Treasure in the Badlands
John Maxwell
JAN 18,2003
Harris Savannah is not exactly a household name in Jamaica. Probably less than one in a hundred Jamaicans would be able to tell you where it was. Harris Savannah is a dry tropical woodland badly degraded, dominated by cactus and thorn scrub, the sort of place some Jamaicans call ‘ruinate’. It lies south of May Pen in the lee of the Braziletto Mountains. .
Despite the unprepossessing nature of the place, Harris Savannah is about to become big news. The Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, is the world’s thrid most biodiverse region. Harris Savannah is one of the jewels in our crown, unlikely as it may seem.
I consulted our leading botanical expert Dr George Proctor, who has spent the last fifty years attempting to find and catalogue every species of plant in this part of the world. In the first 6 years of this somewhat quixotic mission, Dr Proctor collected and catalogued about 12,000 specimens in jamaica alone. Since then he has catalogued and described well over 100,000 plants and has become one of the world’s foremost botanists. He is THE expert on the Jamaican flora, particularly on ferns of which we possess 609 taxa – a great many of them discovered by him. At the age of 82 he is still exploring, collecting, and cataloguing.
Dr Proctor thinks Harris Savannah is a very special place – not only by Jamaican standards, but by any standards. It is, he says, a scientific treasury.
He came to Jamaica to do his doctoral thesis on ferns . En passant,as it were, he took up an offer of a part-time job at the Science Museum at the Institute of Jamaica. He’s been here ever since, enhancing the Institute’s rteputation as a world class centre of botanical knowledge
Shortly after arriving in Jamaica, Proctor met G. P. Von der Porten and his wife Amy,then a botanist at the Institute. It was their hobby to seek out small rare plants .
Proctor told the Von der Portens he was convinced there was a Jamaican version of a very rare fern-like plant – Isoectes – then known in the Caribbean only from Hispaniola and Western Cuba. Its ancestors were trees in the Carboniferous Period 290 to 354 million years ago, when ferns dominated the earth’s vegetation. Millions of years later, buried by tectonic movement, they became the deposits we now mine as coal.
The Von der Portens took him to Freetown in Clarendon, where they thought Proctor might find what he was looking for. He searched for the Jamaican Isoectes for another 25 years, finding it, finally, only 3 miles from the spot to which he had originally been taken.
Plants at Harris Savannah are adapted to an alternating drought/flood regime.. Their seeds and spores survive devastating dry spells. Proctor found Harris Savannah to be home to a large number of endemic and endangered species Although it is very dry, there is an impervious layer below the surface which allows ponds to form after heavy rain – some areas become quagmires. These temporary and unpromising habitats support an amazing array of plants, including two extremely rare species of water lily, one of which is a very shy plant. It blooms only at night and pulls its inflorescence under water immediately after blooming. Proctor has since discovered scores of new species in Jamaica and in Puerto Rico as well as in Central and South America and other Caribbean islands. Scientists all over the world have named dozens of plants in his honour.
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 profitble 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. As I pointed out in a column nearly a year ago, the (then proposed) dredging in Kingston Harbour threatened to destroy the habitat of one such: “… Ecteinascidia turbinata … 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.”
I don’t believe anyone knows yet whether Ecteinascidia turbinata survived the brutal ministrations of the Port Authority, but we can’t do anything about that. Now.
Harris Savannah is threatened by the same constellation of geniuses responsible for brutalising Kingston harbour. Unless we take urgent action, the Doomsday Highway will bring in its train the extinction of Harris Savannah and everything there.
This is because, as an attempt to justify the Highway, the planners decided to create a new city at Harris Savannah, no doubt on established principles – tidy, treeless, inhumane, an instant slum, without water supply or rationale but with dozens of unforeseen problems. Nearby is fast growing May Pen, which, without any help from outside, has been expanding madly in all directions. Since May Pen has several important reasons for being where it is, it is clear that the value of any money spent paving Harris Savanmnah would be much more productive and sustainable if it were spent making May Pen a more civilised place, with real planning, parks, civic centres and all.
As I said last week, we have given a uniquely Jamaican twist to the Precautionary Principle. Whenever we find something that may be scientifically valuable, we take immediate steps to destroy it.The people of May Pen really need to take action against this idiotic boondoggle.
The only cheer I can see on the horizon is that when Mr Bush leads the world into his promised Hundred years War, it will doom the Doomsday Highway and everything connected to it. Do w really need another Portmore in the desert of Harris Savannah?
It is dangerous to be seen ‘fighting against’ any project which promises, jobs, foreign investment and paradise on earth. Unfortunately, the promoters of this world know exactly how to hook the unwary taxpayer. They don’t sell the steak, they sell the “sizzle”. There is nothing so potent as a vision of deliverance,.
Development based on what people need and on real resources is sustainable. It would be sad if, twenty years down the road, our children came and asked us why we had destroyed Harris Savannah. Didn’t we know that such and such a plant was found there? Didn’t we know that that plant contained compounds which could have cured HIV/AIDS? We could say, with perfectly straight faces: “No, we didn’t know”
The next question would be why didn’t we know?
And, says Proctor, Harris Savannah is only one of a number of similar national treasures in need of urgent care and protection. If we knew what we were doing, they could be enormously valuable as educational and touristic attractions, as biosphere reserves, as sources of new economic activity, new havens of tranquility. The question is: Do we care about our country?
Do we really?
Copyright ©2003 John Maxwell
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