"I said darkness has covered my light/And has changed my day into night, yeah/Where is the love to be found?/Won't someone tell me?/'Cause my life must be somewhere to be found/Instead of concrete jungle/Where the living is harder."- Bob Marle>, Concrete JungI>"Looking down through the rain/I think the future's going my way/And there's a freeway coming soon/Through this dirty old room/Can't you see a 50-storey building/Where a palm tree used to be?" - Ry Coo, In My Town"Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer- except, of course, for the pigs." - George Orwell, Animal FarmTHE island that once styled itself a latter day Eden now resembles a despoiled, greed-tainted Garden of Earthly Delights, that way-station between Paradise and Hell where every vice is sampled, every appetite satisfied, every sensory pleasure entirely overindulged. The excesses are so grotesquely overstated Bermuda has started to mirror one of those surreal allegorical paintings from the High Renaissance. You know the kind. They feature fevered dreamscapes in which joints of meat and jars of wine miraculously sprout legs and walk of their own accord into the grasping hands of sluggards. Or fantastical renderings of post-Fall Eden where the inhabitants orgiastically eat, drink and make merry in ways so very exotic they were not touched on in the Kinsey Report, their graceless swan-dives into the abyss witnessed by razor-fanged, bat-winged frogs and serpentlike creatures that serve as twisted symbols of their sins.

For many Bermuda has indeed become a mink-upholstered playpen, a three-ring circus where the attention-grabbing spectacles under the big top are the neverending quests for money, a certain superficial prestige and chronic self-indulgence. It's become a non-stop Bacchanal, fuelled by high-octane infusions of outside capital, an island where no consideration is given to the consequences, both predictable and unintentional, of such insatiability.

And it's a physical as well as moral morass we're now contending with.

Never mind that Bermuda has an exceedingly limited land area, its hunger for money is in exactly inverse proportion to the island's Lilliputian dimensions. As a result, Paradise hasn't just been paved, it's been sub-divided and then sub-divided again.

Open space is being devoured by mushroom growths of office blocks, unstately pleasure domes like the proposed Southlands monstrosity - to be shoe-horned into what's already the most overdeveloped and densely populated parish on the island - and the condominiums in which the army of guest workers manning our largely foreign-owned and -operated private sector are housed (the largest employer of Bermudians is now Government, a distressing and ultimately unsustainable situation).

You don't have to be an ecological puritan to be alarmed by an increasingly degraded environment, the generations of congenitally deformed frogs - their gene pools corrupted by intensely high concentrations of toxins - and a population of less than 500 breeding pairs of bluebirds.

None of these developments signpost the way to a healthy or even remotely sustainable future for the people who inhabit what, almost unbelievably, used to be billed as "Nature's Playground" in early tourism promotions. Neither does the Government's tin-ear when it comes to contrart opinions on the subject of uncontrolled growth.

This open-ended boycott on dissent has been in evidence for some time now. Over the last year or so we have witnessed a non-stop parade of power plays on this front masquerading as policy decisions, all of them intended to shoot holes in anything even remotely resembling a rational approach to future development.

Certain Bermudian power players in politics and the private sector are not only accomodating but actively facilitating the unrestricted growth which is choking this island. They are placing short-term profiteering ahead of the long-term social, economic and environmental consequences of this phenomenal growth spurt.

The island's extremely limited supply of real estate coupled with an unending corporate demand for this space has created a formula for getting rich quick that must be the envy of professional card-counters in Vegas. Just look at the growth in the construction sector, now providing windfall returns normally only associated with one-in-a-billion lottery wins.

The Sustainable Development Plan, if it isn't actually a dead horse yet, is clearly earmarked for the knacker's yard. It's been exposed for exactly what it was - a Government make-work programme, top-heavy with vague good intentions and buzzwords rather than a practical plan of action that could address the ongoing ramifications of superheated economic growth.

The need to house businesses - and the people who staff them - has now become this Government's prime imperative. So those in power much prefer to shoot holes in any attempt to set rational, manageable paramaters on such growth by way of "Special Development Orders", the devastating hollow-point bullets of the Planning process.

Of course, as soon as such gaping holes riddle a system that's supposed to be impervious to such assaults, opportunities for undue influence and, frankly, corruption abound.

Pointing out such inconsistencies, mentioning a quasi-socialist Government and an aggressively free-marketeering construction sector have entered into a non-aggression pact (ties between some MPs and developers are so close you need a crowbar to prise them apart), is to invite the type of hysterical reaction normally only found in lockdown wards at psychiatric hospitals or on radio phone-in shows.

Logical counter-arguments are routinely answered with either imbecilic flights of fancy (remember the indoor jungle the last Premier suggested would thrive in the wards and operating theatres at the proposed Botanical Gardens mega-hospital?) or racially-coloured intimidation (it's now been deemed unBermudian to oppose overscaled projects like the Southlands resort).

Of course, from this Government's point of view there are not only perceived political advantages to be gained from stereotyping critics along racial/sectarian lines but this blunt-force approach also obscures some of the more obviously conflicted interests fuelling Bermuda's exponential growth.

And so a well-informed constituency recognising the paramount need for sensible economic development instead of the laissez-fe<$>-on-steroids model favoured by this Government along with the prudent marshalling of Bermuda's almost exhausted natural resources finds itself both demonised and side-lined. Whites are reactionaries or pawns of the Opposition Party (or both); blacks find themselves labelled with the type of epithets David Burch is fond of using on the airwaves (but which even the hapless Don Imus might have blanched at employing), their "street cred" and racial loyalty impugned.

Mush-headed rationalisations only a politician could think up are then mobilised and sent off to substitute for common sense in the arena of public opinion. For instance, what will be a largely self-contained development at Southlands, one that will doubtless be staffed by the container-loads of Third World natives who seem to man Jumeirah Group resorts world-wide, is being pitched to the public as the last, best opportunity to resusictate Bermuda's tourism industry.

Hardly.

While such a development will certainly have indirect benefits for the Bermudian economy, its more rabid partisans might want to pay a visit to the hole where Trimingham's once stood. Then they can better familiarise themselves with the fact we no longer have the infrastructure to support a tourism industry.

Or the amenities, for that matter. With a higher population density than mid-town Calcutta at rush hour, roads as congested as Jabba the Hutt's arteries and a diminished retail sector, the guiding principle behind the Southlands resort is to make it a virtually gated property - effectively walled off from the urban sprawl the rest of Bermuda has become.

It may well attract a clientele. But the type of well-heeled travellers who want the unhurried, upscale, surrey-fringed vacation Bermuda as a whole once offered won't be rushing back here en masse. They can now be found vacationing in St. Bart's or Nevis or Costa Rica.

So the debauch in the Bermudian Garden of Earthly Delights looks set to continue. And our own deformed frogs - collateral damage caused by this untrammeled greed, victims of the poisons produced by overcrowding and overdevelopment that may be working their way up the eco-system's ladder to humans - bear silent witness to the staggering follies taking place around them like so many misshapen refugees which crawled or slithered or hopped out of a Hieronymous Bosch canvas. ; Tim Hodgson