Earth Day Reflections on the Bahamian Environment

by Larry Smith

In the early 1970s I was a fresh-faced college student totally absorbed with counterculture politics and the new environmentalism in America.

We grew our hair, wore tattered clothes, spoke in ways that horrified the old folks, liberated ourselves sexually, and ridiculed the straightjacketed behaviour of the previous generation. This cycle of cultural rebellion peaked in 1970.

And that was when Earth Day happened. A grassroots-inspired "national teach-in on pollution and ecological problems", it involved tens of millions of Americans across the country, all passionately protesting corporate and governmental abuse of the environment.

Together with our scepticism of big business and big government, my generation shared a new and very emotional interest in nature. That first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 marked the beginnings of a mass movement to curb pollution, conserve resources, protect wilderness and cherish biodiversity. We saw planet Earth in its totality for the very first time.

From that point on, not only did environmentalism become a mass movement, it became a spiritual cause. It also produced a lot of benefits. By the mid-1970s, the US had enacted a series of groundbreaking laws - including the Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Pesticide Control Act and Endangered Species Act. And a host of environmental groups had sprung up to work for political change.

These measures did not just add red tape. They actually led to cleaner water, cleaner air, safer food, new national parks and protected areas, coastal zone management and much more.

In the Bahamas - with our tiny population and many islands scattered over a hundred thousand square miles of ocean teeming with marine life - we were only dimly aware of the pressures building around us. Back then our environment seemed so large and so healthy that we didn't need to worry too much about it.

In the 1960s - responding to the urgings of a handful of foreign scientists - the government had set aside a few remote areas as national parks - from Exuma to Inagua. Although this rescued the flamingo (our national bird) from extermination and saved one of our most beautiful island chains from piecemeal development, few Bahamians were aware of the long-term threats to our way of life.

In fact, most were oblivious to the environment, particularly when it stood in the way of their freedom to do whatever they wanted. But as our population grew and became more educated, and as investors sought to replicate poorly planned developments all over the archipelago, with little consideration for the realities on the ground, environmentalism was gradually mainstreamed.

In fact, it goes without saying that we never cease talking about the environment today. Since the 1990s the government has required environmental impact assessments before big projects are approved. And parliament will soon enact a comprehensive environmental protection law whose regulations will be administered by a full-fledged government department. Sustainable development is the catchphrase of the day.

Today the Bahamas National Trust is struggling to deal with the massive challenges of public education, public access and supervision for the 700,000 acres of protected territory under its control. And successive governments are wrestling with the urgent need to slow the destruction of our conch, grouper and lobster fisheries from over-harvesting.

Environmentalism has indeed become something of a religion. As Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton recently observed: "If you look carefully, you see that (enviromentalism) is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

"There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature; there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge; and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all...sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment."

And just as priests and pastors wage a moral war against sin, so environmentalists struggle against the kind of "rational bad behaviours" that are harmful for everyone and that can lead to social disaster. The tragedy of the commons is often cited as an example of this type of behaviour.

Living close to the sea as we do, most Bahamians like to fish. And clearly, if we overfish our conch, grouper and lobster those resources will decline or disappear and all of us will suffer as a result. So the obvious thing to do would be for all of us to exercise restraint.

But, as Professor Jared Diamond pointed out in his book Collapse, "as long as there is no effective regulation of how much each consumer can harvest, then each would be correct to reason, 'if I don't catch that fish, some other fisherman will, so it makes no sense for me to refrain from overfishing.' The correct rational behaviour is then to harvest before the next consumer can, even though the eventual result may be the destruction of the commons and thus harm for all consumers."

Unlike religion, however, environmentalism must be grounded on objective and verifiable science. It must be based on realistic cost-benefit analysis. And it must recognise that economic development is a legitimate goal for human society.

Professor Diamond's account of how cultures around the world have responded to environmental pressures is instructive. And he gives several examples of societies that have destroyed the environment they depended upon, including nearby Haiti.

From this wide-ranging review he distills a dozen of the most serious environmental problems facing the world today. At the top of the list is the destruction of natural habitats. And the world's most important habitats are forests, wetlands, coral reefs and the ocean bottom - all of which are under threat in the Bahamas.

Deforestation, for example, was a major factor in the collapse of all of the past societies considered in Diamond's book. And as most people know, coastal wetlands are essential for the existence of commercial fisheries. Coral reefs are the marine equivalent of tropical rain forests and if current trends continue, about half of the world's remaining reefs will be gone within 20 years.

Other problems cited by Diamond are the decline of wild species, soil erosion, depletion of freshwater resources, ceilings on the use of fossil fuels, the costs and hazards of chemical pollution, the damage caused by introduction of alien species to places where they are not native, major dislocations that can be expected from global warming, and the impact of population growth - meaning resources consumed and waste put out.

"No-one is willing to acknowledge...the unsustainability of a world in which the Third World's large population were to reach and maintain current First World living standards," Diamond says. "The cruelest trade-off we will have to resolve is helping all people to achieve a higher standard of living without undermining that standard by over-stressing global resources."

All of the problems listed by Diamond are interconnected. And experts say they will eventually be resolved one way or another within the lifetimes of our children: "The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, epidemics and collapse of societies."

So what does all this mean for the Bahamas? Well, should we really fill in all of our wetlands, strip our beaches of sand, cut down all our trees, level our hills, pollute our water, turn our open spaces into toxic garbage dumps, kill every living thing in the ocean and transform our communities into ugly, unhealthy and congested slums?

Frankly, it is hard to imagine anything more important than the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the spaces we live in. It all adds up to quality of life - and surely we all want to enjoy a better quality of life.

That is what Earth Day is all about. It is really a matter of common sense and salience - communicating information and providing guidance that is relevant to public concerns, and not simply regurgitating fact sheets or depicting the capture of dolphins as an ecological catastrophe.

It just makes good sense to work with the environment rather than destroying it - because the future belongs to all of us.

Comments

[Michael Herrick]

I have been enlightened by your articles for a long time now. This one in particular was the article I hoped would get written.

I thoroughly enjoyed Jared Diamond's Collapse and used his introductory chapter as a research model for my Advanced Writing Skills class. (I missed being involved in the first Earth Day though I remember vividly the National Guard and the teach-ins two weeks later due to the Kent State Massacre.)

I am writing on behalf of the English Department of the College of the Bahamas for your permission to consider using this article in our first-year English composition booklet (2007-2008). The students need to know a little about the history of the environmental concerns of the world and some Bahamians.

The purpose of using your article would be to understand its message, model its structure and expository style, and mine it for ideas to write essays about. We would include the full reference to Jared Diamond's book.

It will be read during the school year from possibly anytime in September though March (before next Earth Day) by today's 17-18 year old college students.

[larry smith]

Thanks - and no problem.

[Percival Miller]

Mr. Smith:

I would add, further, that in the case of preserving natural resources, both of immediate and indirect benefit to our species, and to others in our area, a cost-benefit approach, rooted as it is in human goals, would be imperfect, and poses risks that may aid the types of catastrophes that you mention.

Rather, it appears wiser, as humans and only one of a host of nature-dependent species, to determine how to live with that amount that would least disturb stability or, or that would support resource equilibrium.

If we begin to think about our current natural asset restrictions in terms of the Bahamian population, and add in the probability of impacts of climate change on resources such as fresh water and agriculture and fishing, it may be clear that cost-benefit, which can assume a less-dynamic state than for climate change impacts of less land capacity and possibly marine resources, cost benefit, where we select what we use based upon its benefit and cost us, is a relatively simplified constraint, originating from market supply and demand. While our own learning to live with less so as to preserve critical resources that provide food and water can lessen demand, you can see that those resources will control 'supply,' and we might not have the objective approach of selecting according to cost. So, with supply being an independent variable, our demand has to remain at or below our supply, just so we can continue some semblance of the life we expect to enjoy.