Cayman’s last chance saloon

Theresa Green writes: As we all melt into Cayman’s ever-advancing concrete this summer, gasp at the soaring mercury around the world, watch opened-mouthed at the wildfires burning out of control and the floods wreaking havoc, only the most stupid or stubborn among us doubt that humans are in a whole lot of trouble. But it is also clear now that those with the power to fix it have no intentions of doing so.

As reported on CNS last week, the climate clock ticked below the six-year mark this past Saturday. That means the human race and those with the power and money to decide all of our fates have the smallest window of opportunity yet to reverse the accelerating warming of the planet by drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

But it’s pretty obvious that is not going to happen. 

At the weekend, the G20 wrapped up a four-day summit in India without reaching a deal to phase down the use of fossil fuels or commit to increased investments in solar, wind and other renewable energy sources. The countries that account for over three-quarters of global emissions also failed to agree on increasing investment in clean energy.

With no one coming to the rescue, including the United Kingdom, the people of Cayman must now demand that those in power and those who hold the purse strings here, in both the private and public sectors, take dramatic action to help these islands adapt to and mitigate the effect that climate change is having and will have on all our lives.

Adaptation is Cayman’s last chance saloon.

We can do nothing to change the global catastrophe that is coming, but we must begin to focus on what we can do here to survive it. We can prepare for the impact of rising seas, more ferocious storms, drier, hotter weather and clean up our own air. In line with the original catchphrase of the green movement, it is time to “think global but act local” and prepare our own yard for what is already upon us.

While we are going to need to do an awful lot, the priority has to be a massive programme of rewilding our lost natural habitat, especially protecting and, where possible, replanting mangroves. Wednesday was International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Wetlands. Month after month, we continue to see the loss of this natural habitat as we destroy wetlands to make way for development, usually luxury accommodation rather than affordable homes, to feed the real estate market and the demands of billionaires.

This means that the long-awaited development plan that government wants to roll out, which will no doubt pave the way for more development, needs to be scrapped. Cayman is crying out for a plan that draws a literal line in the sand for the concrete and re-imagines how we need to live. 

Development needs to stop.

And before our resident millionaires and billionaires and those aspiring to join that club begin clutching their costly pearls at the very idea, a moratorium on concrete luxury development will leave plenty of room for a new kind of money-making venture. The redevelopment of existing property and already man-modified land provides plenty of entrepreneurial opportunity for those with the intelligence to generate wealth.

For the majority of the one-percenters who have acquired their wealth by inheriting it or through ruthless or dishonest practices, polluting the world with chemical-based products, the new Cayman will no doubt prove challenging. But as they like to remind the poor working classes whose jobs get pushed out by development and modernisation: adapt or die.

Wealth can no longer be generated as it has been to date by the exploitation of the planet’s natural resources. The new wealth needs to come from reshaping the damage that has been caused here in Cayman as well as around the world. For genuine entrepreneurial money-makers, the new world of redevelopment and green technologies could be their oyster (albeit the only one they are likely to get).   

There will be plenty of work for the innovative and the imaginative, the salvage operators, scrap dealers, up-cyclers and re-users, as everything we tear down in this metamorphosis will need to be reconstructed as something else.

The redevelopment can start here with all of the hard structures that have been built too close to the ocean, from swimming pools to seawalls, and work its way through the concrete with which we have destroyed this paradise.

Coastal concrete erected over the last fifty years or so could be part of a massive managed retreat that will see those familiar sites that have caused beach erosion pulled back and rebuilt in new and innovative ways on much smaller footprints.

The acres and acres of concrete parking, which has become a comic absurdity as it is one of the few things that offends the sensitivities of the Central Planning Authority, leading to the refusal of an application, has to be addressed. Several years ago, during a public meeting to discuss the redevelopment of George Town — a long-running project that has barely gotten off the ground — officials revealed that there were almost 15,000 parking spaces in George Town at that time. Most of them are there as a result of the planning law requirements for each building in the capital.

But many stand empty day after day, reserved for that ‘just in case visitor’, unavailable to those that might need to park and do business elsewhere in the capital, while simply warming in the sun to the point where they make a convenient hot-plate for the growing number of homeless people now living here.

The stupidity of this is breathtaking.

Yet month after month, the CPA requires every planning applicant to tear down trees and other greenery to provide even more of this parking at a time when it is clear people need to get out of their cars. Our approach to development is not only insane, ad-hoc, misjudged and completely inappropriate for the modern world, it is adding to our future demise.

Endless new development remains our fundamental problem as we need to be doing the exact opposite. What remains of our natural world — in particular the wetlands and coastal lagoons, as well as primary dry forest habitat — we must plant many, many, many more trees.

Turning our attention to a new kind of greener redevelopment programme where we reuse and repurpose what we have already built by reducing the concrete footprint we can preserve and regrow the mangroves we continue to destroy. We can protect the coastlines, promote the return of bio-diversity, protect our dwindling marine diversity and encourage people to live differently. We can grow more food, have simpler lives, stop catching up with the ‘Ebanks’ and live in harmony with our environment, taking only want we need, not everything we desire.

There will be no room in the future for obscene opulence based purely on taking, destroying and consuming. To survive what is coming will require a new way of living and thinking.

In a small place like Cayman, we can do it. It is still possible for us to change and take a new approach. But we must begin now as it is almost too late, and the first job for all of us is to persuade the small percentage of people in our community that hold most of the power and the money that things need to be very different.

The rich can wait until we eat them, or they can help support new ways to feed us all before the last chance saloon closes.

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