The limitations of our leaders Flying home, there was a promotional film on Jamaica on the plane. I didn't listen to the sound track, but I saw the usual pictures of waterfalls, beaches, hummingbirds and scantily clad young women. The images struck me as seriously dishonest. Jamaica doesn't look like that, not any more, not even at the actual places filmed. Sure, you can take a skilful cameraman to Dunns River at sunset, wait until all the people have gone, and make it look beautiful. But the truth is it's getting harder and harder to find beautiful Jamaica amidst all the squalor. I'm never surer of this than on the drive from Norman Manley International Airport into Kingston. I know tourists don't usually come to Kingston, but Jamaicans do. I believe our constitution says we're entitled to a clean and healthy environment and there's little clean and healthy about the entrance to our city. I ask again: What's happening with Caribbean Cement's scrubbers? Why all the dust? What is the National Environmental Planning Agency (NEPA) doing about testing the air quality around the plant? (And at other places in Kingston for that matter?) If there is a programme to bring Carib Cement "into compliance" - to use NEPA's lingo - with environmental laws, why can't we know what it is? So I came home and started to resume my life. Ten days later, I'm depressed. On my first visit to Mona Reservoir, I saw the roads into Long Mountain and shortly thereafter, an advertisement for the houses to be built there. So the "development" is going ahead. No matter how light the impact of this particular housing scheme, it heralds the end of Long Mountain as green space. The more "disturbed" the forest becomes, the less reason there'll be to protect any of it. Soon houses will cover Long Mountain and Wareika Hill and more of our natural resources will be lost forever, continuing Kingston's inexorable descent into a mean, ugly city. It's only when you leave Jamaica that you realise how incredibly short-sighted we're being. There are many cities all over the world which protect their views and hills from development; no matter how much money you have, you just cannot build there. Here, any project which can loosely be labelled "development" goes ahead, because we appear to define development as the indiscriminate application of masses of concrete. Road to destruction In one of the first newspapers I read, I saw a new "Towards" green paper had been produced. For those of you not fully familiar with "Towards" papers, it's our method of choice for dealing with environmental problems. First, we talk for years, in and out of committees. Then we do a "Towards" paper. The latest one is called "Towards a National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan for Jamaica." "Towards" papers never attain a destination, but they do sometimes morph into "Framework" documents. They are generally launched at a function, any pesky question about the resources necessary to carry out the actions identified is treated as undue cynicism, and that's pretty much that. The only action is the production of the "Towards" paper or "Framework" document. Not much had changed in a year. And it seems Highway 2000 is also going ahead. The radio discussions I heard focused on the tender process and the issue of transparency. There were vague mentions of possible environmental impacts, but no-one seemed sure exactly what those might be. Well, here it is, guys. THE most common vehicle for environmental destruction is a road. Roads are themselves harmful as they reduce percolation of rain to water tables, increase run-off into the sea, destroy land and compromise biodiversity. But they also open up previously inaccessible areas to all kinds of other harmful activities, deforestation, quarrying, squatting, unregulated vending, and ill-considered development. If you want to destroy an area, the easiest thing to do is to build a road to it and just wait. Enlightened planning regards roads as necessary evils and tries to curtail them as much as possible. But we are about to engage in an orgy of road-building. THEN I heard Minister Peter Phillips say on radio he wasn't worried about the number of cars on the road, because at some point demand would be satisfied. This is complete nonsense. Even when every adult citizen has a car, car numbers continues to grow with population. As cities become more and more impossible to navigate without a car, people drive more. Roads become gridlocked with traffic, there is pressure for more roads; more roads encourage more cars and more gridlock. Again, enlightened city planning looks for ways to REDUCE reliance on motor cars. But the most depressing thing of all wasn't anything environmental. It was hearing the Prime Minister pandering to our worst impulses by declaring his sexual orientation on radio. Was I really listening to our Prime Minister say he has "impeccable credentials" as a heterosexual? That the talk show hosts could support his claim? In my first 10 days home, I'm uncomfortably facing the catastrophic limitations of Jamaica's leadership. Diana McCaulay
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