Don't destroy your best, natural resource

July 10, 2002

Dear Sir,

This is a letter from a friendly tourist warning all Bermudians about the dangerous deterioration in the quality of the ocean around Bermuda's beaches.

If the increase in floating garbage that we saw this year in Southampton - plastic water jugs, lumber, refrigerator doors, plastic milk cartons, and literally millions of tiny pieces of blue and white plastic - is any indication, the Island economy may well be in for tough times ahead. Clean up the ocean surrounding your Island now, or you may pay for it sooner than you think!

My wife and I have been coming to Bermuda for four years now to celebrate our wedding anniversary. We just celebrated our 35th anniversary on July 8 in a posh Southampton resort hotel where we spent a week, interspersed with visits into Hamilton and St. George's.

I cannot say enough about how wonderful we think Bermudians are: we used the Island bus service to go everywhere, have met a wide range of Bermudians, have dined at restaurants all over the Island, visited all the tourist spots, art galleries and historical places. In short, we're the sort of active tourists that keep the tourism economy humming on Bermuda.

Our compliments aren't news, I'm sure, to most Bermudians and visitors. The shocking deterioration of the quality of the ocean around Bermuda may not be news either. But the fact that two relatively prosperous tourists are thinking seriously about taking their vacation dollars elsewhere (Anguilla? Antigua? Hilton Head? We don't know, but we will be looking!) should be a wake up call to Bermuda's economic development authorities. If word gets around that Bermuda's beaches are filthy, the tourism business will disappear overnight. We may come to Bermuda for the weather, the people, the fancy hotels and the great restaurants, but the bottom line is that we come to Bermuda for the beaches. If the beaches aren't nice, we might as well go just about anywhere else with our suntan oil and bags full of vacation reading.

This letter is written because we love the Island and hate to see this deterioration, which has grown palpably worse in the four years we've been travelling to Bermuda. In year one it was the tar balls, which are likely endemic to the Gulf Stream and perhaps cannot be avoided. We always come in the same month of the year, so we have to assume that there's nothing seasonal about the increase in solid detritus in the water.

We don't know where Bermuda's garbage goes, but most of the stuff we saw on the beaches of Southampton didn't look like it had been in the ocean for very long. You either have people who are dumping garbage at sea, or perhaps you have a landfill on the coast that is steadily leaking garbage all over your splendid beaches. Once your beaches have been polluted with bits of plastic, they won't be easy to clean. They'll be a lot like our beaches here in the north eastern United States.

We still haven't decided whether or not to return for our 36th anniversary to the Island we love. What we hear from the grapevine about the beaches over the next 12 months will be important in determining this. We wish all our Bermudian friends well in saving one of their most important natural resources.

THE BROWNS

Norwalk, Connecticut