Interesting interview on Goat Island

[HL]

What i found most interesting is while the Fishermen was speaking of protecting the enviornment when the camera swept on their catch they were some 3 inch baby fish so its quite ironic they dont see themselves doing what the government is planning to do. In any way can someone educate me how using goat island would work?

Good eye on the size of the fish.

That makes the environmental talk a waste of time.

[OJ]

no it just show how paradigm is everything.

[Sir X]

China Port May Finish Off Goat Islands Fisheries

Published: Tuesday | August 27, 201318 Comments

Diana McCaulay, Guest Columnist




Diana McCaulay, Guest Columnist

The Rev Garnett Roper, writing in The Sunday Gleaner of August 25, 2013, ('Goat Islands: ecology and economy') trots out the usual tired arguments with regard to national parks and protected areas - that they are just an attempt to secure a playground for "the idle rich". That they contribute nothing to the economy. That poverty is the greatest threat to the environment, the implication being if we secure full employment, no matter by what means, the environment will be just fine.[/color]
Rev Roper, a man with a bulldozer can do far more damage than a man with a machete. Yes, poor people do destroy the environment. But so do governments, local and foreign. And so do developers. Environmental destruction is not the sole purview of any class or economic group.
The idea of putting aside land for its natural attributes does have roots in elitism - many early protected areas were hunting reserves - as local people hunting for food were excluded while elites pursued their favourite game.
But it was American President Theodore Roosevelt, himself an avid hunter, who realised that some of America's most beautiful places were becoming enclaves for the rich and provided the impetus for declaring a system of national parks - places of extraordinary natural value to be protected in perpetuity for the pleasure of ordinary Americans. In 2011, 278 million people visited America's 401 protected areas.[/color]
endangered ecosystems
It also became clear in the 19th century that human beings were capable of annihilating ecosystems and species, and this led to the idea that important natural resources had to be protected by law if they were not to be forever lost.
It is certainly true that there are still conflicts between local people using natural resources in protected areas and park managers seeking to ensure ecosystems remain functional. This does not, however, mean that national parks are a bad idea. It means greater creativity and understanding must be applied to find solutions for these conflicts.
To take just one example of the economic benefits of properly managed protected areas, there are roughly 4,000 fishers in the Portland Protected Area. Their livelihoods depend on the fisheries being healthy - which they are not, even before the advent of any Goat Islands port.[/color]
"You see all these boats?" an Old Harbour fisher said to me Saturday, indicating many dozens of boats pulled up on the beach and moored in the shallows. "My father's one boat used to bring in more fish than all these boats put together."[/color]
FISHERFOLK WILL LOSE
It was the recognition of the threat to livelihoods that led the Government to declare fish sanctuaries in Jamaica - as a mechanism to improve fish stock. There are 14 fish sanctuaries around the island, protecting less than two per cent of Jamaica's marine space, but already, some of them are showing encouraging increases in fish stock and improvement in coral reef health.
If the Goat Islands port goes ahead, the people who will lose are the Old Harbour fishers and vendors. And they will not get jobs at the port.
Are protected areas places where development is by definition off the table? Of course not. Some 50,000 people live inside the boundaries of the Portland Bight Protected Area, and there are a host of industries. But development should never threaten the ecological heritage of all Jamaicans.
Rev Roper says we should not look a gift horse in the mouth. He is forgetting the story of the Trojan horse, which contained a select force of Greeks hidden inside who then stealthily opened the gates of the city of Troy to the rest of the Greek army. The Greeks destroyed Troy and became the victors of the Trojan War. Perhaps the Trojans should have looked the gift horse in the mouth.
Diana McCaulay is CEO of Jamaica Environment Trust. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and jamentrust@cwjamaica.com.


[/color]

[Exile]

OJ, to say you are willing to 'compromise Goat Island' without the benefit of properly done EIA reflects the thinking of many who see short-term job benefits or political expedience as the yardstick for 'development' and environmental concerns or issues as peripheral to the perceived higher goal of 'economic development'.
Regrettably, they go hand in hand - and any economic plan which is devoid of the sustainability concerns will fall by the wayside ventually. There are just too many examples of failed developments that we should not sit on the side of the Precautionary Principle. The Precautionary Principle basically says, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

The Precautionary Principle
Source: http://environmentalcommons.org/precaution.html

The Precautionary Principle is a guiding framework for decision-making that anticipates how our actions will affect the environment and health of future generations. The Principle emphasizes public participation and stakeholder collaboration in long-term environmental health and ecological policies and programs.

Five Key Elements of the Precautionary Principle

The Precautionary Principle represents a paradigm shift in decision-making. It allows for five key elements that can prevent irreversible damage to people and nature:

1. Anticipatory Action: There is a duty to take anticipatory action to prevent harm. Government, business, and community groups, as well as the general public, share this responsibility.
2. Right to Know: The community has a right to know complete and accurate information on potential human health and environmental impacts associated with the selection of products, services, operations, or plans. The burden to supply this information lies with the proponent, not with the general public.
3. Alternatives Assessment: An obligation exists to examine a full range of alternatives and select the alternative with the least potential impact on human health and the environment, including the alternative of doing nothing.
4. Full Cost Accounting: When evaluating potential alternatives, there is a duty to consider all the reasonably foreseeable costs, including raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, use, cleanup, eventual disposal, and health costs even if such costs are not reflected in the initial price. Short and long-term benefits and time thresholds should be considered when making decisions.
5. Participatory Decision Process: Decisions applying the Precautionary Principle must be transparent, participatory, and informed by the best available science and other relevant information.

Having said all that though, we do need significant investment and wise use of our natural resources. Yes, we may sacrifice some environmental benefits but at the same time we can gain some economic benefits as well.


Jamaica has experienced the rape of our landscape by foreign bauxite companies, leaving the land rugged, laced with toxic caustic red mud that has seeped to our underground aquifers and are still potential disasters - did we get our full pound of flesh? Did the Jamaican people really benefit as a whole? When the lands are all mined out and it is no longer profitable what are we left with?



So do we go and raze Goat Island? Do we allow sedimentation of fish nursery or breeding areas (not for just a few fishermen). Do we know the full extent of the oceanic currents around the area?? What are the cumulative effects of ALL the proposed development along that piece of coastline - an SEA (Strategic Environmental Assessment) will probably be more useful - which include social impacts as well as environmental & cost benefits. This would also have a proper ECONOMIC EVALUATION of the resources.


Bottomline - this a MAJOR decision to be made an should involve all of Jamaica's stakeholders - this is not to be another political pronouncement.

[Exile]

Another perspective too is that we need to take chances:

The precautionary principle is a blunt instrument

We don't need to appoint a layer of people to say 'ooh, you never know!'

Contrary to the 'job done' jubilation that followed the ban on neonicotinoid pesticides, it will not lead to the revival of the bee population. Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters

The precautionary principle is a blunt instrument, a 90s throwback out of place in an era of "smart solutions" and big data.
A world of over seven billion people faces some pretty complex questions about the trade-offs involved in producing food, using resources, reducing disease and achieving the societies and environments in which we want to live. There's a collision between short-term and long-term outcomes, narrow interests and broader ones, and between problems and opportunities … the consequences of which may be unforeseeable. Fear of the unforeseeable gives the precautionary principle influence, but was there ever such a mismatch between a challenge and a solution?
However simple we might wish managing uncertainty about the future to be, it's not. The precautionary principle misleads us into thinking it is. Its advocates arm-wave about complexity and the unknown future, but they are producing a response that implies the exact opposite. In place of informed, real-world choices that include the potential implications of both doing something and not doing it, we have simplistic bans, precaution's monotonous answer to every challenge.
It is irresponsible. Firstly because it is short termist. In the absence of knowing the future risks of something, the precautionary approach inevitably draws on our present fears and prejudices. These offer a narrow window through which to view the future. When, in the 1950s, the world expected India to starve, no one knew what the impact of IR8, a new semi-dwarf rice plant introduced by Norman Borlaug and M S Swaminathan, would be. It was arguably more innovative and its impact more unknown than much of biotechnology today. It increased yields enough to save millions of lives.
When the first http communication happened in 1989, we could not have imagined Wikileaks or crowd-sourced research on Alpine climate change, so thank goodness no one mentioned pornography because the idea of a website might have been parked forever in a file marked "further research needed".
The precautionary principle is also irresponsible because its only tool is to stop a thing – a practice, substance or technology. This can lead us to think we have protected ourselves from outcomes when we haven't. The recent European ban on the pesticides known as neonicotinoids, for example, was appealing. But it has frustrated beekeeping organisations. Contrary to the "job done" jubilation that followed the ban, it will not lead to the revival of the bee population. If only the problem were that simple. Bees face very tangible pressures, including loss of habitat and parasites, and we do not know whether the pesticide that replaces neonicotinoids will be better or worse.
Above all, the precautionary principle encourages evasion of responsibility for the status quo. When people argue to block change, for fear of unknown consequences, they rarely assume responsibility for the consequences of current problems. If you want to mothball a possible solution, such as genetically modified potatoes, then you need to take ownership of the present problem, which is spraying potatoes with fungicide 20 times a year to stop them being destroyed by the fungal disease blight. We are not in some happy natural state without GM potatoes. We have to face the problem.
So the opposite of precaution is not some free-for-all. It is to develop refined and sensible decisions, with consistency and a far broader context. We can now investigate complex interactions and weigh up choices as never before. We can simulate our physical environment, atmosphere and climate with growing complexity. Genomic repositories are making it possible to examine responses in people, animals and plants to changes in conditions around them. We have become more sophisticated in modelling the interactions of human behaviour with the social and natural environment. Information too is collected and shared as never before: natural hazards, water supply, pollution, genetics, epidemics, drug side-effects, evolution in pests and bacteria … This sophistication is how we manage the future.

In that context, the precautionary principle looks like a childish desire to simplify, with tokens and talismans. It encapsulates a dogma, not just that simplistic bans are an effective way to manage change, but that scientific innovation is full of hubris and blind to its own implications.
But on its own a precautionary principle doesn't require that we know much about what we're talking about, let alone the alternatives and implications. At worst, it can play to our most knee-jerk fears, such as "Frankenfoods". Its advocates don't really have much to offer. We don't need to appoint a layer of people to say "ooh, you never know!"
In agriculture, energy and so much more we need big changes, even if some people do want to stop the world and get off. Realistically, to make these changes needs an approach to innovation that is permissive and watchful – that is, one that takes more responsibility – rather than banning and assuming you've done good, which is the real hubris here.
Tracey Brown is managing director of Sense About Science. This is part of a series on the precautionary principle. You can read Andy Stirling's piece now, and Steve Fuller and Jack Stilgoe later this week. On Friday, we'll pull out readers' comments and give the contributors a chance to respond to one another

[Exile]

Why the precautionary principle matters

In the first of a series on the precautionary principle, Andy Stirling argues it offers crucial time to think through options

Precaution is arguably one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented issues in the global politics of science and technology. Misunderstood, because precaution is so often wrongly asserted to be unscientific or anti-technology. Misrepresented, because a large part of the resulting stigma can be a systematic – even deliberate – effect of power.
Powerful interests behind a particular innovation can understandably get pretty exercised when challenged by precautionary concerns over their favoured new technology. But these highly partisan commotions need not provoke such existential angst across society as a whole. Precaution does not necessarily mean a ban. It simply urges that time and space be found to get things right.
To see the value of this, we can start by considering history. Take, for example, asbestos, lead, benzene, pesticides, ozone-depleters or overfishing. In all these areas and many more, early precautionary action was dismissed as irrational by governments, business and scientific establishments alike – claiming there were no alternatives. Yet now, it is agreed on all sides of the debate that levels of risk were initially quite significantly understated. And, in retrospect, there were more viable substitutes than were claimed at the time. Similar questions arise in forward-looking dilemmas of technology choice; around alternatives to nuclear power or GM food, for example.
In a nutshell, precaution reminds us that innovation is not a forced one-track race to the future. Instead – like biological evolution – technological progress entails constantly branching paths. Though often concealed behind science, each involves intrinsically political choices. This requires understanding, rather than denial, of the real nature of uncertainty. Although there exist many versions of precaution, the general gist is that, where there are threats to human health or environment, scientific uncertainty is not a reason for inaction. This does not compel a particular action. It merely reminds us that lack of evidence of harm, is not the same thing as evidence of lack of harm. In other words, the crux of precaution lies in the rigour of taking similar care in avoiding the scientific error of mistakenly assuming safety, to avoiding mistakenly assuming harm.
This in turn hinges on a crucial technical distinction between risk and uncertainty. Risk is a state of knowledge where we feel confident in assigning numerical probabilities. In conventional risk assessment, the onus, burden and levels of proof typically fall most heavily on those concerned about a particular pathway, or who prefer alternatives. The balance of emphasis tends to favour those products with most powerful backing. Precaution offers to level the playing field by inviting a focus not only on risk, but also on uncertainty. Whether due to incomplete evidence, complexity, divergent values, scientific disagreement, gaps in knowledge or the simple possibility of surprise – uncertainties cannot be reduced to neat numerical probabilities. But they are still crucial to rational consideration – and there are plenty of practical ways to deal with them (pdf).
Under uncertainty, then, it is not merely difficult in practice to calculate some single definitive "sound scientific" "evidence based" solution. The point is, it is irrational even to try, let alone claim, this. The notion of exclusively science-based decisions under uncertainty is an oxymoron. How has such confusion come about? Uncertainties, after all, are among the most important driving forces in science. A typical scientist is well aware of the uncertainties in their field, often strongly motivated by them. Reasoned scepticism and open disagreement about uncertainties, are among the most crucial distinguishing qualities of science. Yet when science comes into contact with economic and political power, there develops a strange kind of uncertainty denial. This brings us back at the end, to where this blog began. In order to understand the rhetorical intensity of so much opposition to precaution, we need to look behind the methodological technicalities and consider the powerful political forces and high economic stakes that often hinge on the outcomes.
It is with some sympathy for beleaguered decision makers in business or regulation, that we can understand the often-overwhelming political pressures to justify decisions. This can mean building "policy-based evidence" to assert some pre-decided outcome. Or it can merely mean pressuring an artificially unambiguous "evidence base" for justifying any firm decision at all. In a myriad ways this pressure incentivises analysts and independent expert advisers to sidestep precaution and produce more apparently confident and precise "risk-based" prescriptions than their better judgement might suggest. It is not necessary to envisage any conspiracy or bad faith. The effect is more like iron filings lining up in the magnetic field of power. Either way, it is this pressure for justification that explains why the animosity to precaution extends beyond the partisan advocates of particular uncertain technologies, to political debates in general.
But, in the end, the picture is quite optimistic. Far from the pessimistic caricature, precaution actually celebrates the full depth and potential for human agency in knowledge and innovation. Blinkered risk assessment ignores both positive and negative implications of uncertainty. Though politically inconvenient for some, precaution simply acknowledges this scope and choice. So, while mistaken rhetorical rejections of precaution add further poison to current political tensions around technology, precaution itself offers an antidote – one that is in the best traditions of rationality. By upholding both scientific rigour and democratic accountability under uncertainty, precaution offers a means to help reconcile these increasingly sundered Enlightenment cultures.

Andy Stirling is professor of science and technology policy at the University of Sussex. This is the first in a series on the precautionary principle. Come back later this week to see pieces by Tracey Brown, Steve Fuller and Jack Stilgoe. On Friday, we'll pull out readers' comments and give the contributors a chance to respond to one another.


Posted by Andy Stirling
Monday 8 July 2013 12.35 BST theguardian.com