"They paved paradise...

and put up a parking lot." Or in this case a parking lot and buildings and 72 (or is it 96?) apartments/condos.

The Developer has started clearing the land at Shacks Beach as the first stage of building his project. Once the land is cleared, he plans to bring in truckload after truckload of fill to raise the level of the land so he can build on it. From the sales prospectus we've seen, it is exactly the same project as before, minus the two additional floors. Now it's three floors, not five.

"Don't it always seem to go/you don't know what you've got til it's gone. They paved paradise/and put up a parking lot."

But we do know what we've got! This is the view 180 degrees and just a few meters from the destruction zone above:


And this shot, looking west, shows the project (the small brown wedge at the left is the area that has been cleared so far; the project area extends through the greenery to where the buildings start at left-center), the dune (the heavily vegetated strip kinda diagonally through the center), the beach, the ocean and the Shacks community beyond. You can see how close the project is to the dune, beach and ocean.

The problem is some people don't seem to care. It seems that some people won't be satisfied until our whole coast is covered in concrete and Isabela looks like Rincon - over-rated, over-priced and WAY over developed. Money is more important than the environment that attracted many of us here in the first place.

(The other song that is going through my head is Tracy Chapman's "The Rape of the World.")

And it's not just here! The same Developer is planning another 124-unit project about 1/2 mile east of here, right next to Bamboo Beach. The owners of the quaint old-school bungalows at Villas del Mar Hau want to built an 11-story mixed condos and tourist rental high rise and then tear down the bungalows. They want to build almost right on ocean and their plan for sewage is to use septic tanks!

Why? How much is enough? How much concrete is enough? How many condos? Before the economy went south, there was a glut of four years worth of unsold housing on the island. Do we really need more? How much money is enough to satisfy these developers? How much damage to the beach, ocean and reefs is enough? To create fill for these sites (which were mined for sand years ago), they will need to tear down the mountains. How much is enough?

And at what cost? What cost to the environment, cost to the lifestyle we came here for? And if the environment is destroyed, who will want to live here? What value will these expensive condos have if there is no beach, if there is no reef, if there are no fish to see snorkeling or diving here?

If you ask me, we're way WAY past enough!