Digging Down Jamaica

Digging Down Jamaica

John Maxwell


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.
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
twelve 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 fertilize 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. They set up
a trust fund to invest their income from phosphate, but within 20
years,  by the end of the twentieth 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 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 world’s 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 $3 billion Jamaican 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 percent 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 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 sixty 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 Nauru-isation.
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 e.g.; 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,(internittently) 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 Govt
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”. 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 Cpuntry, 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
‘bly’.

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 a 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 justfy 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 fifty
years?

Ask yourself why we can’t 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