No mining in Cockpit Country!
Trelawny parish councillors unite to stop bauxite companies
HORACE HINES,Observer West reporter
Thursday, November 23, 2006



Adamant. The JLP's Fernandez 'Bingy' Smith says he'll do everything in his power to save the Cockpit Country

COCKPIT COUNTRY - Fernandez 'Bingy' Smith, the hard-nosed vice-chairman of the Trelawny Parish Council's finance committee, has moved a motion to save the ecologically sensitive Cockpit Country from the backhoes of Alcoa Minerals of Jamaica and Clarendon Alumina Production (CAP).

The motion - seconded by Garth Wilkinson, the ruling People's National Party's (PNP's) councillor for the Falmouth Division, at the council's monthly meeting recently - calls for a resolution to refuse the issuing of licences for mining in the Cockpit Country which has been designated one of the 200 most important ecological sites in the world by the International Conservation Union (ICU).

"I am a victim of bauxite mining in the Mocho Mountains. My family was dispersed and relocated from Clarendon. We are not going to retreat, because it is a no-no," said Smith, also the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party's (JLP's) councillor for the Sherwood Division. "I will be at the forefront of the struggle, so it could be Paul Bogle all over again... I am prepared to sensitise the people about the imminent disaster in store for the environment if mining is allowed."

Wilkinson, one of two PNP councillors on the nine-member Council, agreed.

"From the Council's point of view, we are trying to protect the Cockpit Country," he said.

Alcoa Minerals of Jamaica and Clarendon Alumina Production (CAP) obtained an exclusive prospecting licence in May 2004, to search for bauxite deposits in the Cockpit Country, which is located in Trelawny and St Ann.

Trelawny communities included in the search are Wakefield, Bunkers Hill, Sherwood Content, Duanvale, Kinloss, Jackson Town, Stewart Town, Level Bottom, Rest and Be Thankful and Bryan Castle. Also included are Scarborough Mountain, Gordon's Run, Mosquito Cove, Fontabelle, Pantrepant, Albert Town, Ulster Spring, Dromilly and Deeside.

Smith, a trained agriculturist, bemoaned the anticipated catastrophic effect that mining would have on the farming belt of South Trelawny which relies heavily on yam production.

"The long-term economic benefits of having these areas (remain) unmined would better suit the country. Most of the plants grown in these areas are rich in medicinal values," he noted.

Hugh Dixon, executive director of the South Trelawny Environmental Agency (STEA) and co-ordinator for the renowned Trelawny Yam Festival, also condemned the move to mine in the Cockpit Country.

"The area is a sensitive ecological area that, if mined, cannot be restored. To have something that has international recognition and destroy it is ridiculous," he said.

Dixon noted further that the Cockpit Country supplies 33 per cent of Jamaica's fresh water, which, if disturbed through mining, would result in the disruption of water flow to major rivers such as Martha Brae, Great River and the YS River.

"The Cockpit Country is made of hillocks and bottom lands and the areas where you will find bauxite is the bottom lands, but these areas are where you will be finding agricultural production and residential locations. So if you mine it you would be disrupting the commercial, productive and residential lives of these communities," he said.

Big Up Bingy!!!

This is beyond politics.

This is ours!

All the best, Justice.

From the Frying Pan into the Red Mud
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, November 26, 2006



We are all Maroons now, whether we know it or not, wherever we are on the face of the Earth, whoever we are, black, white or in-between, male or female, human, as long as we are alive, animal or vegetable, on land or in the sea or the air, our very existence is under attack.


John Maxwell
If we want to survive we have to take action. We need to resist the destruction of our own and our planet's integrity, resist degradation and deformity and protect ourselves from extinction.

We are under siege by a system gone mad, an economic system gone berserk, unaccountable to anyone and responsible to nothing because this system has no rules. It can do anything it wants to anyone, any living organism.
It is destroying oceans, mountains and entire ecosystems, and with giant dams, even slowing the revolution of the Earth. It destroys everything in its way, creating deserts out of fertile land, submerging low-lying lands, poisoning the air we breathe, altering weather systems in unpredictable ways and producing more destructive hurricanes and typhoons, even slowing down the mighty Gulf Stream itself, destroying the ice-cover at the North Pole, breaking up the ice continent of Antarctica into icebergs bigger than Jamaica and threatening life itself everywhere on Earth.

It is a system described by George Soros, one of the world's richest men, as "Gangster Capitalism".
On the world stage it calls itself 'globalisation'. On the local stage, everywhere, its adherents call it 'Development'.
In this system, everything and everyone is for sale. Human dignity itself becomes a marketable commodity, affordable to those with enough money to buy themselves a little time.

A FATHER KILLS HIS SON

In Vietnam 40 years ago, the Americans thought they were buying time and safeguarding progress. The Domino Theory was ascendant, and South-East Asia was to be made safe for democracy.

This ideal led to the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of people, some American, some Vietnamese. Here is the story of three Americans:
The son speaks: "The areas around us were heavily defoliated, so defoliated that they looked like burned-out areas, many of them. You know, almost every day that you were in riverboat patrol, you were being subjected to the Agent Orange factor."

The father speaks: "It is the case that the particular area in Vietnam in which my son's boat operated a great deal of the time was an area that was sprayed up on my recommendation, and in that sense it's particularly ironic that in a sense, if the causal relationship can be established, I have become an instrument of my son's own tragedy."
The son is Elmo Zumwalt III, son of Elmo Zumwalt II, Admiral and Chief of Naval Operations of the USA. Elmo the younger died at 42, destroyed by cancers induced by Agent Orange. His father died 11 years later, aged 79.

While serving as Commander of US naval forces in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970 the elder Zumwalt had ordered the spraying of the defoliant Agent Orange in the Mekong Delta, seeking to deny cover to snipers on the river banks.
The older Zumwalt killed his son. His son's genes, deformed by Agent Orange, severely damaged his grandson's nervous system resulting in serious learning disabilities. He is unable to speak for himself.

Hundreds of thousands of South-East Asians were also killed and maimed by Agent Orange and many of their children have been born and are now being born dead, disabled or hideously deformed.

Agent Orange is a mixture of two phenoxyl herbicides 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5 trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T). These were developed for agro-industry factory farming to control broad-leaved weeds. In broad-leaved plants they induce rapid, uncontrolled growth, eventually killing them. There were used all over the world by the middle of the 1950s. At least one extension officer in Jamaica, my friend 'Buddha' Webster, was killed by exposure to this toxin.

It was later learned that a dioxin, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin (TCDD), is produced as a by-product of the manufacture of 2,4,5-T, and was thus present in any of the herbicides that used it. This chemical is among those now present in the waters of Kingston Harbour, and as I pointed out five years ago, redistributed in the dredging of the harbour.

TCDD is a carcinogen, frequently associated with soft-tissue sarcoma, Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL). 2,4,5-T has since been banned for use in the US and many other countries. Its initial effects include liver damage, loss of energy and diminished sex drive.

During the 1970s, at the height of the destabilisation of the Manley government, I saw at Newport East, a big transformer built for JPS dropped onto the quayside, breaking open and spilling into the harbour gallons of dioxins, which remain there to this day.

THE RESOURCE CURSE

Almost all the countries now described as 'developing' or 'underdeveloped' share one major characteristic: for hundreds of years their people, their lands, their resources have provided the raw materials for the development of the so-called 'developed world'.
As one American comic has said: "What is our oil doing underneath Iraq and Venezuela?"

Almost every war ever fought and most of today's wars and civil wars derive from the idea that the strong are entitled to the resources of the weak because the weak don't know how to use their resources appropriately. In this perspective, Jamaican farmland is not serving its proper purpose by producing food. Jamaican bauxite is necessary for 'progress' to make more planes, more frying pans, more garbage and to stiffen the GDP.

In Rio de Janeiro, 14 years ago, political leaders and bureaucrats from all over the world (including P J Patterson) met to agree on a new compact to define development or 'progress' if you will. They signed the Treaty of Rio, otherwise known as Agenda 21, and it committed the nations of the world to work together to assure the survival of the planet and all the living things which inhabit it by adopting and practising sustainable development.

The first paragraph of the preamble of the treaty is worth remembering: "Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being."
Environmentalists put it more crudely: We are living beyond our means, overdrawing our credit from the earth, destroying finite resources for greed.

The oil industry is only now waking up to the prospect that its behaviour may condemn all of us to a future of darkness, disease and destitution; only now beginning to recognise that there is an imminent threat of catastrophic changes because of global warming. Even Mr Bush (USA) and Mr Howard of Australia seem to be seeing the light. The Chinese seem to have some way to go before they emerge from their tunnel of development.

In the Rio statement on sustainable development, the world's leaders acknowledged "the integral and interdependent nature of the Earth, our home" and proclaimed as the first principle of development that: "Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature."

THE PREDATOR'S PROGRESS

Progress is today defined by measuring how much of one's patrimony can be safely delivered into the hands of developers. We offer them incentives to come to despoil our patrimony, abuse and deform our social relations and generally disinherit us. In gracious exchange they will make billions of tax-free dollars and demonstrate how different they are to the rest of the miserable and oppressed of the earth. In return we can go live in the Bronx.

All over the world, indigenous populations are counselled to be investor friendly, to assist the despoliation of their holy mountains in Chile; the poisoning of their streams and the deforestation of their landscapes in New Guinea; the displacement, murder and rape of thousands to make way for oil pipelines in Burma (Myanmar). The progress-bringers are destroying the glaciers of Iceland, the Jarrah forests of Western Australia and the communal tranquility of the Cedros peninsula in Trinidad.

The 2005 Yale/Columbia Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) showed Trinidad and Tobago as having the worst percentage of negative land impacts of 146 countries, yet Trinidad's government is ignoring the protests of its people who don't want any more pollution and degradation of their small and beautiful island.

Public protests in Chile, Brazil and Vietnam have kept proposed aluminum smelters out of those countries. The Trinidadian citizens group Cedros Peninsula United say that when they managed to obtain a copy of Alcoa's (secret) environmental clearance, jointly signed by Alcoa and the government's energy corporation, they found it full of omissions, inaccuracies and outright false statements.

The Barrick Corporation of Canada, like Alcoa, a transnational despoiler of the environment, is proposing to mine 500 tonnes of gold from mountain peaks in Chile. The Barrick corporation intends (Listen to This!) to relocate three glaciers (rivers of ice) to get at the gold.

As you might imagine, the people of Chile are not accepting this proposed rape of their environment.
The proposed assault on the Cockpit Country is not simply an assault on the sensibilities of a few environmentalists. It is an affront to the whole of humanity. When the great devastation comes we won't be saved by bauxite or alumina, but by the species finding shelter in the land of 'Look Behind' and similar refuges around the world.

A hundred years ago Jules Verne described the Gulf Stream as "the sea's greatest river [and] we must pray that this steadiness continues because ...if its speed and direction were to change, the climates of Europe would undergo disturbances whose consequences are incalculable".

The sea's greatest river is slowing down, and the consequences have been calculated. A few weeks ago the British government published a report by Sir Nicholas Stern on the economic consequences of climate change. The report says the possibility of avoiding a global catastrophe is "already almost out of reach",
Stern says changes in weather patterns could drive down the output of the world's economies by up to £6 trillion a year by 2050, an amount equivalent to almost the entire output of the EU. This catastrophic prospect is the direct result of 'progress' as defined by people who have more money than conscience.

If the Gulf Stream slows to a stop or even if it simply continues to slow down, the effects on climate, farming and the populations of the world will be in one word, disaster.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize economist of 2001 and former chief economist of the World Bank says, "The Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change makes clear that the question is not whether we can afford to act, but whether we can afford not to act. [The report] provides a comprehensive agenda, one which is economically and politically feasible, behind which the entire world can unite in addressing this most important threat to our future well-being."

Neither Stern nor Stiglitz (nor Soros) is some wool-gathering tree-hugger. They are among the people recognised as the brightest in the world. I prefer to believe them rather than some public relations flack from any aluminium company or the Port Authority or any other agency of the Jamaican government.

The Spanish hotels on the North Coast are disasters in their own right and will soon become catastrophic losses because of sea level rise and hurricanes. And we will pay for that as we will pay for the 'Doomsday Highway' which is already obsolete.

As I pointed out in my column, People at Risk in February 2002, some of the geniuses of the Jamaican 'development' process tolerate no opposition to 'progress'. They will destroy our coral reefs and degrade the harbour to take bigger container ships - themselves extinct within 20 years. At that time I reported that the bottom of Kingston Harbour contained several extremely dangerous substances and warned that PAJ dredging would redistribute them unpredictably and in a manner which would almost certainly be hazardous to health, particularly to the people of Portmore.

I reported that among toxins present were: Arsenic, Cadmium, Dioxins (including derivatives of Agent Orange), Lead, Lindane, Hexachlorobenzene, Tetrachloroethylene and good, old Mad Hatter's Mercury.

"Progress' has brought civil war, genocide and HIV/AIDS to Africa. It has deformed our politics, driven away our best and brightest all in search of the Holy Grail of 'development',
We can eat Trelawny yam and gungo peas. We can't eat Red Mud, although we may have to drink it, if progress has its way with the 'Land of Look Behind'. Prosit!

Thank you FF for a very thought provoking article.

The Earth lies bleeding
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, December 03, 2006



Norman Manley was a man who loved the earth. He was an environmentalist long before that word was fashionable. He was one of those in the Jamaica Agricultural Society who demanded that the mining of bauxite should not disfigure Jamaica, that the topsoil should be replaced after mining. He wrote the Beach Control Act, the Watersheds Protection Act and was involved with the writing of the Wildlife Protection Act.


John Maxwell
He was the founder of Jamaica Welfare, financed by contributions negotiated by him from the banana shipping companies. Jamaica Welfare was Manley's start in nation-building, a term I believe he invented. Jamaica Welfare was the paradigm and pattern for a host of community development efforts all over the world, using home-grown techniques and home-grown experts to develop programmes in which the poorest people were collateralised - as the saying now is - producing cottage crafts and selling them through cooperatives. Those programmes are now being re-exported to us.
Jamaica Welfare built its first community centre in Porus in 1937. It is still there. From Porus you can see the hills where Norman Manley was born.

Manley was born in Manchester, at the place called Marlborough southwest of Porus. It used to be a place of rolling hills, a cool and tranquil plateau of quiet unassertive beauty. At Marlborough, Norman Manley's birthplace is officially a National Monument.

Today, this monument to the man called the Father of the Nation is in the midst of a wilderness of bleeding earth. The rolling hills have been gouged and torn, their quiet beauty maimed as if gormandised by a cosmodemonic shark, the wounds in the earth transforming the National Monument into a grisly parody.

Marlborough has yielded up its bauxite, its beauty and tranquility to the draglines and back-hoes and insatiable profit seeking of Alcoa - the Aluminum Company of America.


This river runs through the Cockpit Country.

Alcoa was allowed to deprave this landscape by the Jamaica Bauxite Institute (JBI), which has been appointed by the National Environmental Planning Agency/Natural Resources Conservation Authority to be its surrogate in dealing with the bauxite mining companies. The JBI is supposedly the trustee of the Jamaican people in defending the national patrimony.

Oliver Twist on Steroids

In its Annual Report for the year 2000, Alcoa boasted of record revenues, earnings, and growth.
"Alcoa begins the 21st century with an unprecedented show of strength. In 1999, we posted record revenue earnings, and growth and topped the Dow's 30 companies by a wide margin with a total return for shareholders of 126 per cent.

"Revenues rose to a new high of $16.3 billion and earnings exceeded $1 billion for the first time in our history. Earnings per share increased by 17 per cent to $2.82. The annual rate of return for Alcoa shareholders has averaged over 33 per cent over the past five years.

"These are extraordinary results, not only for Alcoa and for this year, but for most industrial companies and for any aluminum company ever. Still, it's important to realise: Our 1999 performance is a milestone, not a destination."
It was shortly after this that Alcoa let it be known that the Jamaican Government's levy was a hardship; the company was overtaxed, and the Government of Jamaica obediently obliged by changing the levy system into a notional tax.

Earlier this year, Alcoa's smaller shareholders (yes, there are some) passed a resolution criticising the company's retirement payoffs for its senior executives. The United Steelworkers Union of America (USWA) blasted the company for ignoring the shareholders' resolution and said :

"Basically, Alcoa shareholders decided that they cannot trust Alcoa's board of directors to look after their interests. Alcoa executives and directors clearly look out for each other, but they are often oblivious to the interests of employees and other stakeholders."

" . oblivious to the interests of employees and other stakeholders?" What on earth can they mean?
Alcoa clearly doesn't see it that way. In its latest Annual Report, the company boasts of its "Unflinching Values" and alleges that:
"Alcoa's partnerships and acquisitions have a remarkable track record, partly because they are based on mutual respect and kept promises.

"Values are at the core of our due diligence process.
"Employees and host communities recognise and respond to our priorities in health and safety, environmental responsibility, and respect for the individual. Alcoa brings its core values to each of its operations around the world."

The people of Mocho and other places in Jamaica, including the mayor of Falmouth and his parish council, obviously do not share these sentiments. As far as they are concerned, they are still waiting after 30 years for Alcoa to fulfill its solemn undertakings - its promises - to rehouse them and rehabilitate their land. And this, notwithstanding the fact that in the annual report the 'values' statement is printed in a fetching, dewy green with a sprig of mint in the foreground, there being nothing fresher, more green.

Green, of course, is, in places other than Jamaica, the flag of the ecologically driven, of the environmental kooks like me who think that the Earth is precious and should be treated with respect.

Alcoa's 'green' protestations make a strange background for the rage it has provoked round the world. In Iceland, in Brazil, in Trinidad and in Jamaica - to name a few - stakeholders who share Alcoa's mutual respect seem difficult to find; "promises kept" seem non-existent.

'A milestone, not a destination'

"In Iceland, artists, environmentalists, tourism operators and poets . are up in arms over plans by Norsk Hydro of Norway to dam the Jökulsá í Fljótsdal river north-east of Vatnajökull glacier in the Eyjabakkar region to power a proposed aluminum smelter in Reydarfjördur fjord" according to a community newspaper. Norsk Hydro and Alcoa are partners in a project regarded as the most gross insult offered to any European environment in recent history.

The statement "A milestone, not a destination" is obviously more a threat than a promise.
In Trinidad, the people of Cedros peninsula are up in arms about Alcoa's proposed destruction of their environment to build three smelters; in Jamaica and across the Jamaican diaspora, there is a considerable wellspring of opposition to plans to ravage the Cockpit Country for bauxite. As I reported before, the Cockpit Country is one of the most important pieces of real estate on Earth.

It is what environmentalists call a biodiversity 'hotspot', a treasure-house of evolution, home to hundreds and thousands of rare life-forms - plants and animals. The Cockpit Country is a hotspot within a hotspot, because the Greater Antilles are regarded as one of the more important hotspots in the world, making the Cockpit Country doubly precious.

There is a sickening fear among environmentalists, ecologists, scientists and just ordinary people about the plan to destroy an area which is not only biologically unique, but also a historical and cultural treasure. The Cockpit Country was the first independent republic in the western hemisphere, although is has never been so recognised.

The Maroons of Accompong and Maroon Town were the first people to force the British to make peace with them and recognise their independence. Half-a-century later, one of their ilk, a man called Bouckman, was the man who lit the fire of the Haitian revolution precipitating the abolition, first of the slave trade, and then of slavery itself and doubling the size of the United States.

Stewart Town was the first Baptist Free Village, founded by William Knibb who, had he been born here, would surely be a national hero. Westwood and Calabar, both in the threatened area, were the first schools for the children of the former slaves.
It is a fearsome prospect that on the eve of celebrating the bicentenary of the end of the slave trade, the last vestige of that heroic tradition is to be destroyed to make frying pans and Reynolds Wrap.

As I've reported before, aluminum is perhaps the most power hungry industry in the world, using so much energy that some people describe aluminum as solidified electricity. The paradox of aluminum is that it is the most abundant metal on the surface of the earth, but it is always found combined with some other elements, usually as aluminum oxide or mixed with potassium and sulphur.

Aluminum forms eight per cent of all the soil on earth, but the most abundant deposits are in tropical regions where it is the product of the decomposition of limestone. Since Jamaica west of the Wag Water is largely limestone, the soil there is largely aluminum oxide - bauxite.

Jamaica's position as a large supplier of bauxite was largely due to the Second World War and Jamaica's proximity to the United States. For nearly two decades we were the world's largest producer of bauxite. The problem with aluminum is that to separate it from the soil is a messy and dangerous process, involving high temperatures and corrosive substances.

The asthma and pervading stink of caustic soda near Ewarton, Hayes and Kirkvine are the results of the refining process and as most Jamaicans know by now, the other major result is a caustic devil's soup called red mud, which dissolves everything including, it is alleged, the lungs of children and the bodies of murder victims.

The most notorious red mud depository, at Mount Rosser, was one of the environmental disasters left behind by the first company to refine alumina in Jamaica, the Aluminum Company of Canada. Another is at Kirkvine near Mandeville. When Alcan sold out to Marc Rich's Glencore six years ago, they left these environmental time bombs as their memorial.

Last week, Alcan announced that they will 'soon' begin to rehabilitate their 50-year-old hell-hole at Mount Rosser, "ultimately rendering the site safe and transforming it into an aesthetically attractive area".

'O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!' He chortled in his joy. ...'
Whether they will be able to stop it from continuing to contaminate the groundwater of central Jamaica (and Portmore) is another question. In St Elizabeth, hundreds of billions of gallons of water underground are contaminated. If the bauxite firms get the Cockpit Country they will probably destroy the water supply of the entire north coast, and possibly the Black River as well.
And then, of course, we'll be even better prepared for climate change and environmental catastrophe.

It is to avoid that and to protect a vital area of world heritage that a number of people, environmental groups and other organisations have come together to protect the Cockpit Country. As I understand it, the decision as to whether the Cockpit Country is to be raped and degraded now rests in the hands of the minister of finance - for no good reason that I can gather.

The minister of finance is a likable and probably a very worthy person, his brother is chairman of the Jamaica Bauxite Institute, but his respect for the national patrimony may be gauged by the fact that his ministry has turned a substantial part of National Heroes Park into a car park. Since that park is a public garden created by Act of Parliament, it should be interesting to hear an explanation of the legal means used by Dr Davies' ministry to change its use.

To those of us who know the Cockpit Country as a sacred place, as an historical as well as a biological treasure, the idea of Dr Davies, the Jamaica Bauxite Institute and Alcoa getting their hands on it is a prospect to induce a century of nightmares.

If you feel strongly about this issue, the people to contact are the Cockpit Country Stakeholders Group (http://www.cockpitcountry.org/) where you will find lots of information and maps and find out what you can do to save your heritage. You might also consider the Jamaica Environment Trust, the Northern Jamaica Conservation or the South Trelawny Environmental Protection Association or one of the other groups involved in defending the Cockpit Country. They need your help.

The Government granted an exclusive prospecting licence to Alcoa and Clarendon Alumina Partners in 2004. It covers an area of over 500 square kilometres, about the size of Trelawny but spread across three parishes. In shape the area resembles an automatic pistol, [see map] aimed at Negril and the Jamaican tourist industry.
There could be no image more apt.

Copyright©2006 John Maxwell
jankunnu@yahoo.com

Fisherman Friend good to have you back

Seconded and thanks for the above.

Best, Justice.

A Mess of Pottage?
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, December 17, 2006



The proponents of unsustainable development have not had a good week. The people of Jamaica and the world are waking up to discover what they stand to lose if the Jamaica Bauxite Institute and the bauxite mining companies get their sweaty hands on the Cockpit Country - The Land of Look Behind.


John Maxwell
From all over the world, support has been building for the preservation of this singular treasure. A few letters have been printed in the press and the talk shows are just beginning to reflect public anger. But perhaps the single most damaging fact to the cause of the JBI et al was the announcement, a few days ago, that a new cancer drug has been extracted and developed from an endemic Jamaican plant.

This is much bigger news than the simple fact that this drug is proving effective against certain forms of cancer. It is more important because this is the second major discovery of the treasures hidden in the Jamaican portion of the biosphere.

As I reported 253 columns ago, scientists had discovered "On the roots of the mangroves in Kingston Harbour and perhaps elsewhere in Jamaica, . a tiny animal, smaller than the first joint in the average adult's little finger, an orange-coloured soft-bodied creature which looks more like a flower than an animal. The name of this insignificant beast is Ecteinascidia turbinata - known to its admirers as a sea-squirt.

It is one of a number of marine animals which manufacture proteins that are proving effective in fighting cancer and may yield substances which may be able to defeat other diseases. A big Spanish drug company, PharmaMar, has bought the rights to a new drug derived from one of the sea-squirt's proteins.

.




"Early trial results have indicated that ET-743 may eventually play a role in treating certain soft tissue sarcomas and other cancers including advanced-stage breast, colon, ovarian and lung cancer, melanoma, mesothelioma and several types of sarcoma. Ecteinascidin not only shrinks and kills tumours, it also restricts cancer's ability to resist other drugs Infinite Injustice " (Infinite Injustice - March 17, 2002)

In another column, nearly a year later, I reported on the government's plans to devastate another priceless, world scientific resource - an unprepossessing wilderness place called Harris Savannah, just off the Doomsday Highway near May Pen, which one of the world's most noted botanists, Dr George Proctor, thinks is a botanical treasury of world importance.

"After rain, Harris Savannah is a botanical bonanza, full of species unknown until Proctor discovered them. Many are new to science. Apart from their intrinsic interest to botanists, some could be of profitable horticultural economic interest; others may contain substances which may lead to important medical or other scientific advances. Most of the world's standard medications are made from compounds first discovered in plants and other 'insignificant' forms of life." - (Treasure in the Badlands November 29, 2003)

In a press release two weeks ago, the head of the Jamaica Bauxite Institute described the campaign against the destruction of the Cockpit Country as 'almost hysterical' - which may or may not be a reference to the fact that so many active environmentalists in Jamaica are women.

I must confess that I too have a long history of 'almost hysteria' dating back, perhaps, to the time when Dr Lyew Ayee was a baby. This year makes 50 years since I led a successful campaign in Public Opinion weekly to force the Caribbean Cement Company to install electrostatic precipitators. These scrubbers recovered seven tons of dust daily, from the smokestack of the company which, until then, had been choking the lungs of Jamaicans high and low.

If that was 'almost hysteria', Dr Lyew Ayee can make as much of it as he wants. Campaigning for a National Minimum Wage (on Public Eye) and for disarming Jamaica and against the death penalty and against the rape of Hope Gardens may also have been 'almost hysterical.' I really don't care what Dr Lyew Ayee calls me or my allies. What we care about is what unsustainable development is likely to do to Jamaica.

For instance: It was reported, some years ago, that the NRCA had turned down a foreign exchange earning development project to build an incinerator in Jamaica to burn imported toxic wastes. I would like to ask Dr Lyew Ayee whether, had he been a member of the NRCA Board at the time, would he have voted for or against the proposal?

I would like to ask the question of several other people, including the former prime minister among others, because it is the sort of question which, in my view, separates the 'almost hysterical' from the sound, sober, reliable forward-thinking people who only have Jamaica's best interest at heart.

Water, water everywhere and .
In the Manifesto of the People's National Party in 1997, the party declared its commitment to "work towards creating a society of high moral values and attitudes; the party best able to unite the people into one common band marching to the goal of creating a better quality of life for all."

Lest it be misunderstood that the party was speaking about foreign exchange, the next sentence makes it clear what the PNP considered the components of a "better life".
"Protecting and conserving our island's resources is an imperative, if we are to preserve its natural features and beauty.
Man is dependent on the integrity of the environment and there is a sacred obligation to protect God's earth and to preserve the quality of life for future generations.

The PNP believes that orderly development can and must co-exist with a healthy respect for the natural resources that sustain development.

We have therefore pursued a collaborative national effort with the private sector and individual communities, to rescue areas of the environment that are under siege." [my emphasis]
The Cockpit Country is one of those areas now under siege and it may be the most important such area, worthy, as the government once believed, of being declared a world heritage site.

In 1997, the government was just four years into a commitment to ratify the SPAW Protocol of the Cartagena Convention. The founder of Greenpeace International, the late David McTaggart, told me he considered SPAW the single most effective piece of international legislation for the protection of habitat and life forms, and he made three visits to Jamaica to be assured by three different ministers of environment, that Jamaica would soon ratify SPAW.

Although the document itself is housed at the International Seabed Authority's Headquarters just a few hundred yards from Gordon House, where our parliament meets, the government has not seen it fit so far to honour its promise.

Jamaica is the only significant signatory not to have ratified SPAW and while the SPAW document lives in Jamaica, Jamaica's representatives to SPAW meetings are observers only, not members.

This is clearly sound, anti-hysterical behaviour.
But the governing party has clearly broken important promises to Jamaica, or at the very least, not remembered to fulfill them.
The PNP manifesto (p 49) made explicit promises in 1997: ". During our third term we will:

. Undertake a comprehensive programme to clean up the physical environment and to protect our beaches, watersheds, reefs and other sensitive ecosystems;

. revitalise our national parks and gardens and establish additional national and marine parks
.The new millennium is the time to reaffirm our responsibility to protect and enhance our environment, so that the country we hand over to future generations will be a better place to live in."
Pretty strong words, but the party was not content with that. On page 71, under the title: "Our Pledge" the party drew a line in the sand:

". . to protect and safeguard our environmental heritage, thereby protecting our fragile ecology for the benefit of future generations.

That, of course, sounds almost hysterical to me, given Hope Gardens and Long Mountain and Harris Savannah and the Doomsday Highway and Bloody Bay and Pear Tree Bottom and Point, and Palmyra and Winniefred Beach.

AMERICAN HYSTERIA

On the website of the US Army Corps of Engineers, there is a fascinating document of 118 pages, including appendices etc.
This document is called Water Resources Assessment of Jamaica and is dated February 2001.

As a technical military document the assessment is, as might be expected, a dry, businesslike paper, all 118 pages of it. It even includes the latitude and longitude of every Jamaican locality mentioned in the text and you may be interested to know that the coordinates for Albert Town are 1817 N 07733 W.

The authors are very meticulous. There may be however, some cause for alarm in developer circles. All three specialists who carried out the assessments are geologists but since they are all women, there is clearly some possibility that their conclusions may be regarded as 'almost hysterical".

However: "This information may be used to support current and potential future investments in managing the water resources of the country and to assist military planners during troop engineering exercise and theatre engagement training. . in addition to assisting the military planner, this assessment can aid the host nation by highlighting critical need areas, which in turn serves to support potential water resources development, preservation and enhancement funding programmes.

Highlighted problems are the lack of access to water supply by much of the population, the density of the population in Kingston, the lack of wastewater treatment, and contamination by industrial processes associated with bauxite mining, sugar cane processing and agricultural activities."

As we know, dunder from sugar estates is often pumped into sinkholes, killing fish and causing widespread pollution of what could be drinking water. The fertilizer used on sugar cane in western Jamaica is one of the factors destroying the famous seven miles of Negril Beach and of course, we know, as I reported a few weeks ago, that the head of Jamaica's Water Resources Authority has reported on the pollution of the aquifer, big time, by bauxite effluent in St Elizabeth.

One of the problems with dealing with Dr Lyew Ayee is that some of what he says, if reported correctly, appears to defy common sense, if not science. He appeared to suggest that surface water would not contaminate the underground aquifer. The lady geologists from the Corps of Engineers say that the streams in the Cockpit Country areas "are fed and in some cases feed the interior karstic limestone aquifer." (p.18)
"For instance, the water in the upper reaches of the White River, may, in places disappear into the limestone aquifer and then rise several kilometres downstream. Drainage in this area is primarily underground and any precipitation is quickly channeled or absorbed into the subsurface."

Again, on page 19 they report that in the Cockpit Country "any water that runs off the central mountains is quickly channeled or absorbed into the subsurface" and they instance the Martha Brae River, the largest source of water on the north coast.
"The Moneague Blue Hole, located in the Dry Harbour Mountains Basin, was once a good freshwater source.

However, this has recently become contaminated. The contamination is believed to be from a bauxite lake, Mt Rosser Pond, which has a high sodium effluent.

"While this might seem to put paid to any further bauxite development in the area, we need to consider one additional point made by these highly trained geologists: "Surface water is generally fresh; however, some major threats to the water quality are from industry, human and animal wastes, insecticides, and herbicides. Most of the mineral industry is based on bauxite mining, and some of the bauxite produced is refined into alumina on the island. Bauxite mining is surface mining, which is land-intensive, noisy, and dusty.

Jamaica can produce about three million tons of alumina per year. The refining process creates a thick fluid called "red mud" which has high levels of sodium and hydroxide ions, iron oxides, and organic substances.

About one ton of red mud waste or residue will be produced from each ton of alumina. The land mass cannot accommodate this high volume of waste. This waste is often ponded into lakes, either man-made or karst depressions, with no consideration of the environmental effects.

The effluent is free to seep into the subsurface, or to mix with precipitation, creating caustic ponds. The disposal of the wastes from alumina processing is a major environmental problem. Discoloration, turbidity, and high coliform bacteria counts, due to the high organic content."

I hope you read that extract carefully.
When I read it, one line jumped out and bit me:
"The land mass cannot accommodate this high volume of waste."

I think that this is a fact that many Jamaicans have known subconsciously for a long time, but we keep denying it, in the interest of foreign exchange.

I keep on referring to poor, tiny Nauru, that Pacific island composed largely of phosphate, fossilised seabird dung, which has been mined almost into non-existence. Those who are left on Nauru will soon have to leave forever, because their country is about to disappear beneath the waves.

In Jamaica, we have a slightly different problem. If, as they say, water is life, bauxite will soon make life impossible on this island. Life, that is, as we understand it.
If the developers have their way, we will be selling our birthright not for a mess of pottage, but a mess of red mud.
Esau, Esau, wherefore art thou Esau?"

copyright ©John Maxwell
jankunnu [at} yahoo.com

If global warming, species destruction etc is a reality, what could be the fate of those that used
persuasion to deflect the dissemination of information of threats posed.

I refer to those that are employed to carry out this possible crime and those that enjoy benefits from unsustainable practices while understanding the consequences.

No, I'm not threatening just projecting possibilities. Surely war crimes pale besides threatening the survival of us 'higher' lifeforms.

Justice, deadly serious! and also one of those guilty of excess carbon emmissions etc.