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 that she believes Sullivan Sealey's research is at arm's length from Discovery Land Company. It's like saying somebody who is employed by the Nazis to study the effects of gassing the Jews is at arms length from Hitler. Sullivan-Sealey was in fact the primary writer for the Environmental Impact Assessment. No doubt that document was tied to her being involved in the monitoring program.
In fact, the very basis of Sullivan Sealey's vast experiment requires this project to go ahead. Sullivan Sealey, if you believe the EIA or her own words to me, wants Guana Cay to be her test tube. If a golf course destroys a coral reef, she wants to be there for the data. In fact, this data would be amazing for any marine scientist. Few scientists have been able to definitely prove the destruction of habitat to specific sources of pollution and land-use. In the EIA for the development, Sullivan Sealey and terrestrial ecologist Lester Flowers write,
"The project will be an experiment in sustainability for small island developments. Clearly, local residents or Bahamians in general would not appreciate being the site of 'experimental' approaches to development of their natural resources, but the aim of the experiment is to provide a truthful documentation of the real ecological costs."
Although they initially hinted in the EIA that the development would use the islanders of Guana Cay as mere guinea pigs in a vast experiment, it has become clear that she has shown a strong disregard for the people of Guana Cay, going so far as to call them 'culturally disappointing.'
If she has to be involved in a study that would harm the inhabitants, it would be convenient to believe these inhabitants are somehow inferior. In fact, the people of Guana Cay are part of a rich Bahamian heritage. Their lineage has remained, in many cases, so untouched, even Victorian. So much so, that in its filming of Pirates of the Caribbean Parts II and III, Disney is actively hiring people of the Abaco Sound as extras. Nobody on Earth resembles more closely the image of pirates and Caribbean settlers than the strong cheekboned, deeply tanned loyalists of this area. Many of these people still engage in the same professions as their ancestors: boatbuilding, fishing, sailmaking.
Although these people's histories are rich and their culture is worth preserving, their qualities should not matter. Human rights does not judge people based on the 'richness' of their heritage.
Kathleen Sullivan Sealey and Lester Flowers are crucial to the development of Baker's Bay Golf and Ocean Club. Without their EIA and their paid roles as continuous monitors of the development, the government would not have been able to sign off on the project. They are the turtles holding up the developer's world.
Reiterating this idea, Sullivan Sealey writes me, "It is the accessibility to the project site before, during and after construction that draws our research to Bakers Bay. Both Mr. Flowers and I see this as the ultimate opportunity to test our theories..."
Mary Blue Magruder, after hearing from me that she is involved in the greenlighting of a golf course, wrote to Sullivan Sealey to ask her about my questions. After this, Sullivan Sealey wrote me, "By the way, thanks for the email to Earthwatch, they are a great organization, and fortunately they are a bit smarter than you give them credit for."
I was confused by this email. But Mary Blue Magruder was even more confused when I said that the Discovery Land Company was using the Earthwatch name to sell the idea of their golf course.
