N 1945, the War ended, but the conflict over Bermuda's built heritage was soon to begin. Starting in 1951, and ending in 1995, the Bermuda Government inherited the major lands, historic buildings and monuments of the military forces, residents of the island for more than three centuries.

The destruction of many of the historic buildings of these properties followed, not by enemy bombs but through the slow burn of our own hands, as committee after committee and government after government failed to appreciate the significance of this legacy and its place in Bermuda's only true industry, tourism.

Many of you who are prone to say in these money-washed days from non-tourism sources that tourism is dead. If tourism is dead, so is the built heritage of this paradise, as there will be no reason to keep any of it, for there will be no visitors to view it.

It remains the almost complete failure of those in the right places to appreciate the connection between tourism and the preservation and well-being of Bermuda's built heritage, military and domestic.

Tourism is rooted in the concept of touring to see unique monuments, outstanding landscapes and different peoples and their cultures. It was such an appropriate cultural environment that made Bermuda tourism great in earlier years.

An example of this failure is seen through a rare booklet entitled . In it industry means nuts and bolts, grease and mechanical hardware, not the software of the tourism trade that is the ambience we know and love as Bermuda itself, its landscape and built heritage.

The purpose of the booklet, published by the Bermuda Crown Lands Corporation ? the precursor to the just as inaptly named Bermuda Land Development Corporation ? was to attract nuts-and-bolt industries to the island.

This was as forlorn a hope in the 1950s as it is these 50 years later. Since the departure of the military in 1995, the only industrial magnets this island can attract are people (tourism) and finance (the so-called "international business" ? but what business is more international than tourism?), neither of which is very greasy.

The guinea pigs for the Crown Lands industry initiative were the sites inherited from the British military from 1957, when the garrison finally departed Bermuda. The Dockyard, Prospect and St. George's Camps, their buildings and associated fortifications were the grist for this new government pepper mill.

These were lands, like those later in Tucker's Town and St. David's Island that were appropriated from private owners ? black, white and other ? from 1809 onwards. Of course, the land was not returned to those original owners, but put in the local government pork barrel.

Few overseas industries were attracted to these historic sites, but many weird local businesses flourished for a while on the cheap rents offered in the business parks of the Dockyard and elsewhere.

Any idea was given credence, but few "industries" long survived, despite the built-in benefits and lack of planning controls. Some of these businesses destroyed the buildings they used, either directly, or because they were demolished afterwards, for, in the usual words of the uncaring bureaucrat: "They had become unhealthy and unsafe."

The relates mainly to the Dockyard and has some interesting statistics. We are informed that "the supply of labour is adequate and intelligent" and that "full governmental co-operation is assured". The local population stood at 42,640 souls, 10,686 Armed Forces and 2,730 "Transients".

By 1964, annual visitors had reached 203,434, a figure the tourism doomsayers think we are reaching today, but by decline not increase. We are told that the largest export was to the United Kingdom, for a princely sum of ?223,737 and the smallest was a pauper's purse to Denmark for ?2,310. In total, exports were less than three-quarters of a million pounds, against imports of more than nine million pounds from the United States alone!

industry initiative of the 1950s and 1960s, while well meaning, must be considered an abject failure for business, and for the built heritage it exploited, it was a disaster. At the Dockyard lands, more than 50 buildings were ultimately destroyed, many of outstanding historical value. Since then at Dockyard, the only appropriate "industry" has proved to be that of tourism.

A hand-and-glove relationship exists between tourism and the preservation of the built environment. Tourism ensures the preservation of heritage and that heritage ensures the delight and abiding interest of the visitor. The nuts and bolts of the financial "international business" is money: their business is to preserve capital, not heritage.

The fact is that tourism is Bermuda's most appropriate industry. Heritage is its raw material and finished product; fortunately we have some left. The fact is that sound tourism depends on the preservation of the historic environment ? which created and sustains the tourist-loved ambience called Bermuda.

The fact is that we are constantly told that tourism is dead. The fact is that that self-fulfilling prophecy is the seed of our downfall as a people and the ruination of the outstanding built heritage of Bermuda.