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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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My Grandfather’s Bones
Environmental Hazards of Bauxite Mining in Jamaica
By John Maxwell
My maternal grandfather's bones lie
somewhere underneath the alumina refinery at Nain, safe
at least from the caustic soda and soda ash which
pollutes the air breathed by his neighbour's
descendants, sickens their livestock, and corrodes their
aluminum roofs.
Beginning six decades ago, bauxite
mining companies began to buy up huge areas of land in
Jamaica, in areas where the earth was red, as red as
blood when newly dug. The people from whom they bought
the land were happy.
There was no irrigation in St
Elizabeth, St Ann and Manchester, and the land they sold
was in their opinion, not really good farmland. That was
not true, as my friend Rolly Simms and his neighbours
proved in Mocho, in Clarendon, where they grew huge
crops of vegetables on bauxite land fertilised by
chicken, cow and goat manure – as they still do in parts
of St Elizabeth.
That was before the bauxite companies
came to Mocho in the sixties and their coming was in a
way providential for the farmers there: they had been
bankrupted by the failure of the Marrakech and Arawak
hotels which had bought thousands of pounds of
vegetables from them and went bankrupt without paying.
In January 1978, when I was chairman
of the Natural Resources Conservation Authority, I
dislocated my shoulder and nearly broke my neck falling
out of a soursop tree in Hayes Cornpiece, in Clarendon.
I was in the soursop tree because I
wanted to see close-up, the damage the people said was
caused to their roofs by the toxic and corrosive dust
and fumes emanating from the Jamalco alumina refinery. I
went to Hayes at the invitation of Hugh Shearer, MP for
the constituency and former Prime Minister, who, in
addition to explaining to me the problems of the people,
confided to me what he said were the real reasons for
the turmoil then rocking the Jamaica Labour Party.
I was joking with Shearer as I
climbed the tree, and didn't pay enough attention to the
branch my foot rested on, which is why I fell out of the
tree.
My shoulder was the least of our
worries that day or in the weeks that followed. Nothing
that Dudley Thompson, then Minister of Mining,
or Shearer or I or could do, could persuade Jamalco to
admit that their factory played any part in the misery
afflicting the people of Hayes Cornpiece.
"Even before community concerns
escalated to public protest, the complaints of illness
caught the attention of University of the West Indies
medical student Patrece Charles-Freeman. After an
exhaustive study of emissions and medical records within
a 10-mile radius of the Halse Hall bauxite-alumina
operation in neighboring Clarendon parish,
Charles-Freeman this month submitted a doctoral thesis
documenting dramatically elevated incidence of asthma,
sinusitis and allergies among those living close to the
mining and refining operations.
“In her study of 2,559 people,
Charles-Freeman found that 37% of adults and 21% of
children living within six miles of the facility
suffered sinusitis. Asthma afflicted 23% of adults and
26% of children. Allergies, likewise, were markedly more
prevalent among those who lived closest to the plant
than in control groups seven to 10 miles distant” (Carol
J Williams–Los Angeles Times, Oct 14, 2004).
The Los Angeles Times story
also reports: "One study underway at the International
Centre for Environmental and Nuclear Sciences at the
University of the West Indies is measuring how deeply
bauxite and other heavy metals have penetrated the food
chain. The center's director, Gerald Lalor, notes that
the soil around Mandeville is also replete with cadmium,
mercury, lead, arsenic, uranium and other elements known
to pose health risks to humans."
Jamalco denied liability. They have
never admitted any environmental damage as far as I can
discover.
They never have and they never will.
A few days ago some of their top executives went to
Mocho where the mining manager, Mr Driscoll said inter
alia “There are some things that should have been fixed,
and I have said it before, a long time ago. But they
haven’t been (done) and we now have to fix it.…. I
could sit here and try to apologise. I don’t think it’s
going to serve us any purpose now.” Amen.
Red Mud, Red Eyes and Red Handed
According to a scientific paper
written by the head of Jamaica's water Resources
Authority:
"Jamaica’s bauxite/alumina industry
produces a waste product known locally as “red mud”.
This waste has been disposed of, for over 30 years since
the plants were constructed, in unsealed mined out pits
within the karstic limestone. The karstic limestone is
the principal aquifer in the island and supplies 80% of
the islands water supply. The waste is more than 85%
water, is highly caustic and rapidly infiltrates to the
ground water table. Ground water contaminated by red mud
shows increased sodium, pH and alkalinity
concentrations. Monitoring of ground water around the
four (4) processing plants in the island has indicated
contamination of water resources.
Approximately 200 million cubic
metres (MCM) of groundwater have been contaminated and
another 200 MCM is at risk of contamination. The red mud
ponds are in the direct path of ground water flow and
pose a serious threat to ground water reservoirs and
consequently the ground water reserves of the island.(my
bold face) Relocation of the ponds would not remove the
threat." (Abstract: "Contamination of water resources
by the bauxite alumina operations in Jamaica -Basil
Fernandez ).
(For comparison, The Mona Reservoir
holds about 800 million gallons of water. 200 million
cubic metres are about 40 billion gallons of
water—enough to fill 80,000 reservoirs the size of
Mona.)
Since they began operations half a
century ago the bauxite companies have mined perhaps 5
thousand hectares (12,000) of Jamaican soil under laws
which theoretically compelled them to restore the land
to its original state after the bauxite was extracted.
If you fly over Jamaica tomorrow you will be able to
see huge wounds in the flesh of our country, from which
bauxite was gouged and the topsoil never replaced. That
land is sterile, and you can make you own estimates of
how much production has been lost in the years since the
earth was ripped and torn to make frying pans and planes
and lots of money, for the financiers who owned the
aluminum companies.
If in all those years the bauxite
companies have made any unsolicited contribution to the
welfare of this country or its people, I would like to
know. There have been public relations gestures, such as
the establishment of a chair in the Environment at UWI.
The Widow’s Mite
The displacement of people from
bauxite land disturbed not only the bones of our
forefathers but also disrupted the cultures of our
people. Many flooded into Kingston, to create huge and
murderous slums. Some went abroad, taking their energy
and skills with them. These days, their widow's mites,
repatriated from the United States and Britain,
contribute more to our national income than does the
bauxite which chased them away. And most of the bauxite
contribution is only notional anyway. What actually
remains in Jamaica is picayune. More especially since a
few years ago a leading light in the trade union
movement called for Alcoa to be given a 'bly' by the
people of Jamaica. They were paying too much tax!!!
Mr Patterson agreed.
The CEO of ALCOA, the world's largest
aluminum producer last year received remuneration of
US$4.4 million (J$290 million) a base salary of US$1.3
million, plus a $1.6 million cash bonus, along with $1.5
million in restricted stock. Alcoa's shareholders spent
another $200,000 paying for, among other items, some of
his taxes and club dues. The company's revenues for 2005
exceeded US$26 Billion. It was to this CEO and this
company that Jamaica made its essential contribution—the
Widow's Mite indeed to support a man who gets one
million Jamaican dollars for every day he works.
To the Uttermost Farthing . . .
The mining company does not only
destroy the land from which it extracts its wealth. The
roads it carves into the mining areas open up the
forests to loggers and woodcutters—firestick harvesters
and charcoal burners. The collateral damage is several
times the damage done directly by the mining companies.
In the seventies when I saw from the
air some of the craters created by bauxite mining, I
asked Dudley Thompson whether we could not seal the
bottoms of some of these excavations so that they could
retain water for farmers and function also as public
fish farms. When he asked the Jamaica Bauxite Institute
he was told that the mining companies were entitled to
all the bauxite in every deposit and that they were
determined to extract every last ounce. This meant that
no clay would be left to seal the holes and most of the
water they caught would simply be lost.
So we lose production and we lose
water. But there is more, much more. According to
ALCOA’s Annual report, plans are in place to double
production at Jamalco to at least 2.8 million tons per
year of alumina, “making it among the world's lowest
cost refineries". That's why they needed an ease, a bly,
the widow's mite. Without that, they probably couldn't
afford it.
What the Annual report does not say
is that between the Jamaica Bauxite Institute and ALCOA,
there has been a plan kept secret for 13 years, to build
a million ton a year alumina refinery in the middle of
Jamaica's most ecologically and environmentally valuable
real estate.
This kind of threat is not peculiar
to us. In Australia, ALCOA is busy destroying the Jarrah
forests in Western Australia. In Iceland they are
wrecking priceless glaciers, canyons and lakes and
blighting the country’s unique landscape to build a
hydropower plant and aluminum smelter. In Trinidad they
want to build power stations and smelters against the
will and wishes of the people.
And the company’s biggest refinery—in
Rockfield, Texas—is the worst polluter in Texas and is
abstracting the common water supply for sale to
townships of its choice. The secret behind ALCOA’s dirty
air: the Rockfield refinery is located on a huge seam of
soft brown coal—lignite. And burning lignite is like
burning dirt.
Unfortunately for us, and probably
unknown to the Government, there is a huge deposit of
lignite in the Cockpit Country.
Insulting Charles Darwin
As I pointed out in an earlier column
(“Land of Look Behind” – October 1) the Cockpit
Country is a riot of biodiversity and one of the most
precious places on the planet because of this. It is a
living laboratory for the study of evolution and, unlike
the Galapagos Islands, it is relatively easily
accessible to scholars and students and eventually, to
people who simply want to enjoy the wilderness.
Of course, when we protect the
Cockpit Country, we need to protect its integrity,
limiting access to some parts to scientists and
qualified researchers. There is enough of this treasure
to go round for millennia—but not for bauxite.
What is planned—whatever the
developers say—is nothing less than the total
destruction of a priceless resource in exchange for a
polluting alumina refinery, the destruction of Rio Bueno
harbour and the world famous coral cliffs above and
below the waterline there. Below the waterline are
corals and an unimaginable wonderland of aquatic life,
already threatened by climate change/global warming, and
about to be sentenced to death by Alcoa and the JBI.
Some people just do not understand
that some of us are unwilling to swap our culture and
scientific treasures for just a few million more frying
pans or a few thousand more Boeing 747s.
Unfortunately, what is being planned
for the Cockpit Country is part of a massive degradation
of the parish of Trelawny in the name of development.
The developers seem to be hoping to compromise the Prime
Minister by involving her in such pagan rites as the
groundbreaking for the latest Spanish
disaster-by-the-sea.
Mrs Simpson Miller needs to advise
herself urgently. She needs to round up all the
developers and force them to disgorge their plans and
feasibility studies, and to seek advice as well from
scientists from Caribbean universities and farther
afield. What is at stake is much more important than we
know.
We risk making world-class buffoons
of ourselves if we continue on this totally
anti-environmental, anti-ecological, anti-civilisation
course.
The Prime Minister needs to know that
13 years after we signed it, the SPAW protocol, which
forbids such obscenities, is still not ratified by
Jamaica – alone – of all the significant countries of
the wider Caribbean. Yet, ironically, the Protocol is
officially housed at the Seabed Headquarters at the
bottom of Duke Street almost within sight of Gordon
House.
There is an island (when last I
heard) called Nauru, in the South Pacific. Like Jamaica,
Nauru was composed almost entirely of a valuable
mineral. In the case of Nauru the resource was
phosphate, the fossilised excrement of seabirds. The
Island was ravaged for its guano; its people had no say
in what happened. Now, they are looking for a roost
somewhere. The mining has reduced Nauru to its bare
bones, and global warming and sea level rise will soon
conceal the crime.
We have nowhere else to go.
Copyright© 2006 John Maxwell
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Life on Mars
By Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly noted the collection's "lyric brilliance" and "political impulses [that] never falter." A New York Times review stated, "Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe; it's to accept—or at least endure—the universe's mystery. . . . Religion, science, art: we turn to them for answers, but the questions persist, especially in times of grief. Smith's pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant." Life on Mars follows Smith's 2007 collection, Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the only award for poetry in the United States given to support a poet's second book, and the first Essence Literary Award for poetry, which recognizes the literary achievements of African Americans. The Body’s Question (2003) was her first published collection. Smith said Life on Mars, published by small Minnesota press Graywolf, was inspired in part by her father, who was an engineer on the Hubble space telescope and died in 2008.
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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