climate change, the proverbial elephant in the room. Or rather a scorpion, with a sting in its tail.

Jeffrey Sachs. (Photo: NASA/Sean Smith)

The distinguished Harvard Professor and founder of the Earth Institute Jeffrey Sachs was in Jamaica about two weeks ago. He spoke to a packed hall at the University of the West Indies about the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which will pick up where the Millennium Development Goals leave off in 2015. Professor Sachs and many others are coming up with ideas and checklists of goals, indicators and the like – for the Caribbean and of course every other region of the world. Professor Sachs loves the phrase “sustainable development,” and I am sure he believes in it, in an academic sort of way. But when Carol Narcisse of the Jamaica Civil Society Coalition stood up and asked a question about the threatened Goat Island development – which should we choose, the environment or development, the good professor did not hesitate.

“Of course, the environment has to come first,” he said.

I rest my case. We cannot, and never will, be able to have our cake and eat it, too.

Doesn’t it have to be one or the other?