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Last Updated: Feb 13, 2017 - 1:45:37 AM |
Save The Bays Chairman: Lessons from Paris, NY and Training under Al Gore, Policy, aggressive action will minimize Bahamas’ danger from climate change
In 2015, Save The Bays Chairman Joseph Darville joined 400,000 people on the streets of New York City as part of the People’s Climate March. During the procession, he spotted an enormous Google globe rolling ahead of him. As the globe rotated, Darville caught sight of The Bahamas. Wasting no time, Darville made his way through the crowd working his way closer to the globe, wading through hundreds of demonstrators before finally catching up with the person operating it.
“Can you stop, just for a second?” Darville asked the young man.
“For what?” the man replied.
“I just want to show you something,” Darville said. “When you start it again, point to the most beautiful spot on that globe.”
The globe was so large that it took about 35 seconds to make a full revolution, but when the man stopped it, he pointed straight to The Bahamas. This came as no surprise to Darville, who refers to his country as “the gem of Mother Earth.”
“That is why I am so passionate about what I do,” Darville told host Diane Phillips April 28 during the hour-long radio show ‘Voice of the Bays: The Environment Speaks’ on Love 97 FM.
Darville opened the weekly show by playing ‘Dear Future Generations: Sorry,’ a spoken word piece by American rapper and YouTuber Prince Ea. As he introduced the poem, Darville beseeched radio listeners to “Listen with your heart and your mind.”
The lyric, an open letter of apology to future generations, expresses regret for the fact that trees no longer exist on the planet because ‘We live in a world where destroying trees makes you money.’ This line was particularly poignant this past week as citizens from around the world planted trees as part of Earth Week.
For his part, Darville, a retired educator and founder of the Save the Bays Youth Environment Ambassadors (YEA) Training Program, presented a Lignum Vitae tree to Bishop Michael Eldon School (BMES) in Freeport, Grand Bahama.
“It was a phenomenal experience,” Darville said. “The hall was completely filled with all of the primary and high school students. To stand on the stage and to look in the faces of young people…. It made me want to almost cry passionately.”
Darville added that the tree-planting ceremony and presentation was in recognition of The Canopy Project, an initiative launched by the Earth Day Network in 2011 which works with local communities to conserve, repair, and restore tree cover. To date, the project has been responsible for planting 3.2 million trees worldwide.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, 51.5 percent of The Bahamas is forested. Because roots of trees help prevent soil erosion, deforestation is making the country increasingly vulnerable to flooding and the rising sea levels that are a result of global warming.
“We have to be proactive. Climate change is already effecting us,” Darville said. “We have 6,200 square miles of land at the present time, and we’re losing some of that already. The sea is advancing and we’re losing the coastal area.”
Darville, who is also President of Waterkeeper Bahamas in partnership with global environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance, was in Paris for the International Conference on Climate Change and Global Warming recently. During one of the lectures, Google presenters zoomed in on Grand Bahama and Bimini. As the area came into focus, Darville noticed a red line slicing through Bimini and asked what the line indicated. The answer was devastating.
“He said, ‘That’s the destruction of the mangrove forest,’ ” Darville recalled. “Then he looked up all of the information right away online, and said 20 percent of your tree cover on Bimini has been destroyed in the past 10 years.”
Darville went on to say that the only true way to put a stop to this exponentially-increasing rate of environmental destruction is through legislation in the form of an Environmental Protection Act.
“We need that act with strong regulations to go along with it,” Darville said. “We don’t have severe penalties for destruction of the environment so people can do whatever they want with almost no penalty.”
When determining which countries will fare best in the face of the global warming crisis, it’s not a country’s geographical location that ultimately determines how vulnerable it will be—or even how much of its population lives in coastal regions—but how prepared the country is for catastrophic events. The countries currently predicted to be least susceptible to the effects of rising sea levels are Ireland, Norway and Iceland, despite their significant coastlines.
“They are at the least risk, not because of natural conditions, but because of their environmental policies,” Darville said. “Their ministers had ambitions and they’ve adopted aggressive and ambitious environmental and energy policies and practices. We can switch this around. There’s an error, but we can correct that error.”
© Copyright 2016 by thebahamasweekly.com
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