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Self-Inflicted Wounds
Common SenseJohn Maxwell
Sunday, November 18, 2007
On Monday, the Jamaica Information Service reported that a campaign had been launched to protect watershed areas of St Thomas.
The campaign is funded by the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica and will be implemented by the St Thomas Environmental Protection Association (STEPA). According to JIS, "the campaign will target communities along the St Thomas Great Morass, Bowden Morass and surrounding coastal areas."
I am happy about this initiative, because although it is only a one-year programme, it shows that there are people who are conscious that their land needs protection.
The last time I was in a plane over the southeast coast of Jamaica, I thought I was over the Dominican Republic or Haiti because the river mouths were such enormous expanses of eroded land, sandscapes that from the air seemed a mile wide. But, as I looked, I recognised where I was and was astounded and horrified at the destruction of the island's southern coast.
This destruction is comparatively recent and is entirely caused by human action. It wasn't always so.
In the 1950s, Hugh Foot, then governor of Jamaica, boldly extracted from the Opposition PNP's 1949 'Plan for progress' a scheme to rehabilitate Jamaica's major watersheds. Major elements of the plan were to create two protected watersheds under the Watersheds Protection law - one for the Yallahs Valley and the other in the west, for the Christiana area.
Those two watersheds rapidly recovered under the supervision of the Yallahs Valley Land Authority (YVLA) and the Christiana Area Land Authority (CALA). Farmers were taught how to terrace their land. Gabion groynes, that is, huge rolls of medium-sized rocks encased in heavy steel mesh were used to stabilise the riverbanks and promote vegetative growth and protection of the riverbanks. It worked.
Coffee and cash crops were planted and sold in the markets, the food supply improved, farmers' incomes rose, the Yallahs River, the Johnson River and others became rivers again instead of dry gulches subject to rampaging floods.
Then, a few years ago -with great fanfare - the Yallahs pipeline was constructed to bring water to the metastasising city of Kingston. The lower reaches of the rivers lost water, the farms dried up, and nobody paid any attention to the watershed.
Rain once again brought floods, floods washed out the riverbanks, destroying farmland and houses, and the construction industry, fuelled by the increased-house building in Kingston/Portmore, began the industrial mining of sand in the Yallahs and Johnson rivers, making a bad situation catastrophic.
The JIS story indicates that someone has noticed, but the proposed solution is a band-aid for a machete chop.
THE WORLD'S MOST BEAUTIFUL CESSPOOL
In my private correspondence, I have often described Kingston Harbour as the world's largest and most beautiful cesspool.
Almost exactly 30 years ago a small group of highly motivated men assembled in an office on Molynes Road, to devise a plan to reverse the destruction of Kingston Harbour. After a few weeks, we produced a short, easily understandable action plan for the rehabilitation of Kingston Harbour. It did not involve astrophysics or rocket science.
The process had started about eight months previously, when I was appointed chairman of the Natural Resources Conservation Authority, a combination of the Watersheds Protection Commission, the Wildlife Protection Committee, the Beach Control Authority, and the Kingston Harbour Water Quality monitoring committee.
Although as a journalist, I had written more extensively than most about environmental affairs, I knew I didn't know enough and proceeded to read my way through every report in the authority's archives, which had anything to do with the environment of Jamaica.
It was thus, by chance, that I encountered Barry Wade's then three-year-old doctoral thesis on the degradation of Kingston Harbour. I was horrified. A body of water 21 square miles in area, once the single richest fishing ground in the world, and an important recreational and tourism asset, had been so degraded by abuse, by sewage, silt, and toxic waste that most of its huge economic and amenity values had disappeared. (In 1950, according to A J Thomas, our world-famous fisheries expert, Kingston Harbour produced about 4,000 tons of fish annually, about half the total production of all Jamaica's fisheries.)
I phoned Barry Wade, whom I did not then know, and on his recommendation assembled a group including him, his supervising professor Ivan Goodbody and about half a dozen others to decide what action should be taken. This situation was clearly an emergency and we thought we needed to act, and act fast.
In September of 1977, we produced our action plan to rescue Kingston Harbour. It was a simple, practical plan and would involve everybody.
The plan was divided into phases with specific actions to be taken within the first three months, within the first year and within five years. It would not have cost much.
The major expense would have been the construction of a comprehensive sewage treatment facility depending on large facultating ponds at southwestern Portmore, in an area now occupied by Greater Portmore housing.
The first phase would include stopping the dumping of sewage and other waste within the precincts of Kingston Harbour, which meant within the Kingston Metropolitan Area (KMA) including Portmore and the western flank of St Thomas.
We would prohibit further housing development in greenfield areas of the KMA, restricting development to areas already served by the sewerage system.
The plan envisaged a comprehensive sewerage system for the Kingston Metropolitan Area, to produce fertiliser and water for recharging the aquifers of the St Catherine plains, restoring their agricultural productivity, and very important, reducing the saltwater intrusion into those aquifers. Saltwater intrusion is one of the reasons the agricultural production in St Catherine has fallen precipitously.
We also wanted to prohibit the burning of canefields prior to harvest, because the burning destroyed the topsoil, at least half of which consists of living bacteria.
The plan would prohibit the destruction of mangroves and the filling of wetlands round the harbour to preserve the highly productive fish and shellfish breeding areas.
We would employ hundreds of people in a continuous gully-cleaning programme, recycling old batteries and tyres dumped in the gullies, and instituting a system for collecting used motor oils from service stations.
In the first year, we planned to institute a reforestation programme to prevent the erosion of the watersheds and stop the annual delivery of about nine million tons of silt into the harbour.
Our plans envisaged a comprehensive Environmental Protection Law, giving the NRCA power to stringently regulate the environment and to require Environmental Impact Assessments for all developments of any significance.
Among our more important proposals was one to declare Kingston Harbour a protected area under the Beach Control Law and institute reforestation and squatter relocation under strict management for the Liguanea, St Catherine, and St Thomas watersheds.
We would also initiate serious scientific studies of the pollution and water quality of the harbour and initiate environmental damage assessments for Montego Bay, Ocho Rios, Negril, and Portland Bight.
One major initiative was to include all the users of the harbour into a kind of parliament for the harbour, involving fishermen, higglers, consumers, manufacturers, shipping agents, and all other interests.
We would also incorporate serious environmental education into the school curricula from basic schools to university level. And, pertinent to the JIS story this week, we would, in the words of the plan:
"Declare the entire Liguanea, St Thomas and St Catherine Plains and upper watersheds to be Protected Watersheds right down to the seashore and include under protection of that law [the Watersheds Protection Act] all rivers, streams, ponds, lakes, lagoons, gully courses and sinkholes."
The purpose of this initiative was not only to restore the harbour to health but also to protect the Palisadoes strip by guaranteeing it the sand washed down by the rivers in St Andrew and St Thomas and swept along the coast to the peninsula by marine currents.
The harbour would return to productivity, as a recreational and touristic asset, with a dynamic fishing industry and other productive enterprises.
We also strongly suggested an amendment of the Town and Country Planning Act, and covering all proposed development, Environmental Impact Assessments covering both long and short-term prospects.
Unfortunately for Jamaica, while the government was enthusiastic about our plan, the IMF, the World Bank, and our other creditors were not. Our plan was announced on the very day that the IMF and World Bank made their first decisive political move against Jamaica.
It was also the same time that Donald Trump, owing about the same amount (US$4 billion) to his bankers as Jamaica, made a composition with his creditors. We made a composition with our creditors too. Trump got to keep his yacht. We were ordered to end subsidies for food, health, and education. The action plan was stillborn.
In May 1978, the NRCA declared the entire island of Jamaica a protected watershed. The minister in charge, Horace Clarke, accepted the recommendation of his civil servants and did not sign the declaration. Three years later, Edward Seaga, then prime minister, and checking up on my activities, found the declaration, and signed it. He and his government then proceeded to ignore it and eventually in 1983, he did not bother to appoint a board for the NRCA, although he did leave the civil service apparatus in place. But without the Authority (NRCA), the NRCD could accomplish nothing.
Then, a decade later, the PNP government accepted the self-serving and totally witless recommendations of the World Bank and the Jamaica development lobby and amalgamated the NRCA, the Town Planning Department and various government implementing agencies into a so-called 'super-agency' - NEPA, now know to its fans as "No Environmental Protection Anywhere"
CONNECTING THE DOTS
As a result we have had the Port Authority destroying cays off Port Royal, filling in wetlands and redistributing toxic sediments in Kingston Harbour - a disaster the scope of which will become apparent in due time.
We now have the industrial mining of sand in Yallahs leading to the continuing destruction of the Palisadoes; the desecration - there is no other word - of history and ecology at Wareika; the reckless endangerment of our most important reserve of drinking water (Mona) by sewage from Long Mountain/Wareika; the destruction of the beaches of Negril by sewage, sugar cane fertiliser and overbuilding, among other things, and the capture of the few unspoiled public beaches for the recreation of foreigners and the enrichment of the greedy.
Here is a short, understandable, environmental theorem:
NEGRIL
Burn the sugar cane fields in Hanover and Westmoreland, destroying the soil quality; apply tons of fertiliser to compensate, allow the fertiliser to percolate to the beaches, nourishing algae and smothering the corals; allow sewage into the South Negril river to destroy the argillaceous (sand-producing) algae; contemplate with horror the dead corals, the disappearing beaches and disappearing tourists; get the people of Jamaica to pay US$20 or $30 million every few years to dredge sand to renew the beaches.
We do not have the capacity, it seems, collectively, to understand that our environment is our life, it is our only real economic asset and resource, and that degrading the Jamaican environment will cost us vast sums of money, degrade our civilisation and cause all kinds of trouble from unemployment, disease and violence.
But we will find out these things, sooner rather than later.
Part of the reason our policymakers have got away with destructive plans and schemes is that the population is largely ignorant of its human rights, including the right to clean, healthy environments.
Some of this is due to our own refusal to face facts, to make sure that every child in Jamaica is within easy reach of a school, which is responsible to the child, its parents and the community. In an island near to Jamaica, there are schools for as few as half a dozen children who happen to live in isolated places. They do not have to walk miles to school. And, in these schools, way out in the bush, there are computers powered by photovoltaic assemblies, which allow the local clinic to refrigerate its medicines and the community to get light for recreation, education or work after dark. In similar places in Jamaica the only recreational/educational space is provided by mattresses or their surrogates.
MR BUFFET'S EMBARRASSMENT
On Tuesday night, the world's third richest man complained that he was not being taxed enough.
Mr Warren Buffet said that while his overall tax liability was 17% of his income - about US$45 million annually - his receptionist paid proportionally more tax than he did. The tycoon said it was outrageous that while his wealth had increased by a factor of hundreds of percentage points in the last 30 years, the working people of the United States were still at the same level they were three decades ago.
Here in Jamaica, the Minister of Finance Mr Shaw, was complaining this week that many of our wealthier businessmen were continually seeking ways to avoid paying their taxes and generally seeking to opt out of the society insofar as paying their share was concerned.
It may be of interest to those who believe in Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand' to hear what Smith said about taxation, more than a 100 years before income tax was commonly implemented and two hundred years before Jamaica brilliantly reverted to the feudal idea of a flat tax:
"The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state" - Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776.
Selah!
Copyright©2007John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
Common SenseJohn Maxwell
Sunday, November 18, 2007
On Monday, the Jamaica Information Service reported that a campaign had been launched to protect watershed areas of St Thomas.
The campaign is funded by the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica and will be implemented by the St Thomas Environmental Protection Association (STEPA). According to JIS, "the campaign will target communities along the St Thomas Great Morass, Bowden Morass and surrounding coastal areas."
I am happy about this initiative, because although it is only a one-year programme, it shows that there are people who are conscious that their land needs protection.
The last time I was in a plane over the southeast coast of Jamaica, I thought I was over the Dominican Republic or Haiti because the river mouths were such enormous expanses of eroded land, sandscapes that from the air seemed a mile wide. But, as I looked, I recognised where I was and was astounded and horrified at the destruction of the island's southern coast.
This destruction is comparatively recent and is entirely caused by human action. It wasn't always so.
In the 1950s, Hugh Foot, then governor of Jamaica, boldly extracted from the Opposition PNP's 1949 'Plan for progress' a scheme to rehabilitate Jamaica's major watersheds. Major elements of the plan were to create two protected watersheds under the Watersheds Protection law - one for the Yallahs Valley and the other in the west, for the Christiana area.
Those two watersheds rapidly recovered under the supervision of the Yallahs Valley Land Authority (YVLA) and the Christiana Area Land Authority (CALA). Farmers were taught how to terrace their land. Gabion groynes, that is, huge rolls of medium-sized rocks encased in heavy steel mesh were used to stabilise the riverbanks and promote vegetative growth and protection of the riverbanks. It worked.
Coffee and cash crops were planted and sold in the markets, the food supply improved, farmers' incomes rose, the Yallahs River, the Johnson River and others became rivers again instead of dry gulches subject to rampaging floods.
Then, a few years ago -with great fanfare - the Yallahs pipeline was constructed to bring water to the metastasising city of Kingston. The lower reaches of the rivers lost water, the farms dried up, and nobody paid any attention to the watershed.
Rain once again brought floods, floods washed out the riverbanks, destroying farmland and houses, and the construction industry, fuelled by the increased-house building in Kingston/Portmore, began the industrial mining of sand in the Yallahs and Johnson rivers, making a bad situation catastrophic.
The JIS story indicates that someone has noticed, but the proposed solution is a band-aid for a machete chop.
THE WORLD'S MOST BEAUTIFUL CESSPOOL
In my private correspondence, I have often described Kingston Harbour as the world's largest and most beautiful cesspool.
Almost exactly 30 years ago a small group of highly motivated men assembled in an office on Molynes Road, to devise a plan to reverse the destruction of Kingston Harbour. After a few weeks, we produced a short, easily understandable action plan for the rehabilitation of Kingston Harbour. It did not involve astrophysics or rocket science.
The process had started about eight months previously, when I was appointed chairman of the Natural Resources Conservation Authority, a combination of the Watersheds Protection Commission, the Wildlife Protection Committee, the Beach Control Authority, and the Kingston Harbour Water Quality monitoring committee.
Although as a journalist, I had written more extensively than most about environmental affairs, I knew I didn't know enough and proceeded to read my way through every report in the authority's archives, which had anything to do with the environment of Jamaica.
It was thus, by chance, that I encountered Barry Wade's then three-year-old doctoral thesis on the degradation of Kingston Harbour. I was horrified. A body of water 21 square miles in area, once the single richest fishing ground in the world, and an important recreational and tourism asset, had been so degraded by abuse, by sewage, silt, and toxic waste that most of its huge economic and amenity values had disappeared. (In 1950, according to A J Thomas, our world-famous fisheries expert, Kingston Harbour produced about 4,000 tons of fish annually, about half the total production of all Jamaica's fisheries.)
I phoned Barry Wade, whom I did not then know, and on his recommendation assembled a group including him, his supervising professor Ivan Goodbody and about half a dozen others to decide what action should be taken. This situation was clearly an emergency and we thought we needed to act, and act fast.
In September of 1977, we produced our action plan to rescue Kingston Harbour. It was a simple, practical plan and would involve everybody.
The plan was divided into phases with specific actions to be taken within the first three months, within the first year and within five years. It would not have cost much.
The major expense would have been the construction of a comprehensive sewage treatment facility depending on large facultating ponds at southwestern Portmore, in an area now occupied by Greater Portmore housing.
The first phase would include stopping the dumping of sewage and other waste within the precincts of Kingston Harbour, which meant within the Kingston Metropolitan Area (KMA) including Portmore and the western flank of St Thomas.
We would prohibit further housing development in greenfield areas of the KMA, restricting development to areas already served by the sewerage system.
The plan envisaged a comprehensive sewerage system for the Kingston Metropolitan Area, to produce fertiliser and water for recharging the aquifers of the St Catherine plains, restoring their agricultural productivity, and very important, reducing the saltwater intrusion into those aquifers. Saltwater intrusion is one of the reasons the agricultural production in St Catherine has fallen precipitously.
We also wanted to prohibit the burning of canefields prior to harvest, because the burning destroyed the topsoil, at least half of which consists of living bacteria.
The plan would prohibit the destruction of mangroves and the filling of wetlands round the harbour to preserve the highly productive fish and shellfish breeding areas.
We would employ hundreds of people in a continuous gully-cleaning programme, recycling old batteries and tyres dumped in the gullies, and instituting a system for collecting used motor oils from service stations.
In the first year, we planned to institute a reforestation programme to prevent the erosion of the watersheds and stop the annual delivery of about nine million tons of silt into the harbour.
Our plans envisaged a comprehensive Environmental Protection Law, giving the NRCA power to stringently regulate the environment and to require Environmental Impact Assessments for all developments of any significance.
Among our more important proposals was one to declare Kingston Harbour a protected area under the Beach Control Law and institute reforestation and squatter relocation under strict management for the Liguanea, St Catherine, and St Thomas watersheds.
We would also initiate serious scientific studies of the pollution and water quality of the harbour and initiate environmental damage assessments for Montego Bay, Ocho Rios, Negril, and Portland Bight.
One major initiative was to include all the users of the harbour into a kind of parliament for the harbour, involving fishermen, higglers, consumers, manufacturers, shipping agents, and all other interests.
We would also incorporate serious environmental education into the school curricula from basic schools to university level. And, pertinent to the JIS story this week, we would, in the words of the plan:
"Declare the entire Liguanea, St Thomas and St Catherine Plains and upper watersheds to be Protected Watersheds right down to the seashore and include under protection of that law [the Watersheds Protection Act] all rivers, streams, ponds, lakes, lagoons, gully courses and sinkholes."
The purpose of this initiative was not only to restore the harbour to health but also to protect the Palisadoes strip by guaranteeing it the sand washed down by the rivers in St Andrew and St Thomas and swept along the coast to the peninsula by marine currents.
The harbour would return to productivity, as a recreational and touristic asset, with a dynamic fishing industry and other productive enterprises.
We also strongly suggested an amendment of the Town and Country Planning Act, and covering all proposed development, Environmental Impact Assessments covering both long and short-term prospects.
Unfortunately for Jamaica, while the government was enthusiastic about our plan, the IMF, the World Bank, and our other creditors were not. Our plan was announced on the very day that the IMF and World Bank made their first decisive political move against Jamaica.
It was also the same time that Donald Trump, owing about the same amount (US$4 billion) to his bankers as Jamaica, made a composition with his creditors. We made a composition with our creditors too. Trump got to keep his yacht. We were ordered to end subsidies for food, health, and education. The action plan was stillborn.
In May 1978, the NRCA declared the entire island of Jamaica a protected watershed. The minister in charge, Horace Clarke, accepted the recommendation of his civil servants and did not sign the declaration. Three years later, Edward Seaga, then prime minister, and checking up on my activities, found the declaration, and signed it. He and his government then proceeded to ignore it and eventually in 1983, he did not bother to appoint a board for the NRCA, although he did leave the civil service apparatus in place. But without the Authority (NRCA), the NRCD could accomplish nothing.
Then, a decade later, the PNP government accepted the self-serving and totally witless recommendations of the World Bank and the Jamaica development lobby and amalgamated the NRCA, the Town Planning Department and various government implementing agencies into a so-called 'super-agency' - NEPA, now know to its fans as "No Environmental Protection Anywhere"
CONNECTING THE DOTS
As a result we have had the Port Authority destroying cays off Port Royal, filling in wetlands and redistributing toxic sediments in Kingston Harbour - a disaster the scope of which will become apparent in due time.
We now have the industrial mining of sand in Yallahs leading to the continuing destruction of the Palisadoes; the desecration - there is no other word - of history and ecology at Wareika; the reckless endangerment of our most important reserve of drinking water (Mona) by sewage from Long Mountain/Wareika; the destruction of the beaches of Negril by sewage, sugar cane fertiliser and overbuilding, among other things, and the capture of the few unspoiled public beaches for the recreation of foreigners and the enrichment of the greedy.
Here is a short, understandable, environmental theorem:
NEGRIL
Burn the sugar cane fields in Hanover and Westmoreland, destroying the soil quality; apply tons of fertiliser to compensate, allow the fertiliser to percolate to the beaches, nourishing algae and smothering the corals; allow sewage into the South Negril river to destroy the argillaceous (sand-producing) algae; contemplate with horror the dead corals, the disappearing beaches and disappearing tourists; get the people of Jamaica to pay US$20 or $30 million every few years to dredge sand to renew the beaches.
We do not have the capacity, it seems, collectively, to understand that our environment is our life, it is our only real economic asset and resource, and that degrading the Jamaican environment will cost us vast sums of money, degrade our civilisation and cause all kinds of trouble from unemployment, disease and violence.
But we will find out these things, sooner rather than later.
Part of the reason our policymakers have got away with destructive plans and schemes is that the population is largely ignorant of its human rights, including the right to clean, healthy environments.
Some of this is due to our own refusal to face facts, to make sure that every child in Jamaica is within easy reach of a school, which is responsible to the child, its parents and the community. In an island near to Jamaica, there are schools for as few as half a dozen children who happen to live in isolated places. They do not have to walk miles to school. And, in these schools, way out in the bush, there are computers powered by photovoltaic assemblies, which allow the local clinic to refrigerate its medicines and the community to get light for recreation, education or work after dark. In similar places in Jamaica the only recreational/educational space is provided by mattresses or their surrogates.
MR BUFFET'S EMBARRASSMENT
On Tuesday night, the world's third richest man complained that he was not being taxed enough.
Mr Warren Buffet said that while his overall tax liability was 17% of his income - about US$45 million annually - his receptionist paid proportionally more tax than he did. The tycoon said it was outrageous that while his wealth had increased by a factor of hundreds of percentage points in the last 30 years, the working people of the United States were still at the same level they were three decades ago.
Here in Jamaica, the Minister of Finance Mr Shaw, was complaining this week that many of our wealthier businessmen were continually seeking ways to avoid paying their taxes and generally seeking to opt out of the society insofar as paying their share was concerned.
It may be of interest to those who believe in Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand' to hear what Smith said about taxation, more than a 100 years before income tax was commonly implemented and two hundred years before Jamaica brilliantly reverted to the feudal idea of a flat tax:
"The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state" - Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776.
Selah!
Copyright©2007John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com