Update, June 2, 2008: Earthwatch has announced they are no longer involved in the Baker's Bay Club on Great Guana Cay. The following was written between 2005-2006, when Earthwatch's involvement in the Baker's Bay Club project was being used in the media to give Baker's Bay legitimacy. Earthwatch appears to be making strides on this issue.
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Magruder said, "I don't understand what you're trying to do here, Kathleen is trying to ameliorate the situation on Guana Cay."
While she said this, I had to grab my dictionary and look up that word.
Ameliorate: improve, make better.
When I found the word, I told her that the inhabitants of Guana Cay are the original native inhabitants of Guana Cay. They have lived on the cay independently for 200 years. Sullivan Sealey is not trying to ameliorate, make better, or improve the situation for them. This golf course development will ruin their way of living, and Sullivan Sealey's own Environmental Impact Assessment (the 'EIA') for the development hints at the fact that the residents of Guana Cay will be victims of a willful cultural genocide.
Magruder said that Sullivan Sealey was involved in education on the island and that maybe these "dark-skinned" people could "benefit from her..."
I told Magruder that Guana Cay is a loyalist cay, and that although the Bahamas is very ethnically diverse, Guana Cay is not appropriately called 'dark-skinned.'
Her assumption of Sullivan Sealey 'educating the natives' is not lost on me. Despite what Sullivan Sealey may be telling Earthwatch, she has succeeded in no education on Guana Cay because the native inhabitants are already well versed in ecological issues, and throughout 3 years of following this issue, I have recorded only one time Sullivan-Sealey visited with the locals to talk about the development. After their failed opposition to the Disney Cruise Ship site on their island, the Guana inhabitants have become extremely wary of environmental issues.
They don't lack education, they lack an international voice.
Also, these inhabitants' incomes rely either on ecotourism or on subsistence fishing and gathering of the island's marine and terrestrial resources. Although they are not perfect stewards of their island, it is not the job of a golf course to tell them how to live their lives.
And the intonation that "dark-skinned" Bahamians need environmental education strikes me as strange. In fact, my understanding is that African-Bahamians are very keen on updated environmental laws in the Bahamas. In December 2004, my brother and I spoke with the fishermen of Sandy Point, an African-Bahamian fishing village, about the updated Grouper (a type of sea-bass) laws, and they were eager to chat about the importance of such laws with us.
It is not the job of a golf course to provide the environmental education of Bahamians, but rather the job of local legislators encouraged by a federal government that understands how conservation feeds, not detracts, from the country's largest revenue-generator, tourism.
