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The Political Ecology of Paradise 3 3 CHAPTER 1 The Political Ecology of Paradise s SHERRIE L. BAVER AND BARBARA DEUTSCH LYNCH Introduction Filtered through the lens of the European and North American media, the Caribbean becomes a series of uniformly breezy landscapes of sun and sand designed for loafing, sailing, diving, and perhaps for gambling and sex. In the conservation literature, Caribbean landscapes are habitat for endangered coral reefs and their denizens, parrots, butterflies, caiman, snails and whales and myriad plant species. In either version, the idyllic island landscape is a screen that conceals worlds that are far richer culturally, but trapped in a global economy that offers few options for development. The islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles are linguistically and culturally diverse and their governments differ in form and in capacity, but they share a history of colonization, demographic transformation through labor migration, and economic dependency on activities that have utterly transformed their landscapes—plantation agriculture, mining, and tourism . It is in this context that environmental policy makers and activists are responding to existing threats and seeking to protect a natural patrimony that is also an economic lifeline. The landscape as screen also conceals the development policy choices Caribbean governments are making, the environmental consequences of those choices, and the transnational connections that are reshaping the islands. At the same time that multinational corporations are moving operations to islands where financial laws are lax and wages low, large numbers of Caribbean people have moved away to the north where many continue to make vital contributions— economic, social, cultural, and political—to their places or origin. They have done much to shape the North American environmental justice movement by bringing Caribbean environmental sensibilities, political institutions, and organizational traditions to environmental struggles in the United States and Canada. In this volume we examine the environmental dilemmas that face those who live in these worlds behind the screen, the tough environmental choices that must 4 Sherrie L. Baver and Barbara Deutsch Lynch be made within that world, and the strategies and tactics employed by activists who would reconcile the idyllic and the real.1 The idea for this volume grew out of a conference on “Environmental Issues in the Caribbean and Caribbean Diaspora” held at the City University of New York. The conference, supported by the Ford Foundation, brought together scholars, development practitioners, NGO representatives, and community activists to begin a conversation on Caribbean environment that would break down linguistic and cultural barriers that have divided the English, French, and Spanishspeaking islands from one another. The conference also sought to bring together scholars and activists, and several essays were written by Caribbean scholars who have played active roles in national and regional environmental debates. We also felt it important to represent the diaspora at the conference and in this volume. Chapters on immigrant communities in New York City highlight similarities in the environmental challenges faced in both worlds and in the strategies used to overcome them. International Institutions and the Caribbean Environmental Agenda Once viewed as a luxury of the industrialized world, environmental concern grew in the island Caribbean in the 1980s and emerged as a distinct development policy arena following publication of the Brundtland Commission Report (WCED1988) and the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development that produced “Agenda 21.” These two U.N. initiatives, which sought to reconcile the often conflicting imperatives of environmental protection and economic growth, played an important role in shaping Caribbean environmental agendas. More often than not, Caribbean environmental policy makers have bought into the elusive concept of “sustainable human development,” a concept made popular in international development circles in the 1980s and 1990s (Navajas et al. 1997, ch. 1). The term “sustainability” is problematic: it addresses the intergenerational concerns of environmentalists, but leaves open the questions of what is to be sustained and for whose benefit. As used by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the term conveys an approach that privileges natural resource management, biodiversity conservation, and pollution reduction over other environmental issues, even though it emphasizes the importance of such social measures such as reducing poverty, enhancing women’s participation , and strengthening institutions. The Brundtland Report (WCED 1987) and Agenda 21, like other United Nations documents, were products of considerable North-South dialogue. Still, it has been argued that the definition of environmental protection that underlies them was imposed on the Caribbean region by donors from the north. In the intervening years, southern environmental agendas have become highly sophis...

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