Dear Editor,
Please allow me to congratulate my young friend Rueben Thompson on being awarded the 2009 Ewan P. McFarlane Award for Outstanding Leadership in the Insular Caribbean.
Environmentalists are a rare breed. In our small island societies, it is rare to find local people concerned about the environment. But Rueben, Jadira and others are proof that local people do not need to be lectured to by people coming from the polluted industrial world they left behind.
Jane Bryce in "Walking in Paradise" paid a tribute to Colin Hudson (1938-2004) of Barbados as follows: "But conservationists there are, and they have their weekly rituals like any other believers. Twice every Sunday, at dawn and again in the afternoon, you can join them in a National Trust Walk, led by Hudson, an eccentric and embattled eco-warrior. Hudson is one of those people whose existence proves the development pundits wrong. You find them in all the islands – individuals who have chosen their own way of life, aside from the world of corporate profiteering, tourism expansion and globalization."
Phyllis Shand Alfrey (of Dominica) in her book "The Orchid House," about three white sisters who return to their Caribbean island home, writes how on return to their ancestral home that, "Stella, the sensuous one, put her arms round the trunk of a laurier cypre and rubbed her cheek against the bark. I've come back, she said to the tree...as if she would strangle it for joy!" Generally, people concerned about nature are looked on as not being good in the head and a nuisance at best by those who want to "develop" the land.
As you can read daily in the newspapers, Rueben is up against a challenge which needs encouragement.
However, it is not an easy one. Based on a poem by M.G. Smith, 'Jamaica' (1938), "I saw my land in the morning and O but she was fair." Olive Senior wrote the following poem "Rejected Text for a Tourist Brochure."
Come see my land
Come see my land
Before the particles of busy fires ascend;
Before the rivers descend underground;
Before coffee plantations
Grind the mountains into dust; before
The coral dies; before the beaches
Disappear
Come see my land
Come see my land
And know
That she was fair.
Up here, the mountains are still clear.
After three weeks, I heard a solitaire.
Down there, the mountains are clear –cut
Marl pits. Truckers steal sand from beaches, from riverbeds,
To build another ganja palace,
Another shopping center, another hotel.
The rivers, angry, are sliding underground, leaving pure rock stone
And hungry belly.
No problem Mon, Come.
Will be one hell of a beach party.
No rain. No cover. No need to bring
Your bathing suit, your umbrella.
Come walk with me in the latest style:
Rock stone and dry gully. Come for the Final
Closing Down Sale. Take for a song
The Last Black Coral; the Last Green Turtle;
The Last Blue Swallow-tail (preserved behind glass).
Come walk the last mile to see the Last Manatee
The Last Coney, the Last Alligator, the Last Iguana Smile.
Oh, them gone already? No Problem, Mon.
Come. Look the film here.
Reggae soundtrack and all. Come see
My land. Come see my land and know, A-oh,
That she was fair."
With this letter, I am sending along a photo of Philipsburg taken fifty years ago. I would like for young Rueben Thompson to see how fair his land was and to encourage him to keep up the good work to preserve what is left.
Will Johnson
