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Communities around the world are preaching the gospel of sustainable development.

But the Bermuda version is the best gospel of all, because it lets you do whatever you want.

You have small cars until you want larger ones, and then you change the rules.

You love your tree-lined roads until the leaves rub against your larger cars and trucks, and then you chop the trees down with chainsaws.

You protect green space with a rigid planning process until you want to develop on it. Then you pass a special development order and start building.

It's kind of like an ice cream diet, in which you diet until you feel hungry, and then you eat.

What could be nicer than that?

A lot of people think sustainable development involves restraint and sacrifice, so that resources can be saved and shared more fairly.

They think it means paying a little extra, or putting up with a little inconvenience from time to time, to protect the environment.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

The Bermuda Government's form of sustainable development allows you to do whatever is cheapest and most convenient.

Take its plan for a new hospital, for example.

It will build the new hospital smack in the middle of the Botanical Gardens.

This will be cheaper than re-building the hospital on its current site, the Government pointed out.

It will be more convenient: Patients won't be disrupted by the noise.

And it will be more efficient, because you can build a whole new hospital while the old hospital keeps running like nothing was wrong.

You can't really argue with this kind of logic. And as the Government pointed out, sustainable development never meant NO development.

Most other people who talk about sustainable development would tackle things differently.

They would do almost anything to avoid building on green space, let alone anything like a botanical gardens.

They would search high and low for a large piece of land that had already been built on, but was derelict and ripe for re-development.

This, they would argue, is the only way to develop without actually gobbling up grass and trees and flowers and other undeveloped land.

For a new hospital, of course, this derelict, built-up piece of land would have to be somewhere central, so that ambulances can rush you there before you die.

A careful search of Bermuda reveals only one such site. It is - lo and behold! - the site where the current hospital was built and is now decaying.

It contains all kinds of buildings that are tattered and torn, from the old nurses living quarters on Berry Hill Road to the run-down "old" hospital building on Point Finger Road.

It might cost more to develop a new hospital on top of these deteriorating bits and pieces, the traditional supporter of sustainable development would argue.

But you would have replaced derelict buildings with new and handsome ones, and dramatically improved Bermuda's health care - without destroying a single blade of grass.

If the Bermuda Government had announced this kind of plan - one that most people who believe in sustainable development would recognize and feel comfortable with - it would have won a lot of support.

It would have convinced people that this sustainable development stuff the Government has been going on and on about, was something more than a hollow political gimmick.

Gimmick

But who wants to pay extra?

Who wants any inconvenience?

These are the make-or-break questions in the special brand of sustainable development the Bermuda Government is pursuing.

It is a policy that has plenty of time for forums and discussion papers, speeches and self-congratulation. But the policy has no time for sacrifice of any kind.

That is why the cars get bigger and the trees get fewer, and the Botanical Gardens gets a big new hospital built right in the middle of it.

All in the name of sustainable development.[[In-content Ad]]

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