This is the sixth in a multipart series on sustainable development in Bermuda.

By the beginning of the 21st century the traditional Bermudian way of life was coming to an end. This did not occur overnight but with the implacable, steadily accumulating force of a mass extinction. What appeared to be permanent turned out to be temporary, what seemed eternal proved to be fleeting.

The piecemeal adaptation Bermuda had engaged in since the late 1980s to keep pace with the demands of the new driver of its economy had proved entirely insufficient. The results had been rather like installing a Ferrari engine into the body of an old Bermuda horse-drawn carriage. The fragile infrastructure was simply overwhelmed by its supercharged new power source. So was the Bermudian mindset.

The results of this cultural upheaval were jarring and often disorienting. Its most visible manifestations were, of course, immediately evident in our physical and built environments. For instance, the Bermuda vernacular style of architecture — a neo-Georgian offshoot which had evolved over more than two centuries and elegantly reflected the order, symmetry and balance of the Island around it — was entirely abandoned when it came to most new developments.

Although not strictly adhered to since at least the 1950s, now not even tokens efforts were made to ensure the buildings being constructed to meet the office and housing needs of international business fit into their surroundings.

A non-stop building boom was underway and Hamilton came to resemble one vast construction site. The anonymous glass and steel office blocks which resulted too often resembled the vast, upended hulls of grounded cruise ships (one halfhearted attempt to marry the requirements of international business with at least some aspects of the traditional Bermuda building style was described, rather magnificently, as being akin to placing the head of Sir George Somers atop a statue of Jayne Mansfield’s cartoonishly exaggerated figure).

Acres of countryside also began to disappear under rivers of poured concrete. Pretentious executive homes — too often looking like Bermuda cottages suffering from terminal cases of gigantism — were built for the new captains of local industry. Simultaneously, there was also a proliferation of gimcrack condo complexes (often disingenuously described as ”town houses”) going up to house their employees.

Instead of revisiting our planning regulations, rethinking them and then comprehensively revising them, we simply kept fudging them.

It wasn’t, after all, simply a matter of aesthetics which had to be considered. Other factors associated with overdevelopment had to be taken into account but weren’t. And so the law of Unintended Consequences inevitably came into play. Our infrastructure began to show signs of strain: Bermuda’s roads, paved horse tracks in many instances, became congested and grew increasingly dilapidated; demand for school places began to outstrip our ability to provide them; the capacity of our power grid to meet an unprecedented spike in demand was tested. And Hamilton’s antiquated and already inadequate sewage system began to give clear signs of becoming overwhelmed.

But it wasn’t just that Bermuda’s man-made and natural infrastructures that were under pressure. Long-established cultural and social norms were also being eroded by the almost elemental forces now reshaping our economy.

The bald fact of the matter is that the advisability, let alone the sustainability, of committing Bermuda to an economy based primarily on international business was never adequately addressed.

Bermuda, with its limited land space and finite resources, would obviously only have limited capacity to absorb the inflow of new industries and new people before overcrowding, frustration and a sense of cultural claustrophobia would set in among Bermudians. With a double-digit percentage increase in the population occurring in just a few years, this did not take long to happen.

If Bermuda’s fate was to become the Hong Kong of the Atlantic, as appeared to be the case by the early 2000s, then Bermudians had to be made ready for that eventuality. They needed to be educated and informed about this unfamiliar new environment and prepared to take their place in it. But they weren’t. And too many began to believe they were being left behind.

Most Bermudians already in the workforce when the economic transition slowly got underway in the late 1980s and then took on an irresistible momentum of its own were never going to be in a position to directly benefit from the core industries driving our new prosperity. But with just 60,000 people, the population of a small North American town, only the best, brightest and most determined among us would ever rise to the top in the high-pressure, ruthlessly competitive world of re/insurance and finance. The bulk of the working population would need to refocus and retrench around industries like construction, peripheral but essential to the success of the international companies. But many Bermudians believed this was tantamount to be sidelined in their own country.

Historically, Bermuda has never been an inward looking community. It could never afford to be. Our circumstances have always compelled us to engage with the wider world. An accident of geography made the Island one of the remotest human outposts on the face of the planet. The ingenuity and adaptability of our people, able to read the needs of their times every bit as accurately as our seafaring ancestors read the winds and tides and respond accordingly, are the only things which have made it possible for Bermuda to flourish over the centuries. Whether in agriculture or as a military outpost or in tourism, Bermuda has always been able to identify a niche for itself the outside world needed filling.

In this instance, though, the footprint of international business was so large, the impact so very pronounced, the ramifications so wide-reaching, Bermudians began to retreat inside themselves. The Island grew more parochial, not less so. Politics became dominated by the trivial while matters of consequence went entirely unaddressed. It wasn’t just a way of life which was dying. Bermudians, feeling increasingly displaced and threatened, feared for their very identity.