The Tribune

WHEN Eric Carey said a final formal farewell to the Bahamas National Trust at the end of December, he left an organization that belonged to the people.

That’s not the way he found it when he joined 20 years ago.

Carey, then a young man with thick dark hair, a passion for the environment and a sense of fairness, walked into a quaint cottage-turned-office in the middle of an amazing palm garden off Village Road in Nassau and was spellbound by the potential.

He also heard the downside. Over and over and over again, he heard it. Environmental protection was a luxury. The Bahamas National Trust was for the elite. Ordinary working Bahamians were too busy making a living to worry about depleting the conch stock one day. There had always been grouper in the sea and why should it change now?

Carey had a tough road ahead of him. It was not surprising. The reality is that the Bahamas National Trust was founded by an elite group – mostly by scientists from the New York Zoological Society. It’s a fascinating story of people who discovered the beauty of The Bahamas and took it upon themselves to preserve it, never for a moment dreaming that it was not the responsible thing to do.

They were so sure of themselves and their righteousness that they had the nerve to compliment one Bahamian man, the late Herbert McKinney, for his knowledge, education and dedication to conservation.

No one can blame the foreign scientists for their interest. They laid the groundwork that decades later Carey would inherit following management of the BNT by members of a prominent Bahamian family that also cared deeply about conservation.

But Carey, promoted five years after he started to Executive Director of the BNT, took it to a whole new level. He grew the staff from nine or 10 to 90; he grew the managed national parks and conservation areas from a handful to a 32-park system covering 2.2 million acres.

Mostly, he grew the consciousness of the world around us, the earth under our feet, the air that envelops us, the shimmering water that gives our soul life itself.

I asked him this week what he was most proud of and what he most regretted.

“BNT is now a household name that Bahamians identify with,” he said. It was a polite way of saying he had taken the elitism out of a national land and water park system, even if he had to badger the population into understanding that one day we would run out of conch and fish and crawfish if we did not protect the species and adopt better practices with restricted fishing or harvesting, either seasonally or geographically.

He’s equally proud of instilling in young people the fervor to protect, changing the culture. Thousands have now had hands-on experience handling a starfish or seeing life on a coral reef. They’ve explored the coppice and understand better than most of their parents do the critical role of mangroves through the Discovery Club or other initiatives.

Carey did not do this alone. An environmental awareness movement has swept The Bahamas. From the Environmental Heroes Club at Claridge Primary where they proudly pinned their first environmental stewards in 2018 in the presence of the then Minister of Environment Romauld ‘Romi’ Ferreira to the strong voices of Save The Bays, admired by Carey for the courage to say what had to be said and resources to fight for the environment in court. From a soft-spoken Eleanor Phillips to an outspoken Sam Duncombe, from a reef education NGO like BREEF to the thousands throughout the islands who show up to clean a local beach, there is a new awareness that this land is our land, but it is ours to protect and preserve, not to trample and to disrespect. We have learned so much. What we once called swamp we now respect as mangrove marshland, key to coastal protection and nurseries for young species.

We have people to thank for that, including Eric Carey, today with gray hair and beard, a little older, a little wiser and about to start a new chapter of his life as a consultant. May you maintain your principles, Eric, and never take on a client whose practices would keep you awake at night. If you would not serve on their board, don’t serve their board’s needs.

As for Carey’s regrets – that the magnificent national parks are not used more, that they are not part of our daily or weekend routines.

He wishes they were more accessible or that visitors and locals chose to access them more. He wishes that some, like the Village Road palm grove where he first walked into BNT, would serve as a popular visitor centre with up to 200 persons touring daily. It’s perfect for a gift shop, a local tea stop, he says. Hey Eric, how about hammocks between those palms?

There are those who at a moment in time make a difference. Eric Carey made a difference.