When Stuart Hayward was four years-old he rode his mother?s bicycle from Dock Hill to Black Watch Pass and never encountered another vehicle.

That was in the latter half of the 1940s and the Island was only beginning to accept the arrival of motorised vehicles. Much has changed since and the quiet and largely rural Bermuda from the middle of the last century now seems like another world.

Since the early 1970s, when he returned from 12 years in the US which included studying mechanical engineering at Howard University, Mr. Hayward has been an advocate and activist for environmental and social issues.

He is currently a member of the Sustainable Development Round Table that is involved in gathering and collating information and public views on Bermuda?s future for the draft Sustainable Development Strategy and Implementation Plan, which is undergoing a three-month public consultation period.

Mr. Hayward is optimistic about the impact the plan will eventually have in helping direct Bermuda clear of problems already biting into its social and environmental fabric, such as high density housing, traffic congestion, and near capacity demand on underground fresh water lenses.

Having seen first-hand the downside of what he termed the ?traffic and social congestion? of an urban sprawl in Washington DC he recognised the tell-tale signs that Bermuda was drifting to a similar future when he returned to the Island with fresh eyes after 12 years in the States during the 1960s and early 1970s.

?I noticed how much the Island had changed as far as loss of open space, construction, and even then traffic,? he said.

Around the world cities like New York and Hong Kong had emerged into concrete metropolitan spreads bit by bit without any real forward thought or plan, he felt. And he could see the same was happening in Bermuda.

His baptism as an environmental activist came when he set up an action group calling for Admiralty House Park to be spared as a public open space rather than developed into a hotel college as the Government of the day intended.

Raising awareness of the park, which few Bermudians had seen because of its off-limits past while in hands of the British Navy, and later for the exclusive use of mostly overseas Police and nurses.

A two-day music concert was held at the park by Mr. Hayward?s group and attracted 6,000 people, boosting support for the park to become an open public space. The campaign eventually succeeded.

He later spearheaded the formation of the Save Open Spaces organisation.

In 1981 Mr. Hayward collaborated with Wolfgang Sterrer and Vicki Holt on the book ?Bermuda?s Delicate Balance?.

He said: ?It covered industry ? tourism and international business ? resources, traffic, waste and pollution and values and attitudes. The watch word then was carrying capacity we wanted to make sure that Bermuda?s carrying capacity was not exceeded, that term has evolved into sustainable development.

?We don?t want to cram more into this little Island than it, and the people, can sustain.?

As part of the project Dr. Sterrer estimated that if Bermuda was to be entirely self-sustaining it could probably support 10,000 people and no more ? even then the population was in the high 50,000s.

Mr. Hayward said: ?We were the first to look at the economy, transportation and environment as an integrated whole. We gave a copy to the Government and petitioned them to put a moratorium on development, that was done but only for six months.?

An independent MP in 1992, Mr. Hayward took it upon himself to attend the Earth Summit in Rio which focused attention on the world?s environmental issues. Bermuda, as a dependent overseas territory, could not be a full delegate, which is something Mr. Hayward regrets as the Island has been grappling with environmental problems and finding solutions he felt were relevant to other countries.

?I thought Bermuda had a lot to offer. We are at the leading edge of the interface between population density and environmental preservation. We have about 3,000 people per square mile. There are very few places on the planet that have that. Bangladesh, the most densely populated country on the planet has 1,700 per square mile. We?re almost double that.

?The problems occurring in Bermuda and some of the things we had posed as solutions I felt would be valuable information to the rest of globe. But as a colony our statistics did not appear on any international documents database so the world was deprived of information coming out of a very useful laboratory.?

Mr. Hayward said that in some ways Bermuda has been ahead of its time, enacting environmentally protective laws in the 1600s after being equally ahead of time in hunting some fish, turtles and the Cahows to the point of virtual extinction before quickly applying the brakes and drawing up laws to protect aspects of the Island?s environment.

It is through raising awareness within each individual of the part they play in the Island?s environmental problems that those same individuals can begin to make wiser choices.

As an example, Mr. Hayward has made his own choice to reduce his impact on the Island?s traffic congestion and pollution by riding an electric motorcycle.

He plugs it in to recharge it and can cross the Island before it needs to be recharged.

?I have an electric scooter. While they are not the ideal they are less of a problem than internal combustion engines. It consumes relatively little electricity, it is quiet and there is no heat generated, no smoke,? he said.

?Although it does consume energy there are arguments that having all the energy generation in one place means efficiencies in economies of scale, it?s easier to control pollution at a single point than spread around.?

He believes the Island?s environmental problems can be traced to a root cause within population density. The number of people, their increasing ?appetite? for consumer goods and natural resources such as water, and the waste they produce are at the core of the related environmental issues.

?Those things are playing out in our traffic situation, housing situation, job and employment situation, our feelings of claustrophobia, xenophobic tendencies, all of these things are linked, even the growth of violence. There are studies that link increased aggression to population density,? he explained.

Would getting rid of all ex-pat workers be the solution? Well, that might remove around 9,000 people from the equation, but that would not make a vast difference to the Island?s population density and, as Mr. Hayward points out, ?You still have a serious problem because you are not dealing with the economy, education and other aspects.?

And there are those who have a vested interest in having ever-expanding economic growth who resist the notion of population reduction, he said.

?Our economic system is essentially a pyramid scheme that depends on an ever-widening population of consumers.

?We need to start thinking about what we don?t want Bermuda to become. That?s the easiest thing to grasp because some aspects of Bermuda are already becoming what they don?t want them to become. Then we can start talking about well what do we want it to become. And then we can start working on that list.?

Bermuda has a hemmed-in feel. There are precious few areas of genuine open space for people to escape the hustle-and-bustle of urban life. And yet Bermudians have more or less adapted to this situation, one possible factor being the vast open and tranquil views of the ocean from all compass points.

?Because of our coastline we have an extraordinary amount of open open space per unit of land area and because it is very gentle on the eye we may not feel the direct pressure of not having the parklands.?

Mr. Hayward added: ?But there is this pressure to build on any land that is not occupied. I would say, as part of our education programme, we insist every child spend some time abroad where they can experience the extremes of city density and the vast open spaces that exist in US and Canada. So they can experience that and come back here with that as part of their outlook on how they treat Bermuda and our environment.?

He is wary of talk of building higher and higher apartment blocks and condos as being a magical panacea for the housing squeeze.

Taller buildings only have limited roof space to catch rainfall to fill their tanks. He points out it hardly takes a mathematician to work out that putting more and more occupants into a building with a finite natural water supply will result in a need to garner additional water from another source.

What about the naturally occurring underwater lenses?

?We are already discovering that we may be reaching the end of the supply of water from the water lenses if they are to remain sustainable,? he said.

How about desalination through osmosis plants and water truck delivery?

?Previously we got our water free of charge. It rained. We did not have to send out an order, fill out a form, did not have to put a deposit, did not have to pay for delivery. Now we have to pay delivery and pay for the process. And the process is highly energy intensive. That energy adds to our energy consumption level.?

And so you enter an ever spiralling process of needing to inject more foreign currency into the economy to pay for the higher energy consumption costs to afford to run the osmosis plants.

Mr. Hayward said: ?So we have to increase the amount of money coming in so we have to expand the economy and have more people employed so, because of the small labour pool, we have to import more workers and so it goes on and on. And that is just one aspect of building high-rises. Then there is the density aspect, dysfunctional and adverse social spin-offs.?

At the same time that the water lenses are ?maxing out? the ability for Bermuda to naturally absorb waste through traditional cess pits is now at an equally precarious level judging by increasing nitrate levels being found in well water.

?We have to engage in an entirely different mechanism for dealing with household waste. That raises the issues of how do we centralise collection given that we can not do it per household with cess pits. We are reaching the limits of those as universal solutions, certainly for high rise developments. That means a while new infrastructure for handling waste water and solid wastes generated by the household.?

And what of general household waste? Bermuda?s increasing consumer-driven population is generating rubbish at a rate that outstrips the USA. The vast majority goes up in smoke through the incinerator chimney at the Tynes Bay Waste Management Facility. A small proportion of tin, aluminium and glass is recycled.

Encouraging people to ?connect with their household waste? and recognise its impact on the Island is needed, according to Mr. Hayward.

That might be achieved by direct taxation for trash removal. Mr. Hayward, who was against the proposal for a mass-burn incinerator, said: ?We need to have an appreciation of our waste, we need to remove the disconnect that people now have between themselves and the waste they generate.?

?We should recycle, repair and reuse and only at the end burn what can not be handled by those other processes.?

On the question of whether Bermuda?s booming economy should be slowed down, Mr. Hayward said some form of control would be desirable: ?Appreciating that any economic expansion occurs at the expense of open space, increased traffic, higher housing costs, greater importation of foreign labour. Those problems are added to by unfettered expansion of the economy.?