This is the first in a two-part series on the proposed Special Development Order for Tucker’s Point.Never in my recollection has a joint press release like the one by the Minister of the Environment and Tucker’s Point Resort announcing the latest Special Development Order aroused such universal outrage and condemnation across the board by every sector of the community. To paraphrase a popular Geico ad, even a caveman could understand the catastrophic implications for Bermuda’s environment and economy that this SDO would have if realised in full over the ten-year period alloted.There is an old Chinese proverb “if you keep going in the direction you are heading, you will arrive where you are going”, and the direction Tucker’s Point has been heading with two previous SDOs has been towards more and more costly development leading only to increasing debt. It makes no sense to be building more and more housing stock and hotel rooms on virgin land in an already over-developed and urbanised Island while existing ones remain empty and fall into ruin as James Whittaker and Larry Burchall recently pointed out in connection with Bermuda’s housing crisis (Bermuda Sun 4 Feb: “Our crumbling housing stock” and “We don’t have a housing crisis we have too many empty houses”). Clearly, it makes no sense to be selling off our already scarce virgin land, mostly to non-Bermudians through the misguided loophole created to permit such sales under Hotel and Cottage Colony zoning, when we are desperately trying to protect what little remaining real estate we still have in private ownership to accommodate the future needs of Bermudians. The economic implications of the latest SDO have already been addressed by persons far better qualified in the field of economics than myself (Royal Gazette BEST submission, February 11 “Why the SDO is a bad idea”). My intent is to address the environmental implications, drawing from my experience with the previous two Tucker’s Point SDOs while I was still serving as Conservation Officer and vetting Planning submissions that impinged on protectively zoned lands.There are four fundamental reasons why the latest Tucker’s Point SDO would be catastrophic for Bermuda’s environmental heritage:Firstly, it involves a rural area half the size of a Bermuda parish and proposes to subdivide this into an extraordinarily high number of lots (79 total to be developed to Residential 2 standard!) effectively fragmenting one large open space into numerous small units. (We need to understand that at Bermuda’s tiny scale relative to the land area of the continents, a single house takes up as much space relative to our total land area as a medium-sized city on the continents! The entire development relative to Bermuda’s land area would represent a loss of open space equivalent to Yellowstone National Park or the Everglades National Park on the continental scale). Even worse, the ten-year limit on the SDO puts pressure on Tucker’s Point to sell or develop them all within that period.Secondly, the vast majority of these lots will be located on what is presently steep and densely wooded hillsides, guaranteeing that it will be impossible to develop them without deforestation and rock excavation to create level terraces for house foundations. As the rock here is very hard (Walsingham aeolianite) it will mean the sound of backhoe-mounted jack-hammers reverberating over the landscape for the next ten years as development proceeds. Moreover, most of these lots will be in full view from Harrington Sound and Paynter’s Roads unlike Tucker’s Point’s previous developments which were largely hidden on the Castle Harbour shore side. (Incredibly, four lots are even proposed for the narrow strip of land between Harrington Sound Road and the undercut cliffs of Harrington Sound near the Paynter’s Road turnoff and another is right on the edge of the golf course at that turnoff!)Third, the lot size proposed (as with their previous SDO developments) is in most cases less than half the size of most of the residences on the Mid Ocean Club! What we are talking about here is saturation development which not allowing for the open space of the golf course fairways would represent a development density equivalent to most medium-density residential two developments on the rest of Bermuda, with all the traffic congestion and noise that that implies. Conflicts will arise because of the close proximity of many of these lots to the golf course. This is already a problem on some of Bermuda’s other golf courses where people living in houses too close to the fairways are unable to sit in their gardens without the threat of errant golf balls and occasional broken windows. Thus the now rural Tucker’s Town area would become no different from most the rest Bermuda, vastly detracting from the upscale character that presently prevails there and which the Rosewood Hotel Resorts boast is a hallmark of their properties! Which leads me to wonder: Why aren’t the Mid Ocean Club landholders and previous Tucker’s Point land purchasers also objecting to this proposed devaluing of their surroundings?Fourthly, a good portion of the land proposed for subdivision and sale or hotel expansion, specifically Paynter’s Hill and Quarry Hill, lies within the ancient Walsingham geologic formation which is riddled with caves and sink-holes and beautiful pinnacle rock formations on the surface. The caves and sinks pose major development restraints, vastly increasing the costs of building, but more importantly they are the repository of most of our remaining endangered endemic and native upland flora, including 17 of the 19 surviving yellow wood trees from Bermuda’s original virgin forest. While a small area around the yellow woods is proposed to be spared as a token gesture to environmental conservation, that wouldn’t work anyway because of greatly increased wind exposure from surrounding clearings for development. (One proposed new road across Paynter’s Hill would lie directly adjacent to the yellow-wood plot!). The caves underlying Paynter’s and Quarry Hill have been shown by cave researcher Dr. Tom Iliffe (currently in Bermuda on sabbatical to write a book on Bermuda’s caves) to support more than 60 species of native and endemic marine invertebrates in their drowned sections. The dry caves are likewise a largely un-explored library of Bermuda’s pre-colonial avian and land snail heritage in the form of fossils which are slowly being discovered and described by myself and others. One might well ask how such a supposedly upscale hotel operation can be in the business of obliterating this unique Bermudian heritage and replacing it instead with an expensive copy of Miami Beach when so many other hotels worldwide are learning to capitalise on the eco- and cultural tourism of their home areas.I would now like to address two points which were made during the press release announcing this latest SDO that I take strong issue with. Firstly, it was stated that all development permitted in principle under the new SDO will be subject to the same stringent Planning application review and constraints as any other development and, secondly, that their previous record of working with environmentalists to minimise environmental impact has always been exemplary.Well, I happened to be one of the Government officers involved in trying to minimise the environmental impacts that the previous SDOs made inevitable because they were proposed for land previously zoned Nature Reserve on the basis of the comprehensive Environmental Survey conducted in preparation for the 1973 Development Plan. Under these circumstances (the same that apply to the present SDO), avoiding environmental damage just wasn’t possible.In my report on the implications of relocating golf course fairways to permit lots for sale along the Castle Harbour shore and to build the new golf club, I categorically stated that it would result in the greatest loss of unique natural heritage since the building of the airport. Quite simply there were no land surface areas where compromise could be achieved. Odd, then, that when the proposal went before the Planning Board the submitting Planning Officer told them that it had the “full support” of the Conservation Officer, as I later learned to my great surprise in a conversation with a former board member!I am not blaming Tucker’s Point for that, but rather a Planning Authority put under extreme political pressure to make it work when the SDO on nature reserve and woodland reserve zoned land was environmentally unworkable. On top of this there was the embarrassing incident where a half-acre of mature woodland was mistakenly bulldozed due to poor oversight and had to be restored and re-planted. To be fair, there was one area in which a workable compromise was achievable and in this instance Tucker’s Point was indeed very cooperative and agreed to a very expensive tertiary water treatment plant in order to save the cave systems on their property from otherwise inevitable sewage pollution. That appears to have worked and they deserve credit for it.But I can cite previous incidents of blatant environmental neglect by an earlier administration of Bermuda Properties before the original Castle Harbour Hotel was demolished and re-built. For many years they ran an illegal garbage dump in one of their remote and otherwise pristine sink holes (the one ultimately filled in when they re-located a golf course fairway). It took lots of publicity with photographs supplied by Graeme Outerbridge to get that one stopped. In another incident after the Conservation Unit of the Parks Department was given permission (but no financial support) to control invasives that were threatening the one-acre grove of virgin yellow wood trees, I discovered that for want of a simple shut off valve on the huge saltwater tank on top of Paynter’s Hill that provided gravity flow to the hotels saltwater flushing system, salt water was allowed to overflow continuously from the top of the tank. Not only was this killing vegetation on the hillside below, but during winter gales it blew into a plume of salt spray that severely defoliated and damaged the yellow wood trees just downwind. Yes, for want of a simple shut off switch my appeals to solve the problem were ignored for about five years! Fortunately the yellow wood is one of the toughest and most salt spray resistant trees known and they survived. While I have no doubt that the new Tucker’s Point management is more environmentally conscious than in the past, the bottom line is that no amount of compliance with stringent Planning conditions short of not building at all would avoid massive environmental damage on those virgin hills at the density proposed with this new SDO. You can’t have your cake and eat it too!The current SDO proposal does make one magnanimous concession, to hand over 19-acre Mangrove Lake and a few acres of steep palmetto-clad hillside opposite Harrington Sound, but it is a somewhat hollow gesture because Mangrove Lake couldn’t be developed anyway without filling it in a new Pembroke Dump anyone? and the western slope of Catchment Hill is zoned Woodland Reserve ... except I just forgot, this doesn’t mean anything any more in the age of SDOs!David Wingate OBE was Bermuda’s first Government Conservation Officer and is internationally recognised for his work bringing the Cahow back from near-extinction.