Dear ALL (apologies for cross-postings),



The petition to Save Cockpit Country is now live online at The Petition Site:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/848967167



There are minor changes in wording (it had to be condensed and edited to fit the form) but it is essentially the same petition that was sent into circulation by the Cockpit Country Stakeholders’ Group in association with JEAN.



This petition is VERY simple to use – you have a choice to post a comment (for public view) when you sign or just to ‘quick sign’ with a click or two.



If you have ALREADY signed a hard copy or sent an electronic message to indicate that you support the original petition, it’s OK to sign the online version, but please indicate somehow in the comment box that this is your second appearance – I suggest adding a note such as (‘signed original also’). This way we can read your comments but subtract you from the tally!



You’ll get a confirmation e-mail (for verification and security reasons) with a link to the Petition that you can circulate if you wish.



The Petition Site will help us to collate and forward the petition results to the Prime Minister when it is time to do so.



Thanks for your support!



Wendy Lee

For JEAN / CCSG



Northern Jamaica Conservation Association

PO Box 212, Runaway Bay, St. Ann

JAMAICA, W.I.

Tel / fax: 876-973-4305

E-mail: NJCA@cwjamaica.com

Here's a link to a Gleaner story entitled "International Maroons defend Cockpit"
http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20070108/lead/lead1.html

Also see these threads for more information.
http://webtonic.info/discus/messages/1584/6792.html
http://webtonic.info/discus/messages/1584/7004.html
http://webtonic.info/discus/messages/1584/6565.html

-TBNet

Digging Down Jamaica
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, January 21, 2007



The story of Nauru, the world's smallest island nation fascinates me, which is why I keep referring to it as an horrific example of unsustainable development. One of my readers complained that I hadn't really told you much about Nauru, except that it was about to disappear beneath the waves because of rapacious strip mining and global warming.


John Maxwell
So, let us look at Nauru. It's very hard to find, being slightly less than half the size of Kingston Harbour. It is a coral island to the east of New Guinea and almost directly on the Equator.

Most European navigators seemed to have missed Nauru in nearly 300 years of 'discovery' until a British sailor stumbled upon it in the 1830s. The Germans annexed it with the approval of the British in the 1880s, when Europe and the USA were busy carving up the world like a birthday cake.

Soon, it was discovered that the island consisted almost entirely of phosphate the fossilised excrement of seabirds and mining began.
By then alcohol and western improvements had taken their toll. An internecine war began among the 1,500 or so islanders which ended when the population had been reduced by one third and two of the 12 original tribes were extinct.

Mining consisted, as in Jamaica, of scraping off the topsoil and sending it to Europe and America and the world. The phosphate was used to fertilise corn, rose gardens and sugar cane. Phosphate mining was so profitable that by the 1960s Nauru's GDP was second only to Saudi Arabia's, but GDP doesn't translate into money for ordinary people as we in Jamaica know from bitter experience Nauru was running out of phosphate. By the time the Nauruans realised that they needed to do something about it, it was too late.


Scene of the Cockpit Country
They set up a trust fund to invest their income from phosphate, but within 20 years, by the end of the 20th century, Nauru was for all practical purposes bankrupt.
A brief try at offshore banking (money laundering) was put down by the international community.

Bankruptcy is not Nauru's only problem. The bling and kitsch of the glory years produced unhealthy eating habits and today, Nauru has an additional claim to infamy: it is the world capital of toxic malnutrition. Because of poor diet, alcohol abuse, and unemployment, Nauru has the world's highest level of diabetes, kidney failure and heart disease, affecting 40% of the population. Sounds a little like Jamaica don't you think?

Global warming and climate change will produce sea-level rise that will one day not too far off, swamp poor denuded Nauru and make it vanish beneath the Pacific. There will be no evidence of the crime.

THREATEN THE EXISTENCE OF MAN HIMSELF

The short unhappy saga of Nauru is a microcosm of globalisation and its effects. As Jamaica's National Environmental and Planning Agency (NEPA) says in its guidelines for Environment Impact Assessment:

"The production of goods and services to meet global population demands has occasioned a number of activities which have depleted the globe's natural resources and in several instances contributed to environmental degradation through pollution. These activities done in the pursuit of economic development have also caused the loss of several species of plants and animals and now threaten the existence of man himself, if left uncontrolled."

Humanity came to that conclusion in 1992 when the worlds leaders, including P J Patterson (accompanied by a gaggle of Jamaican environmental experts) signed the Treaty of Rio.
That treaty, known as Agenda 21, charted a new course for the sustainable development of the people of the world, including Jamaica.

Last week the Gleaner was reporting that Windalco, formed when Marc Rich bought out Alcan, is to invest J$3 billion in a plant to produce quicklime in Jamaica. Windalco uses 300,000 tons of lime annually and substantial tonnage was imported despite local installed capacity which should be able to produce the stuff.

Windalco didn't want to go into the business originally, but the decision was a no-brainer since '75 per cent of Jamaica comprises high quality limestone' and ready to be turned into dollars.
As we look up from Kingston to Wareika Hill we see it disfigured not only by the Cartade favelas but by the enormous wounds left by the cement company's limestone and gypsum mining.

In Duncans, near where I was born, the hillside topsoil is underlain by prehistoric coral reefs, solid limestone. After 60 years, the wound remains from the US Army Air Force construction of the Braco aerodrome when I was a child. That quarry, near Silver Sands, seems to have been one of the sources for the roadbed of the Northcoast Highway a superfluous and arrogant example of public irresponsibility.

Windalco correctly understands the nature of Jamaica and its development-apparatchiks. West of the Wag Water Jamaica is either limestone or bauxite. The island is ripe for Nauruisation.
Elements of the government bureaucracy obviously think so too. They seem to have a plan which envisages a Jamaica divided neatly into five sectors: A highway sector, capable of hosting international sports car racing, as in Monaco.

A housing sector, built on any available piece of public land, whether farmland or wetland or biological hotspot eg; Kennedy Grove; Portmore; Harris Savannah. A tourism sector, built on public beaches and walled off from the Jamaican public, who will under globalisation, now pay for the privilege of bathing in their own sea or even viewing it and having the same rights in Jamaica as would Appalachian hillbillies. A bauxite sector, which in pursuit of the sacred ideal of wealth creation for foreign investors, will destroy whatever acreage is left by the other three sectors.

A human resources sector, trained to provide suitable labour for the other sectors, composed of people with no urge to create anything, no need to wonder at the grandeur of nature (there won't be any) or to speculate in the fertile wildernesses which provide room for the soul to roam. They will be born without souls, after suitable genetic modification.

There will be nothing to research, nothing to discover, nothing to amaze or awe, except American and Japanese 'killer' video games, and, most specifically, nowhere to dream. Sound systems will take care of that. I forgot, there will be a religious cum entertainment sector to deal effectively and efficiently with whatever is left of our children's minds and stop them singing "All I want for Christmas is an M-16."

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IS ABOUT PEOPLE, NOT THINGS

As I write on Wednesday, I have been informed that representatives of the Cockpit Country Stakeholders Group have been politely received by a governmental ministerial subcommittee on mining which seems to want to understand why there is so much excitement about their plans to ravage The Cockpit Country the Land of Look Behind.

As I suspected, the ministerial subcommittee was more interested in technical matters than anything else.
The subcommittee members present were minister Roger Clarke, minister Anthony Hylton, minister Donald Buchanan, (intermittently) minister Dean Peart, minister Victor Cummings, minister Phillip Paulwell (came late), the attorney general AJ Nicholson, Parris Lyew Ayee from Jamaica Bauxite Institute and Clinton Thompson, Commissioner of Mines, Rohan Michards ministry of agriculture, Leonie Barnaby ministry of local gov't and the environment.

Three lawyers, one farmer, one trade unionist, one supermarket operator, one sociologist, the technical head of the Jamaica Bauxite Institute and three civil servants. No one representing the nation's so-called National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA). Obviously, our environment does not need protection.

Aside from the fact that I differ profoundly from my fellow
stakeholders in the CCSG on the business of boundaries, I really do not believe most Jamaicans are really concerned about boundaries at this time. What people on the street and on the Internet tell me is that they want to keep the mining industry out of the whole of the Cockpit Country, which a great many regard as a sacred piece of Jamaica.

Most of those I have spoken to are outraged that anyone could even think of mining in the Cockpit Country as a former very senior civil servant told me in the pharmacy two days ago. He was very angry. So are a lot of other people.

The Land of Look Behind is sacred for many reasons one of them being that in its silences are shrouded the bones of all our ancestors, brown, black and white, Taino, African and European. The Cockpit Country was the seedbed for revolution and the spark for abolition.

To the coupon clippers and the margin gatherers, the Land of Look Behind represents nothing but foregone profits. To the rest of us it represents not only our history, but our future, a future which will be foreclosed by reincarnated Henry Morgans, and Blackbeards the 'Chainsaw Al' crowd and the other modern freebooters of globalisation, people without souls, representing entities without conscience, intent only on making the last piece of profit out of the last piece of human dignity.

I and many others to whom I have spoken do not want the Cockpit Country to be a kind of reservation behind valleys of destruction and the ruins of mountains, hills, culture and history.
It is not simply our duty to defend the Cockpit Country, but it is also our responsibility to hold the mining interests and the government to their responsibility to tell us the truth and to justify their indecent assault on a national treasure. The NRCA law demands that accountability and no regiment of lawyers can give Alcoa or Marc Rich a ....?.

The kind of enterprise proposed for the Cockpit Country has no boundaries in its ambit of destruction. An alumina refinery just outside the Cockpit Country will mortify the lungs of schoolchildren and adults and of livestock, kill trees and poison the groundwater for nearly half of Jamaica.

It will destroy the birds, butterflies and fireflies that are part of the magic of the Land of Look Behind.
Aluminum is the world's most abundant metal and its production the most environmentally destructive.
And Jamaica is a very small, very precious country.

CAN WE AFFORD BAUXITE?

If you want to know what bauxite has done to your country, go to Marlborough in Manchester to see how it has devastated the national shrine for Norman Manley, or to the area round Alexandria and Aboukir in St Ann or Mocho in Clarendon. Ask the people of Ewarton or Hayes Cornpiece or Fanti Lands about their asthma, their corroded roofs and dying fruit trees, their contaminated water and the broken promises and lies of the bauxite companies.

If you want to know what bauxite holds in store for us, read what the experts have to say in reports by Basil Fernandez, Head of our Water Resources Authority, Dr Jasmino Karanjac, former Professor of Geomorphology at the UWI and the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Fernandez reports on the extensive pollution of underground water resources by bauxite mud; Karanjac believes that we will soon be forced to distil water because of an impending shortage due to industrial, mostly bauxite pollution; and the US Army Corps of Engineers is certain that we cannot afford three million tons of red mud a year from alumina refining.

Having read those statements, all reported in this column over the last few months, ask yourself why is it that the people who want to protect Jamaica's environment are being asked to justify their position? Ask why it is that no questions are asked of those who wish to take indecent liberties with our landscape, our history and our souls?

Ask yourself why, although the regulations clearly specify sanctions against non-compliance with the Mining Law, bauxite companies have been protected from the logical effects of their lawbreaking for 50 years?

Ask yourself why we cant make an honest living from the lands now occupied by sugar? Ask yourself why any government should be able to steal public beaches from the public and disregard our prescriptive rights? Ask why, though the regulations prescribe Environmental Impact Assessments, the mining companies are never asked to obey this section of the law but allowed free-range islandwide to destroy the beauty, the health, the future prosperity and the tranquility of the people of Jamaica?

The current Guidelines for EIAs (published by the NRCA in 1997) say that it is the people who should decide whether environmental impacts are or are not major and that the local communities including NGOs, the business sector, service clubs and citizens association and others should be invited in writing to take part in the process.

NEPA cannot legally, hand over its responsibilities to a developer such as the Jamaica Bauxite Institute.
NEPA cannot decide what sections of the law it should obey.
If we are a nation of laws, the decision as to whether we will dig down the Cockpit Country is a decision to be made by all the people, because it is their property, their patrimony and the place where their soul finds refuge.

When the Maroons spoke two weeks ago, they spoke for a majority of Jamaicans. If you don't believe me, just ask the next person you meet.

As I said a few columns ago, we are all Maroons now.
Or, perhaps, Nauruans.

Copyright©2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu [at] yahoo.com