TO SUSAN NATHAN KNIGHT

Thank you very much indeed for this frightening account!

HOW ARE YOU?

Did your husband get the treatment he needed? How is he now? I know how it is to be totally dependent on selling property, and getting enough from it to go on with the next stage of life. I was able to sell my late mom's Mona house, give some money to my kids, and still pay down on a house in NM. Such things are great blessings that we seem required to put toward "paying it back." It's going to get bad all over, and paying back now might be the best we can do to hold on to some livable world.

THE JAMAICAN SCENE

Thanks for explaining the utter direness of the Jamaican scene. All it is up to is give away land or manipulate it for short term gain. You're making me see more than ever how much the economic system runs on ruthless resource extraction from the land.

But with an ever growing population on an ever shrinking resource base, something's gotta give. We can't grow the land-intensive economic system indefinitely on a finite planet. 

I'm truly saddened by your bitter experience attending to the desired and expected outcomes from the land you owned. On top of it we have a pandemic that is bad enough by itself, while being a sort of handmaiden of either a profound economic depression, or collapse. 

What happened to you speaks of a lack of transparency, clarity or vision in land use policy. I have no illusion that I can change that. I'd like to see Andy's and my recommendations studies at some high level, but even to get feasibility studies would take too long to make sense. So thanks again for taking the time to instill some understanding of what is at stake, suggesting not to allow bauxite to distract my attention.

PLANNING

I don't have to get anyone's buy-in to embark on preliminary planning focused on St. Ann's Bay (or St. Ann Parish), So planning is preferable to getting tangled up in the nightmare of bauxite. I'm content to do that, however hopeless in terms of tangible results. Maybe some unknown beneficient source will arise, where even a sketchy plan could be useful.

What planning could provide:

-- clarity and transparency.

-- Vision: The properties need to conform to a vision. That real estate property is there to make owners money is part of a world view that is clearly not working well in Jamaica (which is unwilling and unable to protect the private-property rights of owners).

-- It wouldn't hurt to have a plan for properties that go beyond advantages to individuals and look at advantages to communities. Manley appears not to have thought these matters through.

-- Environment and Landscape: The assumption that subdividing properties, clearing land, and building (at this stage, concrete being de rigeur) is appropriate is not reasonable to my mind. We need all the biomass we can muster, and the loss of it is causing drought. The landscape needs to be bushy and wild, and structures need to go on plinth blocks that require no significant digging or clearing.

-- Preservation: Any structure planned to be demolished should be photographed and measured by draftsman/engineer/builders, and we might need to train planning staff to do it themselves on  government required grid paper. None of this is rocket science. 

-- I operate mostly as a one person think tank, and I do actual advocacy through Facebook, hoping it can raise consciousness and promote specific local actions. I see little to no results from this, but not trying seems worse.

-- Values: The world is awash in a value system that I have no obvious power to interrupt. I therefore focus on design standards that maximize biomass and rural aesthetics, that preserve water, and allow for adequate food production. This is not terribly successful either, but it is more feasible in terms of cost, and could be effected if attitudes merely changed.