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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I asked Erin Pagliaro, formerly the president of Friends of the Environment, an Abaco environmental organization, whether Discovery Land Company was using the sacred name of Earthwatch.

She writes, "There are two incidents that we can think of where the developers have named and described the Earthwatch project as their environmental monitoring program in public meetings. One was at a Friends of the Environment meeting when they did a little presentation to the Board of Directors and brought with them two representatives from Earthwatch who handed out their project manuals as evidence of the environmental monitoring program which will ensure that this development will not destroy the natural environment."

The Discovery Land Company, then, is advertising their association with Earthwatch to build one of the most audacious developments on this tiny island.

One of the young Earthwatch volunteers wrote about his experience with Earthwatch on Guana Cay. He described in detail the methodology that the young volunteers used for Sullivan Sealey’s research. In the account of his trip to Guana Cay, he was very frank. He wrote, “ Every day we have to do a turtle walk at 6:30 am, which is about a two mile walk up the beach on one of the islands. The purpose of turtle walks is to search for any traces of turtles or turtle hatchlings. Turtles or turtle hatchlings were rarely ever found, although a few turtles were seen in the water. I didn’t enjoy this very much because of the intense heat and beaming sun while we hiked up the beach.”

The Earthwatch kids sent to Guana Cay were used, and are still being used, to collect data on Guana Cay that would help to support Sullivan Sealey’s grand experiment. Most of the kids had never snorkeled before, and none of them had any knowledge of local fish populations. And yet, according to the article by the young volunteer, they were set to doing tasks that most marine ecologists agree are advanced techniques that should only be completed by marine ecologists.

"Turtles or turtle hatchlings were rarely ever found although a few turtles were seen in the water. I didn’t enjoy this very much because of the intense heat and beaming sun while we hiked up the beach.” - 16 year old Earthwatch volunteer on Guana Cay

Dr. Michael Risk, one of the world’s leading coral reef ecologists explains the problems with having kids do data-collecting designed for professional ecology work. Of the account written by the volunteer, Dr. Risk explains, “Expecting (Earthwatch volunteers) to take research-grade data is a bad thing. It takes about as long to train a marine ecologist as it does a cardiac surgeon. Would you let these kids do open-heart surgery on you? Those methods are rapid assessment techniques. I invented some of them. I would not use them in this instance. The stakes are too high. I mean, the "method" described (by the Earthwatch volunteer) is...inadequate. Proper fish-survey methods have been in the literature for decades, but they take time.”