We are born in a land and ye know not it. Ye know not its majesty, beauty, complexity. Nature is bush. An orchid is a thing to be farmed, cut and sold. A mollusc is to be jooked with a stick, tied up, sold, cooked and curried. Trees are nuisances; they make too much leaf on the ground, their roots crack the concrete, they must be cut down to save "the president of the free world." Ye walk, live, eat, breathe in a land with one of the densest speciation of life, microbial, faunal, floral, and yet are blind to it. Prof Julian Kenny, former teacher at the University of the West Indies Life Science Department, field naturalist, writer, senator, anti-smelter activist, EMA chairman, devoted his own life to opening the eyes of the blind. That they would see, know and respect cycles and species of life that predated the existence of mankind on our islands by millions of years. Is not just bush boy; is a life system, delicate, pristine, complex, and threatened.
When the Chatham struggles against the aluminium giant Alcoa started, Kenny drove down to Chatham and met with Yvonne Ashby. The oracular voice of the ecological order had met the oracular voice of the nation; a former nurse, Ashby-a great granddaughter of Chatham slaves, who could trace her lineage back to the first post-slavery independent African settlement in the Cha-tham forest-declared no smelter: Alcoa was bad for the land. When oracles meet no one could know what mysteries pass between them. But Kenny left Cha-tham with a message; he was the one who brought the struggle into the national limelight by his constant, precise and scientific series of newspaper articles. He explained why carbon, spent potliners, hydrogen fluoride were bad in simple, clear language. And he did this when there was a lot of hemming and hawing by the journalistic literati on the matter.
As I sat on my mat outside the EMA, Kenny brought me a copy of the Basel Convention. The EMA had awarded a certificate of environmental clearance to Alutrint without a clear verification of how the spent potlining was to be disposed of overseas. Kenny insisted I read it. It detailed protocols for the disposal of waste between nation states. Then, desperate for authorities to support the case against the process by which Alutrint had been awarded its certificate, I called on Kenny. He agreed to provide an affidavit, one on which the High Court relied to make its decision to quash the Alutrint CEC.
Again, when a conference on the "Economics of Smelter" was held at St Mary's College in 2009, he came and supported the conclusion of the debate: the Alutrint smelter was uneconomic. As the recent chairman of the EMA, Kenny did not vacillate. There has been a position, articulated by a past chairman of the EMA, that the EMA ought not to stop "development." The EMA could certify even projects which could cause substantial risk to human health and the environment, but correct these risks through monitoring and financial penalty. In other words, the EMA would, on its own accord, pull out its own bulldog teeth, teeth which the law gave to it. Under Kenny's chairmanship, the EMA decided to refuse a CEC for the proposed industrial port at Claxton Bay. The port's negative impact on the Claxton Bay fisheries, the mangrove system and seagrass beds could not be mitigated. He put science before fear of the state executive.
Kenny was the author of Views from the Ridge and The Orchids, which were published by Media Editorial Projects of Maraval. I was privileged to be the bookbinder of these hardcover, gold-foiled books which contain photographs and scientific accounts of T&T's landscape, flora and fauna. He was a hiker and field naturalist who walked with his camera. He illuminated generations of students at UWI; he looked inward, at our source of common wealth, the local ecological architecture. Kenny also toted his messianic swords. He did not suffer sinners lightly. He once declared that working in the Senate was a waste of time. He attacked genocidal US foreign policy and war. When he recently resigned as chairman of the EMA, he felt that the State had dishonourably failed the mountains, streams and forests; victims of the terrors of over-quarrying.
To commemorate the life of Kenny we might do three things: Look to the moon, the sun, the ordinary plant, the soil and grass and see the wealth of power, fertility and fragility of the natural world. Publish his copious articles in a book, a job which he had given to me but in which I failed him. Continue the method that he used in his brief stint as chairman of the EMA: the method of science, honesty and fearlessness.
Wayne Kublalsingh
Via e-mail