This is the seventh in a mulipart series on sustainable development in Bermuda.

For generations Bermudians were familiarised almost from birth with the benefits the whole Island derived from the tourism industry.

Our welcoming nature and graciousness notwithstanding, the Bermudian habit of greeting virtually everyone we meet with a cheery “Good morning” didn’t evolve naturally. The expression actually entered the Bermudian vernacular as the result of a type of gentle social conditioning introduced into our schools and churches and social clubs in the 1920s and 1930s by the Trade Development Board, pioneers of the Island’s resort tourism industry.

In the early days of the industry Bermudians were made to understand everyone had a role to play in tourism’s success: the wealthy vacationers beginning to arrive on our shores were our guests, invited to share the quiet intimacy of our island home, and should be treated as such.

Even at the height of the sometimes high-intensity Black Power revolt which convulsed Bermuda in the early 1970s, tourism was deemed strictly off-limits by militants pursuing a violent campaign against the Bermuda Establishment. During a council of war meeting bugged by police, one militant proposed torching a major hotel. His suggestion was met with a swift and resounding “no” from his comrades. Tourism was simply too valuable, too indispensable to the Bermudian way of life, to recklessly jeopardise.

Although an appreciation for the industry bordering on reverence became ingrained in Bermudians, for years the enchanted little tourism fairyland of Bermuda slumbered away on the edge of an abyss, unwilling to confront the sometimes harsh new realities which emerged in the 1970s and early ‘80s.

The increasing size and disorder of our administrative apparatus began to reflect this.

An isolated world unto itself — as much “another world” as the Island itself was during its tourism heyday — Bermuda’s infrastructure had once been as precisely ordered as a Victorian clockwork toy town with all of the bureaucratic cams, cogs and levers perfectly synchronised. That began to change as Bermuda became considered increasingly passé, a resort for old people and their parents. As the traditional Bermuda visitor aged and younger North Americans opted for more exotic destinations, the growth of the civil service began to burgeon.

The fact is Bermuda’s bureaucracy provided opportunities for a sector of the community previously denied access to (or at least not granted full and equitable participation in) the white collar economy. And as such opportunities diminished in a contracting private sector built around tourism, the public sector expanded inexorably. This was a classic example of unsustainability and to this day poses one of the greatest economic and social challenges facing Bermuda.

A shrinking local economy could not by itself be expected to meet the increasing tax burden required to maintain such an expensive infrastructure. But when Bermuda’s primary economic focus shifted to international business in the 1980s and ‘90s, the multinational operations which began to set up shop here were, by definition, exempt from all but minimal local fees and taxes. We could not, of course, arbitrarily change that arrangement without driving these companies elsewhere.

So borrowing started to increase as government expenditure began to outstrip tax revenues. And the Island found itself living on borrowed time as well as borrowed money. It was an untenable situation as well as a manifestly unsustainable one even before the boom of the late ‘90s and early 2000s showed any signs of going bust. And it urgently needed to be addressed. But no one in a position to do so was prepared to take necessary action; nobody, it seemed, was accustomed to shouldering responsibility for unpleasant but ultimately unavoidable decisions.

Repeated opportunities to rationalise, streamline and possibly privatise some government services were simply ignored by successive governments. Bureaucracies the world over have a tendency to become self-perpetuating and self-justifying entities and Bermuda’s is no exception. Living outside the normal activities of the people and businesses whose lives and affairs they regulate is actually the norm for civil servants. They are institutionally insulated from disagreeable outside realities. And they tend to remain as obstinately rigid as a granite mountain when confronted with new circumstances and new conditions which may threaten long-established routines and practices.

This tendency became increasingly pronounced in Bermuda’s civil service as the Island was wrenched away from its tourism heritage and propelled into the unfamiliar world of re/insurance and finance. The first rule of sustainability is surely ensuring a people understand what industry it is they are expected to help sustain — and explaining how it will help to sustain them. That never happened when international business replaced tourism as Bermuda’s new economic engine. Unlike the case with tourism there was a breach between Bermudians and their new economic reality, one which became increasingly evident in the structure of government as well as the wider social structure. We were caught up in the irresistible slipstream of a thriving international business sector; but we did not really adapt to it, either structurally or culturally.

Perhaps nowhere was the divorce between bureaucratic routine and reality more evident than in the operations of the increasingly hopeless Tourism Ministry. In the face of all evidence to the contrary, the Ministry wasted millions of dollars on failed advertising campaigns aimed at persuading potential visitors Bermuda was still “the unspoiled, unhurried, uncommon” resort it had been in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The travelling public was unenthusiastic, unconvinced and, ultimately, uninterested. With massive office blocks going up throughout Hamilton and the countryside increasingly blighted by the unchecked proliferation of condo developments, we were attempting to sell a product which no longer existed to a market which no longer cared.

Tourism could have been outsourced to professionals decades ago at considerable savings and with what would almost certainly have been more satisfactory results. For instance, a lucrative niche market in cultural tourism might have been developed for those interested in our rich past — one-time US President William Howard Taft was only slightly overstating things when he said of Bermuda that never in history had such a small country played such a large role on the world stage. The UNESCO World Heritage site in St George’s is book ended by the massive Royal Naval Dockyard fortifications at the West End and there are a host of museums, galleries and places of interest in between appealing to students of everything from our indigenous folk art traditions to colonial architecture to Mark Twain. A concerted effort to retool our tourism product and to market ourselves as a cultural tourism destination would have at once celebrated and promoted the Island’s unique heritage while also helping to sustain it.

But, of course, we continued to adhere rigorously to a tried-and-failed formula in tourism as in so many other areas, squandering vast amounts of money in the process and ignoring very real opportunities for remaking the failed industry into something viable. The Bermudian bureaucracy stubbornly remained “another world” — taking its own decisions, running on its own momentum and traditions, ignoring all attempts to direct and manage it.