Human development has replaced the classical economists’ conceptualization of development such so that modern economists refer to this construct as including social, political and economic development. With this change in ideography, peoples’ welfare is a vital component in the new thrust. Now that welfare is measure beyond the capitalism perspective of costing, the issue of sustainable development is now a focal point of development discourse. At the heart of those discourses, lay the people in particular the less fortunate and how they will be able to garner needed resources to attain a particular lifestyle. The latter issue is always the catalyst for activities in deforestation and other environment hazards by the poor and destitute among us.
The issue of deforestation and its impact on the ecological balances have been the study of many environmentalist including Messers John Maxwell and Peter Espeut. The author chose this topic as the economic sustainability of human lives will destroy peoples’ welfare in the near future. Although housing development and the burning of charcoal provide a social safe net for many individuals, the problem of ecological balances and impact thereby from the issue previously mentioned cannot be overstated. The environment is gradually speaking to its inhabitants by way of illnesses and ecosystem imbalances. In that many people are reporting contracting asthma, other lung infections and the ozone layer has now shown a clear gap therein.
The island of Jamaica’s human population has grown exponentially over the last one hundred years and so the demand for various infrastructure developments. With the new but old phenomenon of globalization, migration is a thrust of a particular colonization of Western cultures on the African diaspora. The preference of Jamaicans for North American ‘goodies’ is no longer a casual relationship but causal one. Islanders are now demanding clusters of buildings, modernized shopping complexes, high-rise buildings and the taste that goes with it all in the name of development. This has resulted in the wholesale ‘rape’ of the environment. The metropolitan arenas of Jamaica have expanded from Port Royal, Kingston and St. Catherine to Kingston and St. Andrew, Montego Bay, Falmouth, Black River, Port Maria and now an urban centre is in each of the fourteen (14) parishes of the island.
Despite the early claims of globalization, on its ‘bad’ is urbanization with proper town planning. Urbanization sees the expansion of initial towns and cities by way of infrastructure development in the form of roads, schools, hospitals, housing developments and many more. These changes are usually accommodated by way of the cutting down of trees and other vegetations. This begs the question, is there an effective, structure and holelistic plan afoot to adequately address the issue of urbanization?’ The author coins the position of ‘geo-politicking’ to refer to the dynamics of urbanization and the ineffective and unsystematic plan for its address. This is a real situation in Jamaica – geo-politicking.
Jamaica is small an island of particular parameters to which geo-politicking is predominantly practiced by the inhabitants. This coupled with the continuous increase in it human population is a cause for concern to policy planners. With geo-politicking, the country continues to lose many of its vegetation and forestry. From the economic dependency that was created by the Europeans, geo-politicking threatens to substantially erode the ‘progress’ make by successive generations. Deforestation in this country has received minute attention and so offer a further rejection of the importance of this issue. Some environmentalists argue that Jamaica’s average annual deforestation rate is 3.9 per cent in comparison to the world’s rate of 5.2 per cent. The last major ‘rape’ of forestry is the Long Mountain housing development.
Many of the Jamaica’s lowlands have been cleared for agriculture and-or housing development. The example here is Portmore, with Liguanea a prime agricultural land being designate for infrastructure development. Because of the lack of a systematic and carefully designed population/infrastructure development policy, the country continues to suffer from landslips. Oftentimes, with the passing of any heavy rains, the island experiences flooding and landslippages. This issues is oftentimes exacerbated by hurricanes. The increasing ‘rape’ of the trees and shrubs results in soil erosion that worsens in the hurricane season. It should be noted that Jamaica is one of the islands within the hurricane belt, and so have had a national policy in regards urbanization and population.
Bauxite mining is the island’s second largest foreign earner and the single largest perpetrated of the ‘rape’ of trees. This deforestation mechanism provides geographical reconfiguration of the topology of the island. This activity has destroyed large areas of forestlands by open cast mining, which requires the complete removal of vegetation and topsoil. Another example of an industry that ‘rapes’ the land for its survival is tourism. Tourism, however, has contributed equally negatively to Jamaica’s development. This is seen directly through deforestation and further by urbanization. In recent years, deforestation has led to the deterioration of more than a third of Jamaica’s watersheds. The diversity of plants and animal lives are been threatened. This a led to the loss of traditional ways of life, the knowledge about local plants and their medical uses are slowly becoming days of the past.
A PSOJ’s bulletin (September, 1999) stated that, “Industrial development and technological change have often been implicated in environmental degradation, particularly in developing countries. It is inevitable that industrial development will have some environmental impact and the tradeoffs may be necessary in some circumstances. This in essence is sustainable development which seeks to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their needs.”
According to the World Wild Life, “This ecoregion comprises approximately 85 per cent of Jamaica’s terrestrial area and covers the entire island except [the] coastal areas and lowland dry forests.” At present, only the most remote and inaccessible forests on Jamaica are considered original and undisturbed. In 1983, less than 67, 000 hectages (i.e. 6 per cent) of Jamaica were covered in undisturbed natural forest. In 1995, the World Resource Institute ranked Jamaica as the country with the highest deforestation rate (Hoagland et al. 1995).
Deforestation has many negative effects on the environment. Those include: climate change; loss of biodiversity; erosion of topsoil; flooding; decrease in the region precipitation, loss of forest resources; spread of diseases; increased poverty; depletion of soil nutrients; soil compaction; weed infestation, and the loss economic and social aesthetic.
This begs the question, why Jamaica continues to experience Geo-politicking in the face a likened terrorism threat on the island’s environment? The author finds this mind goggling within the construct of sustainable development.
Paul Andrew Bourne, M.Sc. (candidate), B.Sc. (Hons) Economics and Demography
Graduate Assistant
Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work
The University of the West Indies
Mona Campus
Kingston 7
Kingston, Jamaica
West Indies