John Maxwell's views: Jamaica, Haiti and the world...

The warmth to come
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, November 04, 2007



In 1958, Jamaica was in the grip of a severe drought. It hadn't rained for months. Water was rationed; pastures and the cows they supported were drying up. The situation was dire.



The then Lord Bishop of Jamaica, Percival Gibson, went to Premier Norman Manley with the support of a wide spectrum of churches, arguing that Jamaica should observe a national Day of Prayer for rain.

Manley saw no harm in the proposal so he supported the idea.

Scarcely had the Day of Prayer ended when the rains came. It rained and it rained and it rained, and when the sun came out again the country had been devastated by flooding, washouts, landslides and other disasters.

The rains over the past few weeks reminded me of that week so long ago, except that after all the rain this year, nobody was praying for more.


Two residents of Duhaney Pen, St Thomas walk in flood waters from last week's rains. (Photo: Michael Gordon)

In fact, we probably haven't had such consistent rainy seasons for a long time. Jamaica - and the rest of the Greater Antilles - seems to have been oversupplied with rain over the last four years and we have been visited by a variety of weather systems including storms and hurricanes, which seems to me without parallel in my memory.

The truth is that global warming is already changing our weather in unpredictable ways. Over the past few weeks, where I live in Stony Hill, my views of Kingston have been occluded by more mist/fog/low cloud than I can remember in the 34 years I have lived in this house.

The resulting environmental moisture hasn't, unfortunately, put an end to the criminal stupidity of clearing land by fire. The results of some of that activity may be seen in landslides on Jacks Hill and the incredibly rutted and potholed roads of Kingston.

On Wednesday, it took me an hour to get from the UWI campus to my home, most of it spent on the unsalubrious Barbican Road. During that spell, I remembered another experience in that area a couple of years ago, when it took me an hour to get from Lionel Town to Kingston and then another hour to get from King's House Gate to Barbican Square.

Wednesday's crush was caused by the rain, by potholed roads and by a primitive road network more suitable for a rural market town than a city of nearly a million people. The experience is one that will become increasingly familiar and expensive because of global warming and our idiotic refusal to face facts.

Before ground was broken for the Doomsday Highway, I was one of those suggesting that the highway was a wrong priority. I thought we should have spent the money on the existing road system, and on education. As I reminded my readers then, Norway's Millennium Project was to put the entire Norwegian educational system on the worldwide web, the Internet.

We chose to make a statement, egged on by the overpaid loonies at the World Bank, who were quoted to justify the most gigantic piece of foolishness in our history. According to them, roads were guarantors of development, attracting investment and so on. Perhaps that is true in Amazonia, where greedy entrepreneurs are raping the world's greatest supply of fresh water by clearing forest areas the size of Jamaica every six months.

Meanwhile, following more of the Bank's misguided advice, our Government was contemplating the sale of our water supplies to private business interests. They actually sold at least two, which we should use every means at our disposal to recover before it is too late.

The World Bank is a villain in another environmental disaster, convincing the Government of Mr Patterson to create a dysfunctional monster by amalgamating the Town Planning Department with the Natural Resources Conservation Authority and a slew of other Governmental agencies in the most intricate conflict of interests it is possible to encompass in one decision. All that was missing from the mix was the Universal Devastation Conglomerate - the UDC.

This year's rains may have got the attention of some of us, but most people will never make the connection between the disastrous decisions we have been taking with our coming debilitating poverty and the mayhem which will inevitably follow. Our gunmen and child molesters are the products of a depraved environment and of a system which cares more for 'tax reform' than it does for people.

Rain in Haiti

Nothing better exemplifies the need for real democracy than the disaster attending Hurricane Noel in Haiti. The Americans kidnapped the president of Haiti four years ago, charging corruption and mismanagement.

The real reason was that he disobeyed the dictat of the World Bank, the IMF and - Good Grief! - the United States of George Bush.

Haiti is the poorest country in this part of the world and poses no threat to anyone, except to a few light-skinned Haitians and Lebanese-Americans who form the so-called 'Elite' of Haiti.

Last week, some researchers announced that they had traced HIV-AIDS in this hemisphere back to Haiti, which doesn't surprise me, since Haiti has represented to Americans, Satan's western kingdom ever since the Haitians threw out the French (twice) the British and the Spaniards, abolished slavery and set up their black republic offering asylum to any black person fleeing slavery in the US and anywhere else.

Aristide seemed determined to restore Haitian independence and national integrity, so he had to go. In recent months, two of his top lieutenants in Haiti have been kidnapped. One of them, Dr Lovinsky Pierre Antoine, has probably been murdered. The other, Dr Maryse Narcisse, has been returned after a huge international outcry led by Haitians in Haiti and in the USA.

The point is that when Aristide was in office he was busy installing systems, which allowed people to be warned and moved away from impending disaster. Now that he is gone, the new/old rulers are trying to dismember the Fanmi Lavalas, which wants Aristide back.
Expect more outrages and lots more dead Haitians.

Reflections in the Mist

On Wednesday evening I watched as gradually, Kingston disappeared from view. The lights had gone out because the Stony Hill area is usually the first to lose electricity when there is a power crisis. The combination of the blackout and the fog left me in deepening darkness, but not before a most unusual encounter with a bird.

I'd been on my verandah photographing humming birds when I sensed the approach of something bigger. It was a whitewing dove, obviously headed for a landing on my head. In my surprise at the approach of the bird I threw a hand up to protect my face before I realised what was coming at me. The dove, startled by my sudden movement, banked sharply, its wings touching my hair, and went off to settle on a power line adjacent to the house.

As the darkness deepened I thought about my close encounter and about things that happened a long time ago.
As the mist intensified I thought that all Kingston was in blackout and that I would have as good a chance of seeing the stars again as after Hurricane Gilbert. But the lights were not all out and the cloud and the light pollution prevented me seeing any stars.

That took me back to my hometown, Duncans, now threatened by 'development', where I walked with my father under a Milky Way such as none of this generation can ever have seen, a broad, coruscating belt of stars arching across the sky. My father explained that the constellations we could see, such as Orion, Cassiopeia and the Pleiades and the sun around which our earth revolved, were all part of the Milky Way. We were seeing only a small fraction of it, from inside.

As a small boy I felt even smaller when he assured me that the universe went on and on and that there were probably more stars - more suns - than the grains of sand on Derby Beach, now Silver Sands, and probably on all the beaches in Jamaica, if not the world.

And, as I mused on these things I remembered summer days and nights after my father died, summer holidays I spent with my Uncle Hugh and Aunt Ivy Cork in Clarendon, first at Tollgate (the house is still there) and at Palmer's Cross where my uncle's small farm is probably providing a foundation for Jamaica's largest patty factory.

My uncle raised Dr Lecky's Montgomery-Jersey crosses (now the Jamaica Hope) cows, goats, Leghorn, Rhode Island and Hampshire chickens, for eggs and meat along with a few 'common fowls' for Sunday dinner, rabbits, turkeys and bees.

I learned to milk the cows, to assist in the delivery of calves, feed chickens and turkeys and deal with them when they fell ill, look after the bees, extract honey, separate the cream from milk and churn it to make butter. I even cured a rabbit skin to make a cover for a notebook, which I took with me to my first journalistic job at The Gleaner.

My cousins Karl and Clive and my brother and I spent our free time climbing mango and cashew trees, roasting cashews - more difficult than you think - and going 'bird hunting' armed with catapults and knives made by laying ten penny nails on the railway tracks, to be recovered, flattened, after the train had passed.

We were barefoot, of course, braving prickles, which were extracted by hot needles. I learned how to get cold, fresh water by using a thin piece of bamboo to draw the precious fluid out of honeycomb rock, which to the naked eye, looked as promising a source of water as the Sahara sands.

It was idyllic but it was also a profound education. I learned to handle a plough behind a yoke of massive Indian (Brahman') steers - a skill as difficult I imagine, as ice-skating. The owner of the team, a small Indian gentleman in a dhoti, handled his massive charges as if they were kittens.
And as I thought of these things, of my time as a Sea Scout at Calabar and an ordinary scout at JC, I grieve for all those boys who have never had any of these experiences, boys who know only squalor and aggression. Development, bauxite and bad planning have robbed them of something infinitely more precious than first prize in the lottery.

Climate Change & Planning

The world is running out of petroleum. Peak oil production occurred a few years ago and it is all downhill from there. As the supply diminishes the oil companies will become even more voracious and the oil producing countries will want more for their wasting asset.

Mr Bush's United States hopes to trump all that by its dismemberment of Iraq. Without a strong ventral government the US can make better deals with whoever is left when everything falls down. The US was hoping for an independent Kurdish state in the northern part of Iraq, bordering on Turkey. The Kurds want an independent Kurdistan, which would embrace parts of Iraq, Turkey and Iran.

Neither the Turks nor the Iranians are going to accept this American cuckoo - Kurdistan - which is why Turkey intervened in Iraq recently, not only to punish the Kurdish guerrillas, but also to warn the United States. The US would prefer to confine the more independent and warlike Sunni Arabs to a small area, largely without oil while the south of Iraq is ruled by an American-friendly Shiite government.
The trouble is that oil is too corrosive for any such solution to last.

In addition, the US stands to be outbid by the Chinese and the Japanese, both of whose economies are much stronger than the US. Additionally, the US does not know what to do about Saudi Arabia which sits on the largest proven reserves. The present rulers are more or less friendly to the US but the US can't be sure how long they will last. And the Americans cannot forget that most of the 9/11 hijackers and their leader, Bin Laden, are Saudis.

Whatever happens, Jamaica will soon not be able to afford petroleum-based fuel. The proposed replacement is based on coal, which can be turned into liquid fuel for motor vehicles. South Africa is the master of this technology. Will Jamaica be able to buy it from them?

Even if coal is the substitute for oil, the price of that commodity will rise, as oil gets shorter, to whatever the market will bear. In the global auction for fuel, we do not have a chance. We need to make two decisions: one is what form our major transport services will take; the other what fuel will we use for power.

The prospects of ethanol are almost nil. Jamaica could not produce enough ethanol even if sugar cane were to be grown on Blue Mountain Peak. We need the land for food, which will become much more expensive to import, given rising fuel prices. We will become, as the quaint saying is - "more competitive".

We have almost no alternative to solar power and if we had begun planning for it in the seventies and eighties, as we should have done, we would not now be in our desperate position. The Cubans have oil, yet they have been developing solar energy, producing their own photovoltaic cells and making other preparations for the warm times ahead.

Placed as we are between the Tropics, we have pretty constant sunlight, and enough land unsuitable for anything else (think bauxite) to produce much more power than we need.

Those who downplay solar power as the dream of tree-huggers and unpractical people will soon be telling us that they have discovered solar energy and wondering why the rest of us didn't get the message earlier.

For most of Jamaica's heyday in sugar we depended on solar power in the form of windmills and water wheels. But there are very wise fools who will tell us that solar power can't work in Jamaica

Copyright©2007
John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com

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