By Esther Figueroa
Esther Figueroa, Ph.D. is an activist independent film maker, writer, linguist and educator who focuses on the environment, social justice, indigenous knowledges and local content. “Limbo” , her 2014 novel about Jamaica is an environmental murder mystery. Her most recent feature documentary “Fly Me To The Moon” is about aluminum, modernity, the political economy of our material culture and consumption, and is a call for us to stop destroying the natural world that we all depend upon.
Peter Tosh’s 1981 song “Fools Die”, begins with his reworking of Proverbs 10:21:
“The lips of the righteous teaches many
But fools die for want of wisdom”
Our wanton, willful destruction of Planet Earth is both foolish and deadly. In my 2007 film, “Cockpit Country – Voices from Jamaica’s Heart,” the then science teacher Winsome Lawson describes plans to mine bauxite in Cockpit Country as:
“…ridiculous, it’s silly if we are going to do that knowing all that we know now in the 21st century. It means that we would experience drought, we would lose some of the rare species that we see there – the butterflies, the birds, just what we have that money cannot buy. It would be very sad for us to do that. We destroy everything including all the things that would support us economically, socially, in every way.”
Photo credit: Danielle Nembhard
Teacher Lawson taught at Westwood High School, one of the best high schools for girls in Jamaica. Westwood is in Stewart Town, St. Ann. Stewart Town is in Special Mining Lease 173 and is slated to be mined for bauxite.
Extraction is violence in every sense of the word. It is “fast” violence, happening suddenly in real time. The dynamite blowing up the mountain to make way for haul roads. The huge loud machines mowing down forests and tearing away all plant cover, blasting through the rocks, digging ever deeper, scooping up the soil into trucks that drive up and down all day and night, their sole purpose the transportation of the Earth’s geological innards from one place to another. It is “slow” violence. The transformation of entire landscapes, ecosystems, societies, ways of being. The transference of the sacred from what gives life – water, soil, air, oceans, rivers – to human technologies, things, and the worship of “wealth.” We are living in the Anthropocene because men have removed and reordered so much of the planet, replacing the Earth’s biomass with man-made structures and human waste. This violence is normalized through the patriarchal ideology of Man’s right to dominate Nature. Through a necro-political definition of masculinity, where males and masculine bodies are rewarded for being killers and destroyers of the Earth. Extractive industries pay much better than the care economy. A man will earn more by violating nature and displacing his neighbours than by nurturing the land and growing food. A woman will earn nothing at all for giving life and taking care of multiple generations. As we say in Jamaica, “Is so the system set.”
“The rich man’s wealth is in the city
Vexation of the soul is vanity
Destruction of the poor is their poverty
The poor man’s wealth is in a holy place”
In Jamaica, one can experience fast and slow violence every day. We are by murder rate considered one of the most violent societies in the world. The Prime Minister has just added more States of Emergencies, these zones that strip the occupants of their rights so the state, the police and armed forces, can do as they please to “contain” out of control gang violence and gruesome murders. The same government is rigorously expanding bauxite mining, the over seven decades long assault on rural communities and the lands that grow food. The two go hand in hand – the brutal sacrifice of the rural and the brutal curtailment of the urban.
You can go right now to Somerton St. Ann, stand on the side of a narrow country road, look over the precipice and down into an enormous pit, stand on the side of a narrow country road, look over the precipice and down into an enormous pit. What had once been acres of fruit trees, ground provisions, and food growing, is now trucks hauling bauxite that will be loaded onto trains, then into ships and transported to North America to be refined into alumina and smelted into aluminum. The largest parish in Jamaica, St. Ann is central to two sectors the government of Jamaica subsidizes, promotes and proclaims essential for economic development – tourism and the aluminum industry. Yet it is the poorest parish in Jamaica, and the poorest areas in St. Ann are those that are mined for bauxite. The bauxite companies and the government deny that mining has anything to do with poverty, it must be related to other factors since bauxite mining only leads to wealth, especially in the form of foreign exchange and royalties that go to the government. Almost the entire interior of St. Ann is being mined or will be mined if the government has its way.
You can experience the fast and slow violence right now, as you experience both the bulldozer and the broken heart. The impending hunger not just for food but for all that has been lost, the destroyed and crumbling infrastructure, the emptying out of people and place. The transformation from self-sufficiency to economic dependence, whereby the only game in town is what the bauxite company says it is, if you “qualify” and show the suitable gratitude of the enslaved, you will get a job or “nuisance” money from the company, and you will be quoted in the media as saying mining is a good thing and we need more of it. You will be found hanging out at the rum shop and riding up and down on your motorcycle making a lot of noise while the children watch and learn that this violence is normal and good. That the year of mining right by their school that made them sick, anxious, and unable to attend classes, and made their teachers take leaves of absence was good because now they will have a “playing field” gift of the bauxite company 51% owned by the Government of Jamaica.
After many delays, the National Environment Planning Agency has accepted the completely corrupt (because paid for by Noranda Bauxite Partners, now rebranded after yet another post-bankruptcy change in ownership as Discovery Bauxite, and to be permitted by the Government of Jamaica, both of which will benefit from the mining), and scientifically inept Economic Impact Assessment (EIA) for Special Mining Lease 173 that, once permitted, will expand bauxite mining into a sixth parish – Trelawny – while continuing the destruction of St. Ann.
On 16 November there was a public meeting to present the EIA as is required by law. As always the moderator, who is the same person moderating all these high profile EIA meetings, was accommodating of the bauxite company and their hired EIA consultants, letting them say whatever they wanted unchallenged, often repeating key aspects of their claims with emphasis in case we had zoned out during their riveting presentations, and lobbing them leading questions that would allow the spouting of more propaganda. Meanwhile questioners at sites stood waiting a long time, and only had a minute allotted not to speak but to ask one question. No questions were included from the chat.
The bauxite company, which is a master of PR, had people placed at the in person sites to not ask questions but state their support of mining and to predict a dire economic future without such mining (the moderator did not cut them off), as well as people placed in the chat to not just support the claims of the company, but attacking “you environmentalists” who want to keep people from working, stop people from eating, who are over emotional, need to know the facts, who should just get in your SUV’s and return to Kingston and let all those mining loving people in St. Ann alone.
But the most real part of this rehearsed, staged and manipulated public meeting, the moment that exposed the underbelly of the whole enterprise and revealed it for the farce that it is, was when the zoom part of the transmission was hacked using pornography. This managed to shut the whole thing down for a while. Unfortunately not long enough to stop the event which was restarted from the beginning, allowing for the lies to be repeated again: “Green mining,” “Corporate Social Responsibility,” “Good Corporate Citizens,” “Environmentally Friendly,” “Reducing Footprint through Best Practices.” All straight from the green-washing playbook.
Imagine rape laws that allow for free, prior and informed consent. That allow rape under certain circumstances, if permitting conditions are met, such as the time of day, location, duration of the rape, the permitted and not permitted instrumentalities of rape, the log-book for complaints, the mitigation measures if something goes awry. We know that in many places married women cannot claim rape for non-consensual sex with their husbands since it’s seen as part of their marital duty and not included in the definition of rape. Would environmentalists agree to these sorts of legal frameworks and processes for the rape of humans, and if they don’t, then why do they agree to them for the rape of Mother Earth?
Starting in the 1970s, the mainstream environmental movement was captured by the fossil fuel industry that cleverly played upon the human delusion that we can have it all, can continue to live with impossible levels of energy usage, consumption and waste. All we needed to do was recycle, reduce and reuse. So instead of banning new products we came up with the fairy tale of recycling. Then the neo-liberal era of “civil society” convinced environmentalists that what was needed was not to end the onslaught on nature but to “regulate” it. Make ecocide more tidy. There had to be free, prior and informed consent, participatory public consultation, permitting processes, because after all we are high civilized, highly rational products of the enlightenment who play by the rules. And when things didn’t go so well, it was said the rules were fine, just the enforcement that was the problem. And corporations, governments, the rich and powerful had a good laugh while performing good corporate stewardship that strictly adheres to international standards, good governance through accountability and transparency, and good philanthropy by the mega rich when they aren’t racing each other to the Moon or Mars.
We have to redefine poverty and wealth, stop glorifying the rich and shaming the “poor.” Minimal material consumption is not poverty. Over accumulation and over consumption is not wealth. Tosh sings, “the poor man’s wealth is in a holy place.” The holy place is Planet Earth. The wealth of the earth has been extracted and sent to the city. It is time to stop sacrificing the sacred to create the rich man’s wealth.
