The Danger In Seeing Nature As "Product"

The theme of the 10th Annual Caribbean Conference on Sustainable Tourism Development that I've been attending all week is "Sustaining the Caribbean Coastal Product." Turks and Caicos Premier Michael Misick referred to the local TCI "product" over a dozen times in his opening remarks to the conference. Delegates in every direction I looked kept complimenting each other on an "impressive product."

Product? When did our environment, our natural resources, become commodified into products? What a dangerous precedent to set for ourselves to regard our natural world solely as a commodity to market and potentially exploit. It seems to me just such a mind-set that leads to the folly of proposed projects such as Star Island here on Turks and Caicos Islands where the status of a marine protected area has been ignored (some may say bulldozed) and public comment and buy-in circumvented in order to line the pockets of developers.

I've heard a lot of allegations of corruption at the highest levels of government here on Turks and Caicos. And for a government to simultaneously talk about leadership in sustainability on one hand while green lighting an environmentally destructive project such as Star Island on the other is the epitome of green washing.

Conference keynote speaker David Suzuki, who is certainly no shill for a greenwashing host government, hit the nail on the head when he said, "The way we see the world shapes how we treat it." Do we look at a reef as an engine for evolution and incredible ecosystem services for the world, or is it a stockpile of resources to extract or manipulate? Ultimately, our actions become the true "product" of our particular worldview.

Premier Misick has made his worldview clear.