Aluminum Smelter in Trinidad - Environmental Dangers, Crime, Industrialization

Wish you were here
Super Size Us-Part 8: The man with the golden name
MARK MEREDITH

"We didn't inherit this land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." A Lakota Sioux proverb delivered by Robert F Kennedy Jr at CHIC 2005. Standing proudly with him are journalists Indiana Monteverde, left, of Solocaribe.com, and Janet Silver

The most important regional tourism industry meet of the year, the Caribbean Hotel Industry Conference (CHIC), was held in Miami at the end of June. MARK MEREDITH repeats his invitation to a certain somebody to visit this country.

I GRASPED his hand and he flashed that Kennedy smile at me; the famous one that charmed a previous generation. But this grin wore a hint of surprise: "Who is this guy?" it seemed to be saying.

I had bided my time, waiting for an opening, hanging around the periphery of senior Caribbean tourism and hotel industry figures crowding in to have their photos taken with the man with the golden name.

Robert F Kennedy Jr had just delivered a spellbinding "keynote address" on the environment and its importance to the Caribbean to a standing ovation. He's a log off the old block, is Bobby Jr. Get under his spell and you'll understand why people elected his uncle, Jack, the President, and probably would have elected his father, Bobby, too.

The cameras flashed, and the dazzling Kennedy smile bounced back at us from the tanned and handsome face; a look of confidence that knows the power of one's own aura. Charisma enveloped the foyer of Miami's Hyatt Regency Hotel like a vice.

I plunged into the melee from the rear. "Mr Kennedy," I said, rather loudly into the back of his right ear. He spun around, a distinct expression of hesitation etched upon his bright-eyed countenance. I thrust my hand forward.

"I just wanted to tell you how much your speech meant to me," I blurted out, as his hand closed firmly around mine. He looked at me inquisitively through a beaming smile, so I volunteered: "I'm an environmental journalist from Trinidad and Tobago. I really wish you would come and give your speech to our government. They need to hear it from you. In person."

The smile broadened and he said: "Trinidad and Tobago, I've been there. It's a beautiful country."

He was being pulled back into the sea of dark suits.

"It's in trouble, Mr Kennedy," I replied, raising my voice in desperation as he began to disappear.

"I know," he said tantalisingly, turning his head to look me in the eye one last time before being swallowed up by the crowd.

This Kennedy made his name fighting for the environment with a "take-no-prisoners approach", successfully winning 300 lawsuits against Hudson River polluters; turning a fouled and putrid waterway into the "most productive river in North America".

You can see why Kennedy wins; he knows how to make a passionate, common sense argument, even when suffering from laryngitis. He told, and croaked to, an enraptured CHIC audience of how the organisation for whom he is chief prosecuting attorney, Riverkeepers, beat the polluters "by channeling anger into legal warfare". He used laws, like the US Clean Water Act, to make polluters pay and clean up their act-what the EMA wants to do with our own missing Water Pollution Rules.

Time magazine named him one of their "Heroes for the Planet" for leading Riverkeepers' legal crusade for the Hudson. Riverkeepers, a group formed to fight the Hudson's chronic pollution, has since spawned 125 Waterkeepers organisations to defend rivers and shorelines around the globe. Kennedy is their president, as well as the successful senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), and he is a clinical professor and supervising attorney at Pace University School of Law's Environmental Litigation Clinic. Not someone you really want to upset.

Which is why I asked him to come to Trinidad and Tobago. You know, show him around a bit; somewhere like Alcoa's Cedros peninsula in Trinidad, or the Tobago House of Assembly's L'Anse Fourmi/Charlotteville Link Road. That should wind him up a bit. Then put him in front of our parliamentary representatives and industry CEOs and let him go...

"Good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy" was Kennedy's message at CHIC, aimed squarely at the entire Caribbean. Lapping up this emotionally charged wisdom were a record number of 1,100 delegates, including Caribbean prime ministers, premiers, and tourism and development ministers and officials, including our two representatives.

Kennedy warned them: "political and economic sustainability of the Caribbean islands will be destroyed by the degradation of the environmental resource which brings your visitors... environmental injury turns into economic collapse", reminding them, "investment in the environment is an investment in health".

And, he warned about a certain mirage, a message that could have been delivered entirely for T&T's benefit: "Pollution-based prosperity-which our children will pay for."

Kennedy's war for the environment brings with it admiration of St Francis of Assisi, his "hero", and incontestable truths.

"What we are fighting for is not just the fishes and the birds. We protect nature not for nature's sake but for our own sake because it's the infrastructure of our communities. If we want to meet the obligations of our civilisation and our culture-which are to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as the communities that our parents gave us-we've got to start by protecting that infrastructure; the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the landscapes that enrich us.

"We're protecting nature because it enriches us; yes, it enriches our economy and we ignore that at our peril. But it is also enriching us aesthetically, recreationally, culturally, historically and spiritually. Human beings have other appetites besides money. And if we don't feed them, we're not going to grow up... we're not going to become the kind of beings that our creator intended us to become."

But even Robert F Kennedy Jr, with all his eloquence, training and charisma, might struggle to make his voice heard in Trinidad and Tobago, even face to face. But I wish he'd try.

Kennedy's victories over the Hudson River polluters showed what can be done when you have a regulatory authority with power, the US EPA, and laws which are enforced. You can turn a toxic toilet into a clear river filled with spawning fish.

Kennedy, and his Waterkeepers, couldn't use our laws to prosecute polluters to clean up our Caroni or any other river, or our hydrocarbon-laced Gulf of Paria because... we don't have any laws. All we have are standards which are not enforced, but flouted.

The Gulf of Paria is a good example. It receives everything urban Trinidadians throw at it, and everything industrial plants pour away. The Gulf has become a lagoon of pollution "hotspots", according to EMA chairman John Agard in an April UWI magazine report. The pollution is worst in the south-west, shows his graphic, just to the north of Chatham/Cap de Ville-where Alcoa wishes to begin industrialisation south, and north.

This pollution is seriously affecting the fishing industry, say locals-and that is perfect Waterkeepers territory. Dr Raphael Sebastien, recent protest organiser against Government plans to industrialise the eco-tourism promise of Cedros, said that even before Alcoa's 325,000-tonne smelter and NEC/Sural's "Chinese"-made 200,000-tonne smelter and new industries have gone up, the Gulf of Paria is already experiencing serious contamination: thick, oily mud weighing down fishing nets, with species disappearing, destroying livelihoods. He said the honey shrimp, normally so abundant even in the shallowest of shallows in Cedros, failed to show at all this year. Not one shrimp.

It would take someone like you, Mr Kennedy, to reverse the social and environmental impacts of the collective interests of those profiting in T&T's industrial/energy/construction/quarrying sectors today. So if you're listening, Mr Kennedy, Sir, here's what I'd like to have told you at CHIC-after all, I know of your successes fighting for the lands and rights of native American Indian communities.

There are 12 village communities in rural Cedros, and others to the north, protesting about being industrialised and swallowed up by multinational smelters and chemical processing plants without their consent. Losing their heritage, Mr Kennedy, which I know you abhor.

They are facing formidable odds: a spendthrift Government withholding environmental legislation and wishing to curtail the right of appeal; State companies given carte blanche to seek out and exploit land; an Environmental Management Authority (EMA) which hardly says no; and powerful interests of large local conglomerates and multinationals, including your countrymen from Alcoa.

A report carried in another newspaper this week, headlined "Alcoa is a scapegoat-Chatham is a good site (for Alcoa's smelter) say National Energy Company (NEC) officials", quotes NEC's president, Prakash Saith, as saying, "I am almost certain that we can get the EMA's approval for those areas"-three new industrial sites, including Chatham/Cap de Ville in Cedros.

Yesterday the paper carried a three-page full colour advertisement by Alcoa with a letter to the people of T&T from their president of Primary Metals Development, Randy Overbey, telling us to have faith in our Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process. But this process is threatened, Mr Kennedy, says someone who sits on our EMA board, and he should know.

On Friday, Sir, Prime Minister Patrick Manning said that Alcoa's "US$3 billion" aluminium smelter in Cedros would go ahead. Peoples' attitudes were being based on emotion, he said. He told these thousands there was "no need to worry".

So, Mr Kennedy, I hope you and your team at Waterkeepers can come and visit T&T rather soon. I know you love a challenge. You'll get a great welcome, especially in beautiful Cedros. And, after you've saved our peninsula, perhaps you could tackle our Gulf? Not for nature's sake, you understand...