Remembering a Giant

My tribute to C. Dennis Morrison

Maybe we all do this, but when I learn someone I care for has died, my first thoughts are in relation to myself – where we met, the relationship we had, the person I knew and now must mourn. This feels somewhat self serving, as if the person existed only in relation to me, but also inevitable and right, because what else is there to reflect on but the ways in which that someone touched my life enriched it, and changed it? Then I feel guilt – when was the last time we spoke, the last time we saw each other? And finally, those resolutions come, the ones we all make, to be better friends and family members, to understand tomorrow is promised to no one, to live meaningfully and purposefully and intentionally every day, promises we so rarely keep.

Dennis Morrison, Rhodes scholar, teacher, attorney, jurist. Jamaican son, Caribbean man for the ages died yesterday, February 3^rd, 2024. He was a towering intellect, a cool head, a man of reason and kindness. A light spirit too, always ready with a smile and a joke. Articulate, erudite, passionate. Husband, father, steadfast friend. I aspired to his calm eloquence, valued his counsel, saw him as a role model. He made me proud to be Jamaican.

I met him more than 30 years ago, in my insurance days, when he was a partner at a prestigious law firm and we would speak about thorny claims. He taught me to look for the principle to guide my decision making, to consider multiple viewpoints, to build an argument, a strong case. He toned down my impulse to act quickly, without sufficient thought – I can’t say it was ever completely vanquished. But what I remember most about Dennis was his time as the Chairman of the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) and his willingness to argue JET’s first legal environmental case pro bono. I remember the outrage from certain captains of industry not said directly to me, but related back by those who heard it: “How can that woman afford Dennis Morrison, Queen’s Counsel?”

Dennis saw the principle and that was what mattered to him.

What follows is an account of that legal case, extracted from my largely unpublished environmental memoir. This is the man I knew, the man we all have lost, and I offer it in his memory, which to me, will always be the greatest of blessings.

The place was, is, Pear Tree Bottom, near to Runaway Bay on Jamaica’s north coast. The issue was the construction of a large Spanish-owned hotel on the coast, at a location long slated for protection. The basis of the lawsuit was the poor public consultation and inadequate Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). The claimants were the Northern Jamaica Conservation Association (NJCA), JET, and four NJCA members. NJCA, led by Wendy Lee, reviewed the EIA and went through the failings that remain standard in Jamaican EIAs. The review was supported by 22 other environmental or community groups, many of which no longer exist today, and 81 individuals.

This is what the environmental consultant said about Pear Tree Bottom, taken from the verbatim notes of the second public hearing in 2008, after the court case:

“In a compact manner, it demonstrates linkages between the surrounding watershed, connected to the hydrological system, connected to the fresh water marsh then to the brackish water estuary with mangroves, to the back reef lagoon and sandy and rocky shoreline, coral reef ecosystem and then the fishery. So it is a beautiful example… of a complete tropical ecosystem.” 

A month or so after the first public meeting in 2005, I got a phone call from Wendy and in a voice creaky with emotion, she told me that the site at Pear Tree Bottom had been cleared, bulldozed to bare dirt, marl had been spread and the big trees were being burned. “It’s near the end of the breeding season for the birds!” Wendy wailed. “The babies were almost ready to fledge and if they had waited just one more month it would have made all the difference to the bird life of the area. Diana,” she went on, “they were given permission to clear the site by NEPA before we even went to the public meeting!”       

            “How do you know that Wendy? I said.

            “I have the letter sent by NEPA to the developers,” she said. “It’s dated April 8^th, 2005. Ten days before the public meeting.”

JET’s Chairman at the time was Dennis Morrison, Queen’s Counsel.  

“How can they do that, Dennis? Clear the land before the public process has even started? Do we have a legal case?” I asked him at a JET Board meeting in September 2005.

“Yes, D,” said Dennis Morrison, QC. “I believe we do.”

“Will you handle it for us?” I said. By that I meant: will you handle it for us without a fee?    

“Yes,” he said. “I will.”

We began a process of negotiation with the boards of two NGOs – JET and NJCA – and four individuals – Cecile Carrington, Eleanor Grennan, Annabella Proudlock and John deCarteret. And in October 2005, we filed Jamaica’s first public interest environmental legal case requesting Judicial Review by Jamaica’s Supreme Court of the decision made by the two Jamaican government regulatory bodies, the Natural Resources Conservation Authority (NRCA) and the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) to grant an environmental permit for a 1,918 room hotel to Hoteles Pinero Jamaica Ltd. at Pear Tree Bottom.

It was Dennis Morrison who spoke for Pear Tree Bottom in court. The judge was Justice Brian Sykes, now Jamaica’s Chief Justice. The trial took place over six days and each morning we went to the law offices of DunnCox to meet with Dennis and junior counsel Julianne Mais-Cox to reconnect, review the previous day’s proceedings or to strategize. 

One morning, there was to be a meeting at the Attorney General’s Chambers with the Hoteles Jamaica Pinero principals to see if we could agree to an out of court settlement. They had arrived in their private jet. Wendy brought a baby dove which had fallen out of its nest in a shoe box with her. She insisted that the bird come with us to the meeting, as it had to be fed throughout the day. And the bird came with us to the Attorney General’s office and Wendy also had a syringe and suitable food, and at various times during the meeting, which ended without agreement, she got up to feed the baby bird. Dennis handled the bird care requirements with equanimity.

Was my memory of this baby bird a constructed one? It seemed entirely unlikely that a baby bird in a shoe box came along to a high-level meeting at the Attorney General’s Chambers. I called Dennis, by then the President of the Court of Appeal, to ask him if he remembered the baby bird. “Of course I do,” he said. “It was a moment when I appreciated the gulf between the parties, the dismissive way you were both treated, wackos concerned about cooking fires being set under trees, one of you getting up to feed a bird in a shoe box, in this formal room with its coat of arms and photographs of the Prime Minister and Ministers of Government on the wall.” 

Not a constructed memory then. I turned to my computer. My cell phone rang, and it was Dennis. “D, I want to tell you this,” he said. “They didn’t get it, the Pinero people, but neither did I.” 

“Get what?”

“That someone could regard it as uncontroversial to try to save a baby bird. That the trees and the land were important. I didn’t get it then, but I get it now. And you helped me to see it.”  

“Don’t make me cry, Dennis,” I said.

EPILOGUE: I was in Antigua at an animal welfare conference when the judgment for the Pear Tree Bottom case was handed down on May 16^th, 2006. Wendy called me on my cell phone and she said: “We won! We WON Diana. And the judge quashed the environmental permit!”

“He quashed the permit?” I said.

“Yes. He said the process was flawed. He said NEPA and NRCA failed to meet their own standards of consultation and he quashed the permit. When are you coming back?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. And then I yelled to the whole conference room, who knew about the lawsuit because a Caribbean NGO had never been to court against their government over an environmental issue: “WE WON!” And people hugged me and I was so, so sorry that I was not at home, not in that courtroom to hear Justice Bryan Sykes deliver his judgment on the matter of the construction of the Grand Bahia Principe Hotel at Pear Tree Bottom.

That was not, of course, the end of the story. Before the end of that same day, the lawyers for Hoteles Jamaica Pinero Ltd. had filed a request to be heard by the Supreme Court in order to make arguments that the judgment should be varied. On June 23^rd, 2006, Justice Sykes ruled that the hotel could be completed, due to the undue hardship that would be caused to the investor, who had already spent US$62 million; and the fact that Hoteles Jamaica Pinero had not been joined in our suit. He strengthened his declarations against the regulatory agencies and did not withdraw his comments on their failure to meet their own standards of public consultation.

And the place which all who studied it, all who knew it, agreed was unique to the north coast of Jamaica was lost. 

That is my tribute to Dennis Morrison. Along with all his extraordinary personal attributes, he laid the foundation for public interest environmental law in the Caribbean. And I will miss him forever.