Bahama Pundit

Solar Power Consumers Upset by Fossil Fuel Plant on Abaco

by Larry Smith

LITTLE HARBOUR, ABACO - Within sight of the smokestacks rising from BEC's heavy fuel oil power plant under construction at Wilson City just across the Bight of Old Robinson lies a solar-powered community of some 40 homes encircling a picturesque cove.

This unique settlement was founded by a Canadian art professor named Randolph Johnston, who sailed his family to the Bahamas in 1952 and initially housed them in a cave - like a modern-day William Sayle (who sought refuge in Preacher's Cave on North Eleuthera more than three centuries ago).

Johnston set himself up as a charter skipper and sculptor, becoming a local celebrity within a few years. His bronze statue of a Bahamian woman was installed on Prince George Wharf in 1975, while his autobiography, Artist on his Island, was published the following year.

When it was virtually worthless, Johnston acquired land at Little Harbour and over time sold bits and pieces to other vagabonds from varied backgrounds, creating the eclectic community that exists today anchored around Pete's Pub, a famous watering hole run by the sculptor's son. Little Harbour is now an attraction in its own right - drawing thousands of visitors a year.

Among the homeowners are artists, doctors, lawyers, engineers, airline pilots, and boat bums. One of the more recent settlers is Gordon Pearce, whose Cape Cod firm builds high-tech tennis courts and running tracks in Massachusetts. His comfortable 2,200 square foot home sits on a hill overlooking Little Harbour and - like all the houses here - it's powered entirely by solar panels.

Fault Lines Exposed by Haiti’s Earthquake

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

The fault line that triggered the recent horrific earthquake in Haiti also exposed centuries-old fault lines -- which though not as ancient as the geographic one that ruptured weeks ago -- have deep historic roots which have produced more devastation than this tragic temblor, as deadly as it was.

Whatever the final number of the dead, many more have perished over the course of Haiti’s history through war and slavery, brutal rule and neglect, disease and poverty.  The graves of the many who drowned in the ocean expanse extending from the southern Bahamas to the Florida Straits, are marked not by personal signifiers but by the cay or island next to which they are entombed.

Of course, one of the greatest killers of the Haiti revolution, of her sons and daughters and their basic aspirations and longings for peace, has been the punishing isolation and neglect by the world’s powers, along with misrule by successive dictators propped up by a tiny wealthy elite and their foreign allies.

The Blue Holes of the Bahamas—An Incredible Underworld

by Larry Smith

Looking down, the opening into the cavern beneath could be distinctly seen and it was evident, as the tide was flowing, that this ocean-hole communicated with other caverns at a distance, possibly on the island of Andros, and that the water was being sucked down through the opening to find its way into unknown parts.

There are deep, well-like depressions filled with salt water and connected with the ocean by subterranean passages. They ebb and flow with the tide, support marine life, and in all essential features resemble the submarine ocean-holes, except that they occur on land, usually removed some distance from the sea.

-- the Bahama Islands, by Drs George Shattuck and Benjamin Miller, 1905

The Bahamas are like no other group of islands in the world, scientists say. They were formed about 150 million years ago - as the Atlantic Ocean began to fill the space where Africa and North America were once joined. The islands that exist today are little more than the tips of fossilised sand dunes.

Deep drilling has established that virtually all of the rocks that make up the Bahamas platform - to a depth of at least 19,000 feet - were formed in shallow water as layers of sediment. As these layers gradually subsided under the weight of new deposits, they were converted into limestone. Winds blew the top layers into vast sand dunes, and by the end of the last glacial period - about 12,000 years ago - the geography of the Bahamas was more or less complete.

Perry Christie in Wonderland

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

The deep-seated resistance to reform within the PLP notwithstanding, a clue as to when the party is in the throes of a fresh crisis is the resurfacing of Party Leader Perry Christie to assure one and all that there is no crisis. 

It’s akin to the General Manager of BEC reading a statement by candlelight that the electricity company’s blackouts are a thing of the past.  What blackout? What crisis?  Don’t believe what you see or don’t see, believe what I tell you. 

In the long build-up to the party’s national convention this past October, Mr. Christie was generally out of sight, re-emerging to aggressively fend off the pretenders to his throne as well as urgent calls for reform within the PLP.  Crisis averted, Mr. Christie mostly disappeared again.

The First Case Study in Sustainable Tourism

by Larry Smith

MARSH HARBOUR, Abaco - The acrimonious and long-running effort by some residents of Guana Cay to derail the multi-million-dollar Baker's Bay development came to an end last November when the Privy Council ruled against the Save Guana Cay Reef Association, represented by Freeport lawyer Fred Smith.

The environmental contract between the Baker's Bay Club and the University of Miami also came to an end last year, and Dr Kathleen Sullivan-Sealey, the marine biologist who ran the environmental management programme, was at the Abaco Science Alliance conference in Marsh Harbour this past weekend. She gave a report on five year's of work that has been billed as the first "case study on sustainable tourism" in the Bahamas.

Tough Call was also at the conference, which is organised every two years by Abaco Friends of the Environment.  And Sullivan-Sealey was one of a slew of scientists who shared their recent Bahamian research. Presentations were given on the behaviour of deep-diving beaked whales in the Tongue of the Ocean; the results of the first Bahamian conch fishery survey in 15 years; recent fossil discoveries in the Sawmill Sink blue hole south of Marsh Harbour; bonefish conservation; coral reef assessments; and community-based tourism.

Confronting the Colonial Mindset

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

After 43 years of majority rule and nearly 37 years of independence, the clutch of colonialism still controls much of our national psyche and imagination. 

As a fairly young country, similar to other postcolonial states, some of this is to be expected. But much of it is disturbingly backward looking and insidious.  The current enforcers of retrograde colonial mindsets are not primarily the British.

Today, the apologists for colonialism are typically Bahamian born and bred, though varied in the nature of the apologetics they employ.  They are black, white and mixed-race. With stubborn outmoded colonialist notions lodged in their worldview, many are unaware of their roles as apologists, mindlessly repeating shop-worn shibboleths.

The First Six Months of 2010

by Larry Smith

As we start the new year hoping for better times ahead, here is a selective calendar for the first six months of 2010.

JANUARY

Bye-election for Elizabeth constituency. Estranged Progressive Liberal Party MP Malcolm Adderley resigned from the party and from his parliamentary seat, reportedly to become a Supreme Court justice (he acted as a judge from 1999 to 2000). A bye-election to fill the vacant seat must be held within 21 to 30 days from the date the writ is filed, assuming there is more than one candidate—since the cash-strapped PLP opposes a poll. Bye-elections are generally perceived to favour the party in office, but there have been exceptions to this rule. In 1960 the opposition PLP won four new constituencies on New Providence set up as a result of electoral reforms piloted by the British following the 1958 general strike. The PLP's Warren Levarity also won a bye-election on Grand Bahama that year. However, the PLP went on to lose the general election two years later. The opposition UBP's Basil Kelly won a hotly-contested bye-election in 1967 in Crooked Island and Acklins, and the opposition FNM won a 1990 by-election in Grand Bahama held after the death of then FNM leader Sir Cecil Wallace-Whitfield. Hubert Ingraham replaced Sir Cecil as leader and went on to win the 1992 general election.

The World Economic Forum takes place in Davos, Switzerland. This annual, invitation-only meeting has engaged leaders from all walks of life to help shape the global agenda for the last four decades. This year they are being asked to "Rethink, Redesign and Rebuild". Co-chairs include Melinda Gates (of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), Erich Schmidt of Google and Joseph Ackerman of Deutsche Bank. Among the 2500 participants are top executives, senior government representatives, academic experts and journalists. Last year, participants agreed with former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan's assessment that "the current architecture of managing global affairs is broken and needs to be fixed...new players have to be integrated and the poor have to be given a voice." His advice was acted upon with the emergence later last year of the Group of 20 nations (including the top developing countries) as the chief global kitchen cabinet.

An Abridged Critique of Nicolette Bethel’s 2009 Day of Absence

Bahamian cultural activists staged a 'Day of Absence' last February. The name was taken from a play about a small American town in which the white inhabitants discover that all the black people have suddenly disappeared. What would happen if Bahamians woke up one day and found that all the artists and cultural workers had vanished? Wouldn't our world be a poorer and sadder place?

According to former cultural affairs director Nicolette Bethel (now a lecturer at the College of The Bahamas), the Day of Absence attempted to make the point that Bahamian artists, musicians, writers, actors, directors, dancers, designers, craftworkers, you name it — are marginalized, disrespected, and taken for granted:

"They are unable to find work in the areas in which God has gifted them. Our greatest brain drain is arguably in the area of the arts, and culture has absolutely no respect in the national discourse." I wrote a column about this last April, and one of Bethel's colleagues - Ward Minnis - was moved to write an essay "congratulating her on a job well done while taking her to task for ideas that are at best half-baked." What follows is an abridged version of that essay, published here as a guest column.

Minnis (the son of songwriter/artist Eddie Minnis) recently earned a Master’s degree in history from Ottawa’s Carleton University. He is a visual artist and a writer, with poetry appearing in Yinna volume 2 and Tamarind volume 1, and a satirical play on prosperity theology in development. He continues to research The Fergusons of Farm Road  - a Bahamian radio serial. On January 12 the National Art Gallery will host a debate on the merits of the Day of Absence between Bethel, Minnis and the Bahamian art community.