The forests of the Cockpit Country in Jamaica's interior are a world-famous karst (limestone) habitat, home to many plants and animals found nowhere else in the world as shown in this October 11, 2003, file photo. The spectre of bauxite mining here has raised the ire of environmental groups. - Andrew Smith/Photography Editor

The Editor, Sir:

It is with concerned interest that I follow the ongoing outcry in the Jamaican print media with regard to the potential harm posed to the ecologically-fragile Cockpit Country area should the extraction of bauxite be allowed to proceed. As a professional planner and academic in the field of urban development studies, I would like to suggest a possible preemptive solution: regional county-based general plans.

General plans, public-based legal documents that serve as constitutions towards comprehensive socioeconomic/land use development, essentially precipitates greater degrees of grass-roots democracy by fostering transparency in how Jamaica's resources are managed and/or utilised.

The regional county approach to the design of general plans affords for a more proactively focused (bottom-up) coverage of Jamaica's developmental landscape - a reality not effectively enjoyed at the more miniscule/fragmented parish level or spatially inarticulate/diffused national level.

County-general plans would allow parish councils the critical opportunity to proactively orchestrate local community development in ways that promote spatially comprehensive/integrated planning that seeks to engineer the control of intrusive development thrusts from (foreign and domestic) sources, ones which may hold interests external to those of the respective county-based constituency.

Towards the protection of national environmental interests, county-general plans would be subjected to minimum environmental standards, ones set within a legal framework by Jamaica's National Environmental Protection Agency. Such a federalised approach to local government would allow parish-based entities the chance to enact more stringent county-based environmental policies, ones deemed fit on the basis of the dynamic health, safety and welfare concerns determined by grass-roots communities islandwide.

In essence, the provision of county-general plans will serve to precipitate a transparent approach towards the effective management of Jamaica's developmental landscape, one that is preemptive and thus cost effective in nature.

I am, etc.,

G. O. WHITTAKER

garfield.whittaker@csun.ed

Lecturer, Department of

Urban Studies and Planning

California State University

Northridge

Go-Jamaica