We are in the minority

On travelling

Vancouver, Canada. Taken from Stanley Park. March 2024.

I’ve been travelling for a few weeks, hence the Substack silence. I’m thinking now about luggage – the things we take with us when we leave home. I haven’t checked a bag on a flight for about fifteen years, which means my take-along possessions are restricted to a small backpack and a rollaboard. I do this for many reasons – I never have to worry about a bag going missing, I don’t have to wait at baggage carousels after a long flight, I regard being able to put my rollaboard into the overhead bin as a test of strength, I don’t have space to make impulse purchases, which then get put into a cupboard at home and never see the light of day, it stops relatives and friends from asking me to transport car parts and computers. I used to mail books home but now I load up my Kindle. I wear hiking boots and pack my city boots, wear a pair of jeans, pack another pair (in case I get wet, always a strong possibility), carry an outer jacket, pack travel size toothpaste, lotion and basic drugs, enough socks, underwear and undershirts to wash and allow to dry. Oh and pyjamas. Travelling light never fails to remind me how little we really need.

I’ve been in the Pacific northwest  - USA first, and briefly Canada. It’s still winter, but spring is on the way, flowers pushing up, trees blossoming, the sky full of scudding clouds, shafts of sunshine, sudden rain showers. My initial stop was at the Environmental Law Alliance Annual Meeting in Eugene, Oregon – my first in a long while. And it was great to connect with my struggle, as it were, many old friends (in both senses of the word ‘old’ – me, I’m claiming the word) and so many new ones. Young people. Brave people from 50 countries; I learned about their victories, when environmental victories in Jamaica seem so rare. Some words that stayed with me from a decades-long campaigner – we are in the minority. Yeah.

Of course, compared to travel when I was young, you are not disconnected from home, so while I was away I saw news of the latest fish kill in the Rio Cobre, the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) rushing to declare it ‘minor’, images of a big fire at the Riverton Dump, which received no further media coverage, so I don’t know if it actually occurred, ministerial bleats for more personal responsibility for garbage disposal, although it is still true that our solid waste laws and infrastructure are entirely inadequate, other ministerial announcements about the blue economy, a local government election with somewhere between 26% and 29% voter turnout and both sides claiming victory, the government’s Minister of Information plaintive ask for advice as to the single thing the government should do – I posted, ‘tell us the truth, stop saying one thing from the podium and doing another’ – but I’m not putting my pot on the fire for this change to be adopted, and a public relations reel on Jamaican beaches, narrated by an English voice, possibly AI, glossing over the reality of declining beach health and restricted access for local people.

While all this was boiling up in my mind, I walked with friends around Stanley Park in Vancouver, a five-mile paved trail along English Harbour with views of snow-capped mountains and the ocean – the water looked pretty clean for a very busy port - and in all those miles I saw one single plastic bottle. Forests, gardens, lawns, benches. Many birds, most I couldn’t identify. City people using their park. I took photos and later that night, saw a post on Facebook by Donnette Zacca who was stopped from taking a photo of a bearing ackee tree at Hope Gardens by a security guard because, as some of those who responded explained, it was an ‘income stream’ to Hope Gardens and a visitor has to pay. I will never understand why we accept this kind of thing. Here’s my photo of defiance taken in Hope Gardens in January of this year.

I took an Amtrak train from Eugene to Seattle – seven hours – and from my window I wondered if I was witnessing America’s decline in the rusty bridges and dingy train yards. We lumbered by parking lots chock full of cars, so if you were an alien recently arrived from another planet you would conclude the predominant life form in the US was a car. And I saw dozens, maybe hundreds, of homeless encampments along the train tracks, small tents in bright colours, a bucket, a dented bicycle, a supermarket trolley, the possessions of those who live there. A lot of discarded garbage.  

Where I am now in Seattle, there have been many changes since my student days more than 20 years ago, some remind me of Kingston – big cranes, soulless, cheap, generic construction taking up entire lots, vanishing neighbourhood character. But like Vancouver, like Kingston, the natural setting is still gorgeous, mountains and water at every turn. And I thought about what makes a city a pleasant place to live, a place that’s different from other places, recognizable for being itself, and surely it’s things like authenticity, character, even quirkiness, good public services like transportation and parks, big trees, roadside flowerbeds, cleanliness, safety, quiet.

In Seattle the residential areas often have traffic calming circles – small roundabouts that cars must go around at slow speeds, and the people plant gardens within them, and they look after them and erect signs saying things like ‘Drive Nice: It’s Contagious’.  We could do with traffic calming circles in Kingston.

Seattle signs

I saw Bob Marley: One Love here. The theatre was empty. For me, the high production values, the music of my young years, the wonderful job done by Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch playing Bob and Rita respectively, the Jamaica that was revealed as not merely a playground for tourists, but as a country, a real place, these brought tears to my eyes. I did find the film a sanitized and incomplete version of our flawed and fascinating hero, as many have said – and I hope someone else will make a film about Bob’s young life, his journey from Nine Mile in St Ann to Trench Town in Kingston.   

It did not escape me that the images which were likely shot at Bob Marley beach in Bull Bay might very well soon reflect a hotel beach with all the exclusion that implies.

So my mind is turning to home, energized on the environmental front, ready for a Bombay mango and ackee off our trees, with some of my own callaloo (maybe it has survived without me), seeing my family and friends. On the other hand, I’m not looking forward to a March which, judging by many Twitter posts, is already way too hot.