In a Jamaica Observer Letter to the Editor, Collin Hutchinson ponders, from his Florida perch, possible environmental lessons gleaned from the flood beating recently visited upon JamRock by tropical storm Nicole.

"Tropical storm Nicole taught Jamaicans a very harsh lesson - that man cannot win the fight against nature. So like the adage, "If you can't beat them join them", I say, why not work with nature instead of against it?

For too long unrestricted deforestation has been rampant in certain parts of Jamaica. Unplanned settlements, businesses and illegal quarrying have laid waste some of Jamaica's most pristine areas. The consequences of these actions were largely ignored until the arrival of tropical storm Nicole.

Nicole proved to developers, engineers, industrialists and squatters that a land devoid of its natural resources - for example, trees - is as safe as ice in sunlight. An economy already battered by recession has now been given a millstone around its neck as basic common sense was ignored so that a few could get their way.

The tragic result of all this is that lives were lost, infrastructure destroyed and sadly the blame game has started. However, one cannot help but ask, are there any teeth to the environmental laws that govern Jamaica?
Do the environmental agencies have to turn a blind eye to the abuse that occurs so as not to have their funding cut? Why do successive governments continue to lambast squatting publicly, yet privately support individuals who capture areas not safe for human habitation? These are basic questions that the environment and planning ministry and agencies need to answer.

The nine-day wonder that greets any major issue or disaster should not apply to the aftermath of Nicole. Environment and planning agencies need to say to politicians, businesses and individuals that they cannot continue to undermine the earth.

Trees needed to hold the soil together and deflect the pounding rain are missing in many areas resulting in soil erosion. Board and concrete houses cannot do what trees can, so why are they given preference over the natural fabric of the soil?
Let tropical storm Nicole teach all Jamaicans a good lesson.You cannot rape a land of its resources without expecting dire repercussions. As children we were taught that the environment was our friend who protected us, so why now do we treat it as an enemy?"

www.jamaicaobserver.com/Let-Nicole-be-a-lesson_8053500

We are reminded of QUOTE by the Virginia-based architect,W.G. Clark:
(www.wgclark-architects.com/project_menu.html)

Architecture, whether as a town or as a building, is the reconciliation of ourselves with the natural land.
At the necessary juncture of Culture & Place, architecture seeks not only the minimal ruin of landscape but something more difficult...a replacement of what was lost with something that atones for the loss.
In the best architecture this replacement is through the intensification of Place, where it emerges no worse for human intervention, where Culture's shaping of the Place to specific use results in a heightening of the beauty of the landscape.

In these Places we seem worthy.

Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World: An excerpt from a new book by Wangari Maathai, 2004 Nobel Prize Laureate

"...When I began this work in 1977, I wasn't motivated by my faith or by religion in general. Instead, I was thinking literally and practically about solving problems on the ground. I wanted to help rural populations, especially women, with the basic needs they described to me during seminars and workshops. They said that they needed clean drinking water, adequate and nutritious food, income, and energy for cooking and heating. So, when I was asked these questions during the early days, I'd answer that I didn't think digging holes and mobilizing communities to protect or restore the trees, forests, watersheds, soil, or habitats for wildlife that surrounded them was spiritual work.

However, I never differentiated between activities that might be called "spiritual" and those that might be termed "secular." After a few years I came to recognize that our efforts weren't only about planting trees, but were also about sowing seeds of a different sort -- the ones necessary to give communities the self-confidence and self-knowledge to rediscover their authentic voice and speak out on behalf of their rights (human, environmental, civic, and political). Our task also became to expand what we call "democratic space", in which ordinary citizens could make decisions on their own behalf to benefit themselves, their community, their country, and the environment that sustains them.

... I came to realize that the work of the Green Belt Movement (GBM) was driven by certain intangible values.

These values were: love for the environment; a gratitude and respect for Earth's resources; a capacity to empower and better oneself; and a spirit of service and volunteerism.

Together, these values encapsulate the intangible, subtle, nonmaterialistic aspects of the GBM as an organization. They enabled us to continue working, even through the difficult times.

Of course, I'm aware that such values are not unique to the Green Belt Movement. They are universal; they can't be touched or seen. We cannot place a monetary value on them: in effect, they are priceless. These values are not contained within certain religious traditions. Neither does one have to profess a faith in a divine being to live by them. However, they do seem to be part of the our human nature and I'm convinced that we are better people because we hold them, and that humankind is better off with them than without them.
Where these values are ignored, they are replaced by vices such as selfishness, corruption, greed, and exploitation.

Through my experiences and observations, I have come to believe that the physical destruction of the earth extends to us, too. If we live in an environment that's wounded -- where the water is polluted, the air is filled with soot and fumes, the food is contaminated with heavy metals and plastic residues, or the soil is practically dust -- it hurts us, chipping away at our health and creating injuries at a physical, psychological, and spiritual level. In degrading the environment, therefore, we degrade ourselves.

The reverse is also true.
In the process of helping the earth to heal, we help ourselves. If we see the earth bleeding from the loss of topsoil, biodiversity, or drought and desertification, and if we help reclaim or save what is lost -- for instance, through regeneration of degraded forests -- the planet will help us in our self-healing and indeed survival. When we can eat healthier, nonadulterated food; when we breathe clean air and drink clean water; when the soil can produce an abundance of vegetables or grains, our own sicknesses and unhealthy lifestyles become healed. The same values we employ in the service of the earth's replenishment work on us, too. We can love ourselves as we love the earth; feel grateful for who we are, even as we are grateful for the earth's bounty; better ourselves, even as we use that self-empowerment to improve the earth; offer service to ourselves, even as we practice volunteerism for the earth.

Human beings have a consciousness by which we can appreciate love, beauty, creativity, and innovation or mourn the lack thereof.
To the extent that we can go beyond ourselves and ordinary biological instincts, we can experience what it means to be human and therefore different from other animals.

We can appreciate the delicacy of dew or a flower in bloom, water as it runs over the pebbles or the majesty of an elephant, the fragility of the butterfly or a field of wheat or leaves blowing in the wind. Such aesthetic responses are valid in their own right, and as reactions to the natural world they can inspire in us a sense of wonder and beauty that in turn encourages a sense of the DIVINE.

That consciousness acknowledges that while a certain tree, forest, or mountain itself may not be holy, the life-sustaining services it provides -- the oxygen we breathe, the water we drink -- are what make existence possible, and so deserve our respect and veneration.
From this point of view, the environment becomes sacred, because to destroy what is essential to life is to destroy life itself."

www.huffingtonpost.com/wangari-maathai/spiritual-environmentalis_b_762801.html

Thanks ZED. If our educators and politicians understood these things, the generation being taught and those being governed would be better prepared to deal with the remedial/healing work and systems redesigns needed now. We seem lost in pretty things, the illusional security of 'Mo Money' and the urge of power for self. Economy has forgotten it's source: Ecology. The soil, air, minerals, water and us animals.

There does not seem to be a critical mass of individuals that understand our effects on our only space. A thin layer on the surface of a tiny planet in the midst of Awesome.

Still, we are in the midst of a great experiment. Will Homo Sapiens make it through it's teenage years and create the Paradise that we are designed to live in.

I'm hopeful and rarin' to go.

Best, turey.

Diana McCaulay & Deep Pessimism:

Turey, it always good to to have you back scratching in the yard, physically protecting sea turtles, turning over rocks of deceit, running the gullies, following the watersheds and the collected wastes streaming along them as we experience all the OMG (Oh My God), head smacking...trow-your-hands-up shocks to the system.

As a fairly recent member of Jamaica Environmental Trust (JET), I feel almost obligated to keep Diana McCaulay's clarion calls of distress over the environmental distruction of our Island in sharp perspective.
Dis nuh jok!
We can only imagine the personal toll that her battles with devel-interlopers, NEPA, high circles of government and into ministries which trample their planning regulations & documents, is taking on her.

JET members, environmental consortiums, ignored citizens feel it a duty to keep Diana's voice, expertise and (yeh mon) feelings rambling throughout the TB community...to keep us on High Alert (what colour dat), to buk us up as, in solidarity over issues and the battles, we buk Diana up.

I hope Diana doesn't take offense with my sharing her heartfelt blog from SnailWriter, which captures our shared plight and the pessimism that it engenders.

Here's an excerpt:

Folks,
I received this thread (about sand being stolen in Mexico and sold to a hotel in Cancun - authorities closed the beach) with the mixture of anger, cynicism and sadness that is a daily feature of working for an environmental non profit agency in Jamaica, perhaps in the world, I don't know. The sand case (in Jamaica) is in court, where it will wind its way through the justice system, witnesses will be hard to find, lawyers will have other cases, the police will not turn up to give evidence, and after many years, perhaps - PERHAPS - the people who drove the truck that stole the sand will receive a small fine. The real crime - that of politicians, government agencies, boards and officials giving environmental permits to hotels on coastlines where there is no beach without the first idea as to where their sand was to come from - will remain unpunished.

I have just come back from ten days driving around Jamaica with my son and visitors, in effect saying good bye to some of our gorgeous natural assets
• Pellew Island, ironically immortalized on a Jamaica Tourist Board poster in the early days of our tourist industry, about to be villa-ized
• Luminous Lagoon near Falmouth, to be risked by a mega cruise ship pier of the most dubious economic benefit;
• Treasure Beach, on the edge of "development," trying to cope with a disastrous drainage canal constructed with public money, never finished, and without a shred of environmental due diligence undertaken;
• Cockpit Country - who knows - we still await the GOJ's decision on the boundaries years after the commissioned study was completed and now that bauxite is uncertain, limestone mining is about to be considered our savior with no doubt dire consequences for our forests, air quality and aesthetics.
• I went in a fishing boat right up the Black River, such a lovely trip, but a place which used to be a small bar and swimming hole had been venue-ized, all the vegetation cleared and is now a place for fetes.
• I went to the Coral Spring Beach from which the sand had been stolen, most of that coast privately owned, with only a small protected area left, a stunning white sand bay with forested headlands to the east, and due to some trick of the wind, the kind of silence that is no longer available on the north coast. There, the swimming is shallow, and I am sure the owners will legally dredge it, and groyne it, and marina it, and the forest will be replaced by landscaping, and perhaps in a decade, there will have to be a study of what happened to the beach at Coral Spring and environs.
• On the culture side, I went to the ruin of Stewart Castle, also on privately owned land, no evidence of any protection by the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, and the land around it had been cleared by fire and bulldozers.

While I was on my trip, I learned that Dornoch Head (River Head, some people call it), the source of the Rio Bueno, has had the trees cut down, and I was sent photographs of the large cuts in the Blue Mountains, allegedly to build a mountain biking track without, apparently, the knowledge or intervention of the National Environment and Planning Agency.

An Environmental Summit is not going to help us, even if we could stir ourselves to organize it. Were we to get it off the ground, the people who need to be in the room will either not come or simply give greetings and go about their business.

We have had many such meetings in the past.
Basically, the problem we have is that except for the few small, exhausted voices that have been raised over the years, hardly anyone thinks this issue is of sufficient importance, let alone understands it. Hardly anyone in the PNP, hardly anyone in the JLP, hardly anyone in business, hardly anyone in the civil service, and hardly any ordinary Jamaican thinks the sacrifice of our natural assets for a few short term, low paying jobs is a decision we will BITTERLY come to regret.

I know many people on this e-mail list do have concerns – but I regret to say that these concerns have too infrequently become action and our collective failures – and I include myself in that collective– are all too apparent.

I'm sorry to write at such length - but truthfully, this email is actually short, in comparison to the many words and great sadness in my heart.

Diana McCaulay
August 22nd, 2009
The e-mail made its rounds and some people wrote to me with words of encouragement and support, words I tried to hear, over the drumming of a different internal narrative of personal failure. I have been an advocate for the natural environment for more than twenty years, left my private sector job to work first as a volunteer and then as full time CEO of the Jamaica Environment Trust, an agency I helped start, and now I must face the fact that still, after all the effort, our natural resources are put on the auction block, day after day, and the price we accept for our irreplacable assets is a rock bottom, last chance sale price, a going out of business giveaway.

Pellew Island. Cockpit Country. Falmouth. The Luminous Lagoon. Dornoch Head. The Black River Morass. Treasure Beach. Coral Spring. The Blue Mountains.

These I saw over the past ten days, all up for grabs, these I said good-bye to, hiding my tears from my son and his friends.

You can follow Diana's SnailWriter blog at this link:
http://snailwriter.blogspot.com/

I believe that Treasure Beach is the one place on the list that has a chance and indeed could be a model for sustainable development. Recent clearances and all considered.

In the words of Marvin Gaye: "....makes me wanna holler, throw up both my hands". The voices of those who would speak truth to power are muffled by media owned and operated by that same power. People like Diana are like prophets of old shouting to the few who can hear through the present day noise machine. Do not be discouraged folks; some of us are listening. One day the pendulum will swing. Just keep on doing what is right.

The Blue Mountains and the Cockpit Country also have their defenders and will be difficult to destroy. Still development mania will eat away at anything. It a mek money fi feed pickney, is arr rite!

Daag nyam di pickney dem supper when it all gaan.

Diana's SnailWriter blog has moved:

www.dianamccaulay.com/apps/blog/

complementing JET's Earth Link site:

www.jamentrust.org

Turey::Blue Mountains

In the mid-1990s, Jamaica had the highest rate of DEFORESTATION (5% per year) of any country in the world and, although there is now greater awareness of the problem, it is still a threat. Many of Jamaica's endemic wildlife species are endangered or gone forever...according to the World Conservation Union, Jamaica ranks among the top 10 countries in the world for numbers of both endangered amphibians and endangered plant species.
Legislation has been largely ineffectual: authorities are underfunded and fines are absurdly low.

Deforestation has ravaged the Blue Mountains, where farmers felled trees to clear land to grow lucrative coffee plants. When the dwindling tree population caused migratory birds to shun the area, in turn leaving it to insects that ravaged the crop, some farmers began to work with conservationists and park officials trees.

The past decade has seen a stirring of eco-awareness.
The National Resources Conservation Authority (www.nrca.org) is entrusted with responsibility for promoting ecological consciousness among Jamaicans and management of the national parks and protected areas under the Protected Areas Resource Conservation Project (PARC).

(Excerpted from the Lonely Planet)
For more info, contact the Rainforest Trust (rft@rainforesttrust.com)

Psychological Insights & the Common Good

Psychologist/psychotherapist Douglas LaBier, Phd in a recent blog reflects on conditions developing in the US and adapted or adopted globally affecting our consciousness of how we protect-serve-love-share our fragile planet.

Many ironies abound in the so-called environmental movement, not the least of which are media reports of more prosperous believers in environmental orthodoxy actually consuming MORE energy, appliances, devices and doodads AFTER they have installed solar PV on their roofs or bought their hybrid cars. As explained, psychologically, it has something to do with conscience-salving..."I've done my piece for the EARTH, so I'm immune to criticism and judgement".

LaBier:
By the "common good" I'm referring to a broad evolution beyond values and actions that serve narrow self-interest, and towards those guided by inclusiveness -- supporting well-being, economic success, security, human rights and stewardship of resources for the benefit of all, rather than just for some.

It's like a stealth operation, because it hasn't become highly visible yet. But polls, surveys and research data reveal several strands of change that are coalescing in this overall direction. I describe each of them below. They may appear to be unrelated, but I think they're driven by an underlying perspective that we're all like organs of the same body, and the body doesn't thrive if any of the organs is neglected or diseased.

•21st-Century Mindset
The rise of the common good reflects a sense of global citizenship and an obligation to be a good ancestor to future generations who inhabit this planet....

And Umair Haque writes in his Harvard Business School blog about the new principles of a new economy "built around stewardship, trusteeship, guardianship, leadership, partnership," adding that "[a]s interaction explodes, the costs of evil are starting to outweigh the benefits." In effect, transparency will become the antidote to evil.

Other aspects of how the redefinition of the Common Good is Transforming Our World
•The New Norm of Racial-Ethnic Diversity
• Volunteer Service
• Donations of Organs by Living Donors to Strangers
• Hands-on Philanthropy
• Responsibility for a Healthy Planet
• Personal Success
...men and women increasingly want a "4.0 career": one that provides more than personal recognition, power and financial reward. They want meaningful work, opportunities for continued learning and growth, a positive management culture and a team-oriented, ethical environment. They want to have impact on something larger than just their own personal success. These themes are especially pronounced among younger workers.
• The Social Impact of Business
• Acceptance of Gay Relationships & Gay Marriage
• Families & Relationships Are Transforming

LINK:
www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-labier/the-rise-of-the-common-go_b_759622.html?vi ew=print

Peter Espeut: Attitudes to the Environment in Jamaica
www.nepa.gov.jm/documents/Espeut-Attitudes-of-Jamaicans-to-the-Environment-1998. pdf

Peter Espeut (A Silver Recognition):
www.instituteofjamaica.org.jm/Docs/citations08/PETER%20_ESPEUT.pdf

"NO PROBLEM PARADISE" (By Chantal Dunbar)

The Caribbean offers the kind of beauty that turns other destinations green with envy. However, its tourism-based economies rely heavily on sun, sea and sand, and this dependence introduces risks that cannot be overstated.

If recent events have taught us anything, it’s that accidents (manmade and natural) can devastate the livelihoods of those supported by the proceeds of nature-based attractions.
Until the BP disaster - or Haiti (or Nicole) for that matter - few companies would have considered having a risk mitigation strategy or integrated policies that are designed to protect the environments of host communities.

Climate Change Inertia may be somewhat to blame, but the certainty that we face a future clouded by an increase in extreme weather events, rising sea levels, bleached coral reefs, scarcity of potable water and soaring energy costs, should be enough to trigger action.

“Water, Energy, and Waste Management are the three most significant environmental issues facing Jamaica at this time,” warns Richard May, Group Director of Environmental Affairs, Sandals Resorts International (SRI).
“Coastal Erosion and Rising Sea-levels run a close second.

Jamaica is at a stage where so many of our environmental issues are at a tipping point, that it won’t take much to topple the cup!”...

www.eccomagazine.com/no-problem-paradise.php