Burly Cobbs House, South Tuoro, 1930,

Geometric shapes pinned and bolted together, with steel rods running through the ensemble from different directions. It is snuggled next to a foreground cliff which further reinforces the sensation that it's partly buried and immovable. The road that is visually aligned with sections of roof, and further functions like a stabilizing rod through the construction.

UBIs and SYSTEMATICS

Gail says more debt is needed. This program would raise debt. She also recommends extending the current, unsustainable debt bubble for as long as possible.That might work better with a variant of UBI: Money might be given for community resilience projects that are easy to monitor and almost fail safe. Maintaining or expanding an urban forestry would seem to offer relatively little harm, and possibly significant good. Another even better project, more suited to coastal settlements, might be marine sanctuaries. You need to pay specialists to monitor and report on the health and management of the sanctuaries. Since the sanctuaries improve fisheries, you get free food out of the expenditure to set up the sanctuary. The satellite technology, among other kinds, already exists that can help monitor forestry and fishery health. Giving people the money directly means they'll spend it in an unsystematic way. Allotting the money to land and ocean (and community) systems that can be measured and be relatively sure to create benefits should be more systematic and constructive?

CHANGE

Bigger and faster doesn't seem to be working well these days. And I don't see any radical change as helping much either. That includes changes away from the businesses that currently exist. Changes of any kind that are erroneously though to make a difference by the mere fact of changing them. In other words, the idea that radical change is needed by default might be a problem all by itself. .

HERITAGE/COASTAL TOURISM

Some 56 years later...

Around 1963, just fresh from art school, my uncle (who basically ran St. Ann's Bay) asked me what my plan would be for the town. Poor clueless me. He and main cohort were utterly disappointed that all I could recommend was "tourism." 

Well 56 years later, it's still tourism. And here's my very bare bones pre-outline for a preliminary plan:

ST. ANN AS HERITAGE PARISH

- St. Ann's Bay (SAB), being the seat of government for St. Ann Parish, is the appropriate place to hatch a plan for the entire parish.

- Ever since the first Taino inhabitants' era, fishing has been a staple of human settlement by the coast.

- The abundants river-fed water supply from the southern watershed led the Spanish to set up their first capital here. 

- Prior to settling in Seville, SAB, the Spanish tried settling in Discovery Bay and Rio Bueno, respectively, both withing the parish boundaries. 

- After the British conquest of Jamaica, SAB became the port town for plantation produce from Seville plantation and (possibly) elsewhere. 

- SAB (post British settlement) is some 360 years old, older than NYC. (The clock tower, older than Big Ben, dates from c. 1804.)

- SAB is the birthplace of Jamaica's First Ntl hero, Marcus Garvey, who is similarly honored throughout the entire African Diaspora.

- If for no other reason, this history that is unique to St. Ann Parish, ought to qualify it as a heritage parish.

THE BAPTIST INFLUENCE

- The Baptists were essential to the entire history of the abolition movement.

- William Knibb is noted as a prime figure within that movement.

- Knibb's primary achievements were in Falmouth, Trelawny.

- Somewhere c.1866 a Baptist Church was constructed in SAB

- An infant school was instituted at the church.

- Marcus Garvey attended that school.

- The school was later moved to the St. Ann Parish Church site a few block away, and exists under a different name today.

- The SAB Methodist Church was built at the time of emancipation from slavery, and was also attended by Marcus Garvey.

- Given the activity of the Baptist church and religious abolitionist involvement, St. Ann can claim abolitionist history as part of its heritage. (and heritage tourism plan)

MIDDLESEX COUNTY

https://www.aol.com/article/finance/2019/02/16/why-next-recession-could-be-unlike-any-us-has-ever-seen/23670977/

- A plan for Middlesex County could dovetail with a plan for St. Ann parish, its keystone. 

- A unifying thread of such a plan would be a coastal district plan, managed respectively by St. Mary Parish and St. Ann Parish. (We could call that the Middlesex Coastal Plan)

THE MIDDLESEX COASTAL PLAN

- Assemble information on tourist facilities along the coast.

- Integrate cruise ship programs with other Middlesex programs (e.g., collect waste from cruise ship and relocate in mining cavities left by bauxite mining)

- Negotiate heritage tourism programs with cruise ships and hotels.

- Prohibit dolphinaria.

-  Space marine sanctuaries 15 miles apart coastwide. 

COASTAL/HERITAGE TOURISM ACTIVITIES

- Make optimal use of taxis.

- Make optimal use of small business.

- Celebrate the primitive.

- Promote sailing and marine education.

- Consider the most minimalist and unobtrusive versions of floating piers at all tourist destinations.

- Have policies that promote healthy fisheries.

- Prohibit further big business incursions (hotels, villas, etc.) onto traditional "people's" beach access points. 

- Prioritize wide socioeconomic range, from roadside tourism to great house tours, whether coastal or inland. 

CARBON ABSORBING PLANTS FOR CARBON EMITTING CONDUITS

If there is truth that releasing carbon emissions next to absorbing plants works to sequester the carbon into the plant material, then what happens if you bury that carbon-saturated plant material very deep and leave it alone? You wouldn’t use it to do anything industrial if the outcome is so unclear. You’d leave it buried till there was greater certainty about whether or how to use it industrially. The jobs would be horticultural jobs to eternally grow the sequestering plants and place over and remove them from the perforated extent of tubing conveying the emissions. The emissions would be released very gradually over a great extent of conduit.

REVERSE COLONIALISM

The above was a follow-on response to another blogger, who was talking about the energy required for colonial expansion. Some of my earlier response to that was here:Something I wrote elsewhere might apply her;

"While in Mexico in the late 60's, I met a historian researching slavery there, and he assured me that there were more slaves in Mexico than in the US during the 18th century (or some period therein anyway). With the enormous Hispanic population in the US, as well as the large number of southerners "passing," DNA tests ought to demonstrate that people who qualify as black under America's "one drop" culture would qualify the the USA as a majority black country."

http://media.miamiherald.com/.../news/afrolatin/index.html

Since we've been discussing raw physical energy as a means of colonizing, how about considering it from the opposite end AS WELL and as a process of cultural dominance? It's not as though we'll all blend in and be the same one day. That "one day" is looking mightily as though it could miss the bus. The issues are about now. Right at this very moment, America is arguably a black majority country, and numbers are a major driver of energy impacts. What we do with this knowledge makes a big difference in how we see energy." We could be dealing with a kind of reverse coloniaLISM

What is the role of Colonialism? If the Western hemisphere has now become majority African, how did this happen? Africa wasn't and still isn't a united nation with a mighty conquering military. One must conclude, therefore, that the so called African Empire is the creation of colonialism and its primary responsibility for the transatlantic slave trade. African slavery in the Western hemisphere provided foundational wealth upon which industrial civilization was created. Destroy colonial heritage, and you destroy African heritage at the same time.

http://media.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/afrolatin/index.html?fbclid=IwAR13sag3tipwIJN_OLVyUxFKhGcDXWclA5W78AEQw4ABSBNrUmD_0FqtoHI

MARINE LIFE PROTECTION IN JAMAICA?

Erica Anne Hamilton, who has been working to have a dolphin pen permit for Discovery Bay revoked posted a condensed version of what she found. Compared to the rest of Jamaica, Discovery Bay is well protected. Still, it's impossible to make head or tail of what that actually means. NEPA, which is the organization that government relies on to set the agenda for coastal management, is neither structurally sound nor even able to minimally serve as an agency of sane coastal governance.

As to St. Ann's Bay, an online search for laws governing its coast turned up nothing at all. This could be a good reason to propose a coastal management district for St. Ann parish's coast, and ask its educational institutions to help with the research to make it happen.

_______________________

A SNIPPET OF WHAT ERICA FOUND, RELATED TO DISCOVERY BAY

(5) Wild Life Protection Act 1945 (6) The Natural Resources Conservation Authority (NRCA) Act 1991 - marine parks and protected areas

There have been numerous other Green Papers and Draft Policies that have not been enacted, including the Dolphin Policy of 2003 which I understand was placed before the house in February 2018.

According to the Caribbean Research Policy Institute (CaPRI) In 2001, the three main regulatory bodies, the Natural Resources and Conservation Authority (NRCA), the Town and Country Planning Authority and the Development and Land Development and Utilisation Commission were merged to create NEPA. However, the Act that established the NRCA was never repealed and the new NEPA Act was never promulgated. They say that means that NEPA is operating under multiple laws that pre-date the organisation with no legislation giving it legal authority to actually enforce any of these regulations.

We are not alone. A study as long ago as 2010 by Aliza M. Cohen of the University of Michigan Law School made a very detailed analysis of the very same shortcomings, albeit in the framework of US law.

The most pertinent document I have found, in terms of our own Discovery Bay, is The Discovery Bay Special Fishery Conservation Area Management Plan, 2015 – 2025.

It begins with a brief recent history of the bay as it relates to fishing, that it had been overfished, economically, and biologically, talks about pollutants, sediments, global warming, and the increasing strength and frequency of hurricanes. The Bay was declared a Fish Sanctuary in 2009; in 2012 this voluntary designation was revoked and replaced by the Special Fishery Conservation Area Regulations, no longer voluntary but a strict no fishing zone with statutory and legal status, to try to return fish populations to a sustainable level focusing additionally on issues that affect the bay and on conservation of habitats. This Management plan was supplemented by an Action Plan, a Business Plan and a Training Plan, published under separate covers and I have not seen those. The implementation of this management plan is an obligation of the Fisheries Division and they signed an MOU with the Discovery Bay Alloa Fishermen's Association to help on a day-to-day basis, with management.