One environmentalist believes Barbados is well positioned to become the leading Caribbean country in creating a green economy.
Craig Morrison, president of the Caribbean-based consulting firm CLS Consulting Limited, said, however, there was still much work to be done.
The comments from Morrison, whose company specializes in international trade, business development and environmental and project management, came during the monthly mix-and-mingle session staged by the Barbados Chamber of Commerce and Industry last Thursday at Hilton Barbados. During the session a new company, Caribbean LED Lighting Inc, was launched.
“Within the Caribbean there is no green leader. [But] I think that Barbados is well positioned to become the leader in the region with respect to the good management of the environment.
“Without taking responsibility for the future of the environment and our children, and without demonstrating some real leadership, nothing is going to change,” Morrison said, noting that for the past 50 years people had been talking about pollution.
Morrison said that over the last 12 years, increasingly more people around the world have been living beyond their needs and contributing significantly to pollution of the environment – a trend which he said needs to stop.
“What is driving the problem is population growth; it has driven the pollution problem. It has driven the extraction of resources and the unintended mismanagement of those resources.
“The population is growing exponentially and unless we get this green management right and unless we create enough green jobs in Barbados and elsewhere, things are going to get a lot worse very quickly,” he warned.
Citing examples of how some people in Peru, Canada and other parts of the world turned waste into profit, he said it was about time leaders stopped talking about corrective measures and start taking preventative steps
to reduce pollution. He suggested that at the moment “we are not doing a great job”.
He told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY he believed one of the best ways to curb the problem and create a much safer environment for generations to come was through education at the primary level.
“As humans, we like to do what we want to do and what we have always done,” he remarked. “For us to change we need to be convinced. We need to have our attitude shifted to push us to do something new. One thing we learnt in Canada was that education was paramount to get people to do things differently.
“We also learnt that teaching children in school why they should recycle a plastic bottle or tyre, they often teach their parents and those parents listen. So with enough education, all of the society can change,” he reasoned.