THE WALL...THE CANAL...CHANNELS OF ECO-ANXIETY

As we await with trepidation and baited breath the consultations (Parish Council, NRCA, & Developer/Contractor) which NEPA is conducting over the Enforcement Notice issued for the "New"-Old Wharf SeaWall, we express concern over the rulings, consequences and any potent challenges or legal responses.

After what appears to be a short-fused, ambiguous regulatory process, and the well- argued & "primal scream" of frustration from the Media's John ("Commonsense") Maxwell, the Environmental Network's JET(Diana McCaulay) intervention, monitoring, and urgent calls for community activism, there remains large troubling issues concerning Development (Tourism etc) and a Sustainable Environmental Future with its conflicting interests.

Numerous Forum postings tried to give voice, form and shape to what underlies these puzzles:

"...it is easy to demonize any developer for doing things that harm the environment, but I believe the real problem is with the regulatory agencies who are set up to ensure these things do not happen and who utterly fail us all. It is for NEPA to tell Bruce Bicknell, his architect and everyone else who wants to build in Jamaica what they can and cannot do."

(..."getting a rational, fair and efficient regulator is the most important challenge we face.•TBNet 1•26•2010)

"I am still prepared to work with the people in Treasure Beach to try and get only appropriate development - but I'd have to see a lot more broad based commitment and willingness to take action from the community than I've seen so far."
--Diana McCaulay (TBNet• Nov. 30, 2009)

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"...So again I ask, "What are we supposed to do about it?"...WE ARE AWAKE...There are many of us here including the very productive Citizens Alert Group working very hard on many community issues and events. We are not sitting here on our hands doing nothing..

...So what do we learn from this? To me it says we will not get the community to rally around something which very few believe is a problem and, therein lies the problem. We need to educate persons into the long term affects of poor fishing practices as the sea is being fished out, making efforts to save the reef, beaches, turtles, etc. Until that happens you can talk all you want but no significant change will occur until the reason for keeping good environmental practices are understood. We need to have more environmental workshops (the last one we had to beg and force folks to attend) especially in the schools. Oh, but then the government just slashed the budget for JET to continue with this...

Again, the movie "Jamaica for Sale" clearly shows the pattern the government, both JLP and PNP, have continued to adopt of sell, sell, sell and build, build, build without worrying about any environmental issues or keeping the beaches public, etc. With this as our teacher what do you expect actions to be?
Rebecca (TBNet•Nov 28, 2009)

As a diversion into our Ecological Unconscious, to the shores, shifting dunes and seas that comfort, even amidst Environmental Degradation & Destruction, here is a share of a recent article:

"Is There an Ecological Unconscious?"...Daniel B Smith

EXCERPTED WITH LINK TO FOLLOW:

“There’s a scholar who talks about heart’s ease...“People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.” ... sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced from their land...“place pathology,” as one philosopher has called it, wasn’t limited to natives...petitioners were anxious, unsettled, despairing, depressed — just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them.

... the residents...were suffering not just from the strain of living in difficult conditions but also from something more fundamental: a hitherto unrecognized psychological condition...

Solastalgia... is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment. As our environment continues to change around us, the question Albrecht would like answered is, how deeply are our minds suffering in return?

Yet all the attention paid to the behavioral and cognitive barriers to safeguarding the environment — topics of acute interest to policy makers and activists — disguised the fact that a significant portion of the document addressed the supposed emotional costs of ecological decline: anxiety, despair, numbness, “a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless,” grief.

ECOPSYCHOLOGY:
There are numerous psychological subfields that, to one degree or another, look at the interplay between human beings and their natural environment. But ecopsychology embraces a more revolutionary paradigm: just as Freud believed that neuroses were the consequences of dismissing our deep-rooted sexual and aggressive instincts, ecopsychologists believe that grief, despair and anxiety are the consequences of dismissing equally deep-rooted ecological instincts.

The terms in which ecopsychology pursues this admittedly ambitious goal are steeped in the field’s countercultural beginnings. Ecopsychology emerged in the early 1960s, just as the modern environmental movement was gathering strength, when a group of Boston-area graduate students gathered to discuss what they saw as the isolation and malaise infecting modern life. It had another brief period of efflorescence, particularly on the West Coast and among practitioners of alternative therapies, in the early ’90s, when Theodore Roszak, a professor of history (he coined the word “counterculture”) published a manifesto, “The Voice of the Earth,” in which he criticized modern psychology for neglecting the primal bond between man and nature.

...the project finds echoes in the culture at large. Recently, a number of psychiatrically inflected coinages have sprung up to represent people’s growing unease over the state of the planet — “nature-deficit disorder,” “ecoanxiety,” “ecoparalysis.”

...ecopsychology endorses a few dualisms of its own. “A more simplistic, first-generation ecopsychology position simplifies the world,” he said. “Either you’re green or you’re not. Either you’re sane or you’re not. It conflates mental health and/or lack of mental health with values and choices and the culture.” His mission, he said, is to spearhead a “second-generation ecopsychology” that leaves these binaries behind.

...Martin Jordan, a psychologist at the University of Brighton in Britain, evoked Kleinian attachment theory to warn against the “naïve” mind-set that sees the natural world as some “perfect . . . benevolent parent.” Such an outlook, he argues, isn’t just untruthful — nature is as harsh and inhospitable as it is salubrious and inviting — it’s a form of escapism, a sign that someone is less in love with nature than out of love with society.

...Gregory Bateson (“Steps to an Ecology of Mind”) a major influence on eco psychologists and something of a lost giant of 20th-century intellectual history...(his) belief that the tendency to think of mind and nature as separate indicated a flaw at the core of human consciousness....argued that the essential environmental crisis of the modern age lay in the realm of ideas.

Humankind suffered from an “epistemological fallacy”: we believed, wrongly, that mind and nature operated independently of each other.
In fact, nature was a recursive, mindlike system; its unit of exchange wasn’t energy, as most ecologists argued, but information. The way we thought about the world could change that world, and the world could in turn change us.

...So what to do? How do you go about rebooting human consciousness?
Bateson’s prescription for action was vague. We needed to correct our errors of thought by achieving clarity in ourselves and encouraging it in others — reinforcing “whatever is sane in them.” In other words, to be ecological, we needed to feel ecological.

Glenn Albrecht (Australian philosopher):
When " people of the region...display an unusually strong “sense of interconnectedness” — an awareness of the myriad interacting components that make up a healthy environment...
(his) concept to encapsulate this idea... a study in
“soliphilia”: “the love of and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it.”

Before parting this scene, may we reflect on Ms. McCaulay's near-mystical moment, when she wrote:

{"...for me, these difficult issues come down to a simple issue: respect. Do people respect and revere the natural resources that have attracted them to an area in the first place, or do they simply see them as backdrop for their houses or hotels? For me, I find beauty and mystery in nature and I regard all its manifestations with awe and the uttmost respect." TB.Net•Nov 20,2010

For anyone looking for an environmental success, so far, reference is made to:
The Gleaner's article: The Fight for the Cockpit Country-NGOs Step Up Watchdog Activism

Embedded in the story are ideas for Citizen Groups and alliances
looking for Model institutional structures for keeping ecological vigilance alive.

On reading about the Cockpit Country Stakeholders' Group (CCSG), I mentally tried on a few combinations, for local thought, such as Treasure Beach Coastal Protection Stakeholder's Group (TBCPSG), which, truthfully, did not exactly roll off the tongue.

www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20061231/cleisure/cleisure2.html

LINK to "The Ecological Unconscious"

www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31ecopsych-t.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print

Thanks ZED. Good if these ideas could be communicated to those in the community not online.

RESPECT TUREY
...for all the attention that you always give to the "ancestors" who masterly navigated self-propelled canoes to the south coast of Xamayca.

When you added Archaeology to your petition written to the principle adjudicators of the issues arising out of the dune-blasting fortification at Old Wharf, it did not seem that you were saying that there ought to be a Stop Work Order to preserve a traceable, historical aboriginal village...as was the case, notably, in Mexico City when the subway was re-routed to protect huge Aztec treasures.

I am sure that you are also aware of the wonderful native archaeological treasures found, valued and preserved by the Tatham family at Great Bay. Clay shards continue to be unearthed or revealed by migrating sands constantly.
Many of us on our pilgrimage walk-abouts are on alert for such finds... specks hidden among the shells, driftwood and colourful beach glass.

You may have added to this collection or even enshrined some pieces, yourself.

This must be said:
...There is almost no greater gift of wonder than to hold, fondle and press into your fingers the small clay head of a sea turtle that was fashioned centuries ago by a Taino craftsperson or child for play or display.
Anyone who finds or was presented with such a gift can not help but feel like a time traveller...and I thank immensely always the Giver.

Lorna Goodison, the remarkable Jamaican painter and poet of a coherent fusion of lyrical dialects, and no stranger to the Calabash Literary Festival, captures an essence, here, that we have been dabbling with:

The Sleeping Zemis

He kept the zemis under his bed for years
after the day he came upon them in a cave
which resembled the head of a great stone god,
the zemis placed like weights at the tip of its tongue.

Arawaks had hidden them there when they fled,
or maybe the stone god's head was really a temple.
Now under his bed slept three zemis,
wrought from enduring wood of ebony.

The first was a man god who stood erect, his arms
folded below his . The second was a bird god
in flight. The third was fashioned in the form
of a spade, in the handle a face was carved.

A planting of the crops zemi,
a god for the blessing of the corn,
for the digging of the sweet cassava
which requires good science

to render the white root safe food.
And over the fields the john crows wheel
and the women wait for the fishermen
to return from sea in boats hollowed from trees.

Under his bed the zemis slept
Where were they when Columbus
and his men, gold fever and quicksilver
on the brain, came visiting destruction?

Man god we gave them meat, fish and cassava.
Silent deity we mended their sails, their leaking
ships, their endless needs we filled even with
our own lives, our own deaths.

Bird god, we flew to the hills,
their tin bells tolling the deaths
of our children, their mirrors
foreshadowing annihilation to follow.

Spade god we perished.
Our spirits wander wild and restless.
There was no one left to dig our graves,
no guides to point us the way to Coyaba.

He turned them over to the keepers of history,
they housed them in glass-sided caves.
Then he went home to sleep without the gods
who had slumbered under his bed for years.

•••From: "This Is My Father's Country"

To the Jamaica National Heritage Trust and The Institute of Jamaica.

We the undersigned request that a Stop Work Order be placed on the Taino villages, ritual sites and burial spots that are located in an area refered to as Treasure Beach in the Parish of St Elizabeth.

We request this as more sites and artifacts are in peril of loss or destruction because of the increase of land development in the area with it's accompanying excavation and soil displacement. Residents will show you how easy it is to find anthropomorphic pot lugs and the occassional petalloid celt. This is just a portion of our ancient cultural past that is waiting to be properly revealed to us.

With the stunning natural beauty and the presence of 'old time' village life still going on after 1,500 dateable years, it would indeed be proper to declare this area a protected heritage and natural site.

Both the community and the wider Jamaica would benefit from such an order.

Copied here, is a similar request for the ecological preservation of the area addressed to the relevant authorities.

Sincerely .....................

It is a thought ZED. The effects on the residents and stakeholders would have to be looked at carefully. It could end up in a tangle of red tape, unless the residents were in charge. In effect the National Trust would be reponsible for the integrity of proven sites and the Institute of Jamaica for artifacts. There should be Park Rangers from the community and scholarships offered in archaelogy, ecological sciences etc to young Jamaicans.

A private museum has already been offered and interest has been communicated to the Caretaker who waits patiently.

Thanks Lorna. I know the Zemis and the finding refered to in the poem. Anyone that would like to see them, take a trip to the National Gallery of Jamaica downtown Kingston. If they are not on display, ask in the main office if someone can show you Taino things.

http://nationalgalleryofjamaica.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/jamaican-taino-art-at-t he-ngj/



They are a people so full of love and without greed… that I believe there is no better race or better land … they love their neighbours as themselves…

– Christopher Columbus.