The Fires Next Time

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

Some of the broadcast news coverage of the recent fires at New Providence’s main dump has been sensational. One network reporter breathlessly signed off from the dump with the melodramatic assertion that he was reporting from Ground Zero.

The term 'Ground Zero' was coined after the initial testing, followed by the subsequent detonation of atomic bombs in Japan during World War II. It referred to the ground directly under the exploding nuclear weapons.

Between August 6, 1945 and September 11, 2001, the term gained currency, and was often drafted to describe the epicentre of a natural or human-made disaster of extraordinary proportions.

Post-9/11, it became synonymous with the site where a pair of airplanes struck the Twin Towers of The World Trade Center in New York City.

We can forgive the hyperbole of labeling the site of these dump fires, Ground Zero. Less excusable, is the failure of much of the team coverage, to sift through the embers and unearth still smoldering and broader story-lines.

The public deserves a review of how well, or poorly, various authorities responded to this crisis. But we also need to look in the mirror and do some soul-searching and self-reflection. And, conversion.

While officialdom must be held accountable, a slothful public needs to acknowledge that our wasteful habits and ecological insensitivity have created mountains of garbage, which threaten the environment and our lives.

A dear friend recently witnessed an all too frequent disregard for our environment. She watched an immaculately dressed teenager mindlessly dump his fast food wrappers in the bush.

Though personally crisp and clean, he failed to recognize a civic duty to afford his/our environment a similar regard. Like this teen, Bahamians pay great attention to personal hygiene and attire. We like to look good.

Sadly however, he is a reminder of how complacent we are regarding our shared spaces: the garbage on our streets; the grime and disrepair suffocating our tourist industry and the anemic maintenance of our public infrastructure.

The shameful reality: too many adults lead the assault on our natural and built landscape, as well as the standards which heretofore served as a bulwark against such a decline.

We have become comfortable with things looking bad. We believe it’s normal for public grounds and buildings to look shabby. Many of us just don’t see the filth anymore.

Personal cleanliness is a reflection of individual character. Likewise, our soiled public spaces grittily cling to our national character -- no matter how smartly we’re dressed.

If personal cleanliness is next to godliness, most Bahamians are blessed. Correspondingly, if public cleanliness is also next to godliness, we may be in trouble.

Like the littering adolescent, a young Bahamas was indifferent regarding where our garbage went, for what we thought, was its final resting place. Now, our youthful indiscretions have become adult habits; difficult to break and highly destructive.

Whether we threw bottles out car windows, or dumped plastic bags in the ocean, or decorated empty lots with discarded appliances, or bade farewell to daily trash when the garbage truck pulled off -- we didn’t give much thought to where it all went.

It was now someone else’s responsibility. But, because nature abhors a vacuum and being taken for granted, the garbage we refused to recycle, may be recycling itself -- with malignant results: poisoned ground water and oceans, polluted air, sick people and regular fires.

To be sure, other environmental crises abound, including the short-sighted, profiteering and destructive practices of many local and foreign developers.

But even as we decry such actions, we often fail to act responsibly regarding the individual actions we can take as citizens, consumers, parents et. al., to transform clean, green and pristine from a slogan into reality.

Ours may not be rank hypocrisy, but it is sufficient hypocrisy.

I say this as a fellow hypocrite, sitting atop my heaping, wasteful mound of poor ecological choices, laziness and stupidity; plastic bags and bottles; and polystyrene containers [Styrofoam is a trademark for this material].

Thankfully, many have started to act more responsibly -- individually and collectively – including, Abaco residents who are attempting to rid themselves of plastic grocery bags.

This may be one small step by Abaconians, but it can be one giant leap, if most of us followed suit. Of course, this is only a beginning.

In 1963 James Baldwin released two extraordinary essays under the title, “The Fire Next Time”. They served as a warning on the corrosive effects an unchecked racism might have on America.

His warnings were ignored and American cities and towns caught fire.

The recent dump fire, which skipped into the adjacent forest and threatened Jubilee Gardens, is another warning that our wasteful habits are coming back to haunt us.

Gated windows, bolted doors and security systems may deter criminals. But they can not stop future fires in dumps across the country. The fires next time -- fueled by our garbage -- may be even worse.

Then we really may be talking about Ground Zero.

Comments

[Bob Knaus]

I, for one, would be happy if Bahamians put more into their landfills and not less.

If you go back to the original US posters for Earth Day back in the early 70s, you'd think the major environmental problem was litter, not rainforests or global warming.

And, it was. And, we fixed it. US roadways are a lot less littered now than when I was a child.

I think the Bahamian government project to put up signs saying "Keep {community x} Clean, Green, and Pristine" are on the right track. Stopping the litter habit is the first step in environmental consciousness. If you can't recyle, at least dispose of it properly.

Bahamians, please fill up that landfill!

[bushbaby]

Those signs are useless. Especially the ones that try to scare people into driving slower.

You could put up a million signs and they will all be cancelled out every weekend when someone's mother puts some fish guts or chicken skin into a plastic bag and tells the kid "here, go trow dis in da bush, trow it far so we don smell it".

...honestly it confuses me when some people do that. I know people whose garbage bin is 3 times closer than their back fence and they put 99% of their trash in their garbage bin but still put stuff like fish guts in plastic bags and throw them over the fence... I don't get it. Just put it in the trash!

[Bob Knaus]

What that says to me is that trashiness is cultural.

A few years back, I rode the "chicken buses" all around Guatemala. They are called that because you can board them with a chicken under each arm. No kidding, I've seen it done.

At each stop (and they were frequent) vendors would board the bus selling food and drink. The drinks came in plastic bottles; the foods in various plastic bags. As we traveled down the highway, all the plastic got tossed out the window to join the mounds of litter already there.

And that got me to thinking. Are Guatemalans trashy people? Objectively, yes. But look back a couple of decades, to when the drinks came in reusable glass bottles, and the food came in wax paper or corn husks. Back then, it was environmentally acceptable to toss biodegradables out the window, and to save the reusables for their deposit.

Today, what they need is a guy on the bus with a trash bag.

Social mores have to keep up with the times. Bahamians have to learn not to throw plastic-bagged chicken guts into the bushes.

Put that on the signs, it's that simple.

[C.Lowe]

I remember a time when it was illegal to dump and throw trash out the window etc.
Wait a minute, it still is.
No enforcement of the law leads to ignoring the law.
There is no such thing as small or large laws but, our police force seem to not recognize that they are the enforcer of ALL law.
The fine for littering was I believe $50 but fairly recently was raised to $500 with little effect.
I think I could collect a couple thousand a day, I wonder how much they collect......

[Paul Lowe]

I began recycling all my non-animal, kitchen waste in a compost in my back yard.

The first batch took about three months to turn to soil. Now potato skins turn to mulch in just a week or two.

The Japanese have invented a technology that will ferment animal waste - not decay - in a relatively short period of time and produces rich loamy soil, and rich soil conditioners to boot.

Now I did say loamy soil, and breakdown in weeks . . . so why is all our organic waste out on Harrold Road generating bio-gasses instead of being spread around farms.