Mark Martin | First, we have to teach

“In the end, we will only conserve what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” Baba Dioum, 1968

In the early ‘60s, when my father was the president of Rotary, his passion was to improve the thoroughfares of Kingston. Through his initiative, with many like-minded people, they hired a landscape architect named Jim Voss to create Kingston’s first four-lane thoroughfare. The streetscape had wide sidewalks graced with native flowering trees and faux wood benches made locally from concrete. Surprisingly, it lasted for many years, but Tom Redcam is a mere shadow of what it used to be.

Growing up, both my parents exposed me to plants and nature. It seemed to have planted roots (pun intended), because it was Jim Voss, 30 years later, who recommended that I should investigate the master’s programme in landscape architecture at FIU. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. The sacrifice it took to get that degree, while working full-time running a landscape installation firm, as well as being a young father, attending school in the afternoon and evenings paid off handsomely.

HISTORICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL COMPARISON

Miami in the ‘80s was more than just cocaine cowboys and banks laundering millions. It was a time to be exposed to bold architecture that looked to the past to create a new paradigm -- an architecture mixed with constructivism, surrealism, Rationalism and modernism. The architects who have influenced South Florida range from Morris Lapidus in the ‘50s to Arquitectonica’s Laurinda Spear and Bernardo Fort-Brescia in the ‘80s. The new architecture allure inspired many opportunistic entrepreneurs, flush with questionable wealth, to enter the fray as developers, caring very little about zoning laws, the environment, or trying to understand what the peninsular of Florida was. (Sounds like Jamaica, doesn’t it?) They were not alone. Wealthy entrepreneurs have always been drawn to Florida when it was seen as a swamp and wetland, filled with inhospitable insects, that needed to be tamed. A hundred years before, Henry Flagler introduced the railroad to Florida. In 1912, he completed the line all the way to Key West, connecting the islands to the mainland. ….

Florida gained statehood in 1845 and the first state legislature declared the Everglades ‘wholly valueless’ and asked Congress to appoint engineers to examine the Everglades, with a view towards reclamation (Army Corp of Engineers and the Florida Everglades, March 8th, 2020, Dawson and Associates).

From the late 1880s to the early 1950s, the Army Corp of Engineers, supported by private self-interest entities, drained the Everglades, home to many endemic flora and fauna. Billions were spent building dykes, levees, and locks to tame this useless wasteland.

In 1947, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas published her influential book on nature conservation called The River of Grass. The publication was timed with the opening of the Everglades Natural Park. What it exposed and ‘taught’ everyone was that Florida, south of Lake Okeechobee, was not just useless wetlands and swamps, but a river that sustained life for many species, including humans. So, after wasting billions of dollars trying to make the land more arable and be able to support new housing developments and toxic golf courses, what they achieved was to reduce the wildlife and vegetation, and created a disaster when hurricanes visited Florida. So, in 2009, both the US Federal government and the state of Florida created the ‘Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Fund’, with almost US$25 billion to restore the Everglades.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH JAMAICA?

With a population that has a poor record of literacy; is now suffering from the pandemic, with kids not going to school - and those that do go, leave school without the ability to read or write - how then do we educate them about the environment? When you are poor, hungry, unemployable, and surrounded by the bling of social media, where lies cannot be differentiated from the truths, what do they care about understanding mangroves; about climate change; about not burning trash; about not littering; about not playing music too loud; or about plain civil behaviour? Where they seek role models to replace absentee parenting, who do they imitate? Where weak politicians placate illegal housing (squatters) and lend their support to ‘legal’ housing that we later learn, when you remove the gossamer veil of secrecy and subterfuge, is fraught with corruption. Permits are issued prematurely, incorrectly, and certain zoning officials turn a blind eye. And what is the penalty for them? The same as the politicians who flaunted the pandemic rules by openly partying in arrogance and decadence. What happened to them? Your guess is as good as mine, but it leaves a bad taste in our mouths.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

The citizens need to organise and let their voices be heard. They need to expose, in the press and in social media, all the clear violations, like our esteemed friend Pat Green continues to do, tirelessly, week after week. Why is this left to her and other concerned contributors? Where are the appointed people within the Government who are tasked with corralling the rampant corruption? Why is the bill that allows the security force to investigate where people get their ill-gotten gains not used? Serious change in zoning and enforcement will not happen holistically. It will transpire when the corrupt politicians are arrested, fined, and jailed. Only then will any of them take our concerns seriously. Anything else is pussyfooting around to fool the gullible citizenry. We need a serious reset here in Jamaica. Crime doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It starts with not holding our elected officials accountable every day.

One of the problems with our zoning process is the lack of adequate enforcement on the general scale; they seemed to be more reactive that proactive. If we had proper enforcement, hiring and training more agents, cities and townships could become financially sound, because fees could be generated from inspections, and fines. When the fines become more than the cost of doing business, only then will we then see some changes.

In a comparison with Miami, the fines to remove mangroves increased 100-fold from the ‘80s. Some homeowners in wealthy enclaves have been fined a million dollars for illegally removing mangroves. Until the fine for removing mangroves hurts, developers will see this also as a cost of doing business. The advent of satellite photography and drones will assist in the monitoring. Regrowing mangroves is a very difficult endeavour; it takes 20 years for the mangroves to mature.

We need to start protecting trees. Some developers often clear a piece of land without fully appreciating the trees on the site. All projects, especially affordable housing, should require a visit by a landscape architect. No project can start without the involvement of a landscape architect in the city of Miami. All you see in our affordable housing schemes are acres of roofs with not a tree in sight.

In closing, Singapore visited us in the ‘60s to study the type of governance we chose. Maybe we can visit Singapore and learn a few things about zoning, landscaping and architecture, and see if we can develop our own brand of the aesthetic.

Mark Martin is a practising landscape architect and owner of Gardenism, a landscape maintenance company in St James. Martin, a past lecturer at FIU’s Graduate School of Design, pioneered the introduction to landscape architecture class at UTech in 2012. Send feedback to d esign@gardenism.com and columns@gleanerjm.com.