REQUIEM FOR ROATAN

                                  By:   Lorenzo Dee Belveal

I have recently been charged, by a long-time friend, with being too critical of Roatan.

In response, let me say that I have never been critical of Roatan. Indeed, Roatan is my favorite island in all the world, and I know lots of them. I collect islands like some folks collect postage stamps. Perhaps that is why I feel so personally affronted by what has happened there.

Perhaps what I feel for Roatan is a kind of guilt.

I gouged a road up the backbone of the island, dug out an excavation for a fresh-water swimming pool, and did some other things I now wish I had not. I was one of the first "violators" of Roatan, and so I was one of those who started it on the way to becoming the commercial whore it now has become.

But I have never criticized Roatan for what happened to it.

Roatan is what it is: A tropical island containing between forty or fifty square   miles of moderately hilly area terrain, about one half of which is suitable for habitation. Most of its majestic trees have been chopped down. Nearly everything   else of size is gone. Most of what remains of its green growth is small shrubs, buck-brush and scrub growth.

The surrounding seas are merely polluted, but the once beautiful inlets and harbors that scallop the island periphery, are open-air cesspools. Foul.  Fetid. Redolent with the acrid and cloying aroma of accumulated human excrement and rotting fish.

It wasn’t always like this. Roatan is vastly overpopulated. In the taking on of a population that far outstrips its capabilities to cope, much (most?) of its erstwhile inherent beauty had to give way to the insistent demands of an overabundance of   people. People, it must be added, who understood little and valued even less, such things as natural beauty and nature’s symbiotic imperatives.

Everything that was not deemed immediately crucial to projected commercial needs fell in front of the bulldozer, the drag-line, the dredge, the back-hoe and the machette. "Development " is not a gentle business. Development has to do with reordering nature to the physical and operational  requirements of people who are seeking profit from their efforts. Secondary considerations come in for little, if any, consideration during the development stage. Those niceties may come later, if at all.

This is what happened to Roatan. It is still happening, and it will continue until Roatan looks almost exactly like a dozen - or a hundred - or a thousand other places that gangs of shortsighted, avaricious "developers" have descended on, and quickly transformed into configurations that maximized bottom-line returns, and gave little attention to the means that accomplished that mercenary end. And that entailed the destruction of eons of  nature’s patient building.

Nature is helpless in the face of men and machines. However, Roatan is doing the best it can under the existing situation, and in some of the less-pressured areas, the situation is still not too bad.

My criticism, however, has been directed almost exclusively to the people who, at least presumably, bear (and share) responsibility for managing what is left of the rapidly diminishing viable resources that remain on Roatan.

The Hondo1 List has, from time to time, carried a good bit of material that reflects an ecological and anthropological thrust. In spite of the, at least passive, involvement of presumably learned people in this group, they - to this point at least - have not undertaken to lend their direct leadership to spark the kind of ecological activities that ostensibly fall within their areas of functional  competence. These are the people who might presumably chart a course that could save the life of the island. And if not "save" it, at least delay the day of  its ultimate demise.

Certainly there has been no shortage of conversation, earnest discussion, and a plethora of high-sounding debates over technical minutae, but there seems to be no discernible inclination to turn talk into programs and projects. This has been and is the continuing target of the lion's share of my criticism. I deplore inactivity on the part of people who should be trying to make an ecological difference on the Island of Roatan.

This functional lethargy is all the more astounding, because there is a horrible example not far from Roatan which can serve as a laboratory demonstration of what ecological neglect will surely bring. But the object lesson gets nobody's attention. At least not to the extent of sparking the resolve, innovation and industry to work life-saving changes.

I am speaking about Copan.

Copan is a perfect example of what Roatan is becoming. Copan is an artifact of a once highly successful society. In retrospect, we might say it was too successful for its own good.

As on Roatan, people congregated in Copan in numbers that could not be accommodated and supported in the manner their lifestyle demanded.

In their efforts to convert Copan to their requirements, the ground was stripped to build temples, "pelota" fields, houses and great eremonial areas. As more and more land in and around the vortex of the city was stripped for non-agricultural use, the fields that had earlier grown  crops to feed the burgeoning population had to be moved farther and farther away from the population center. Agricultural activities became ever more difficult to carry on, because of their sheer distance from those who needed the food.

Roatanians can haul food onto the island from the mainland, but Copan enjoyed no such auxiliary food supply. Either the Copanese had to be self-sufficient - or they had to be hungry. So they were hungry. If Roatanians could not import food, they could not remain on the island, because it has been many years since the island population could feed itself   through its own land resources and individual industry.

There was another problem in Copan that we can safely postulate. By stripping large areas of land to provide building sites and ceremonial areas, ground cover disappeared and the subterranean water supply was reduced accordingly. It happened slightly and slowly at first, and then more dramatically. Researchers tell us that at the height of the ground-clearing activity, there was not a tree left standing within twenty-five miles of Copan!

As the ground-water table dropped, springs dried up, streams ceased to flow. An inadequate water supply invites waste infusion, surface contamination, and invasion by pathogens that bring infections and contagious disease organisms.

There was no integrated sanitary system in Copan, insofar as digs to date have found. Human excrement thus became an increasingly intolerable addition to the ever more congested milieu. The Copanese were amazingly advanced in some areas of knowledge, but there is little evidence of their understanding how to manage epidemic diseases, for example. Without doubt, a great many people died from unsanitary conditions and the inescapable sequelae such environmental neglect encourages. Periodic ravages of deadly epidemics were likely a blessing in disguise for a time at least , since such exaggerated death rates would have helped hold the indigenous population within manageable bounds.

In time, however, natural immunities developed that gradually intervened and, by the beginning of the ninth century following the birth of Christ, Copan had an estimated population of twenty-thousand people. We might also add that many - if not most - of these folks were hungry.

The fields that had earlier provided food for the excessive population were now far removed from the area in which the city-dwellers lived. Raising food crops sufficient unto the needs of the population became ever more difficult.

In addition to malnutrition (well-documented in the ill-shaped skeletal bones of children, especially), illnesses spread by the polluted and inadequate water supplies, and other state-of-nature vectors, must have made great inroads into the largely defenseless population.

The terror-stricken Copanese increased their ceremonials involving blood and living human sacrifices, hoping to placate their pantheon of greater and lesser gods.  But nothing seemed to help.

Investigating authorities tell us that the critical point for the residents of Copan and its environs probably arrived in the last half of the ninth century of the modern era. It was at this point that the combined impacts of hunger, infectious diseases and social violence began wreaking its wrath on the vulnerable population with such devastating effect that, within the span of one generation, Copan became a deserted location. A magnificent city - but without people!

Everyone didn't die. Indeed, remnants of the Copan people are dispersed widely over areas of Central America and Mexico, and elsewhere. But in order to survive, they had no choice but to abandon their beautiful ceremonial city of Copan. This, because it was no longer habitable.

In fact, following the flight from Copan around the end of the ninth century and the beginning of the tenth, Copan would never held a population again, insofar as archaeological evidence shows. This great "disappearance" took place within the short space of about twenty-five to fifty years.  Consider this.

The question for all of us is not "if" Roatan is right now being turned into a comparable artifact of ecological abuse and venal shortsightedness. We can see the evidence on every hand that it is. The destruction is much too far advanced to ignore; and perhaps even too far advanced to be reversed.

Only time and the resolve of its endangered habitants can answer that possibility.

This may leave only one final question for Roatan's destroyers to ponder: How long before "The Incredible Island", itself, becomes quite literally uninhabitable, as did Copan, some eleven- hundred years ago?