Bermuda could sustain only roughly 500 people if the Island were forced to live off its natural resources alone, environmentalists attending a day-long conference at Bermuda College heard last week.

That small number would comprise Bermuda's carrying capacity should the Island ever cease to have its goods and the bulk of its food supplied by other countries.

Approximately 30 to 40 local environmental activists and educators attended the conference on the theme "Environment 2002: Paradise of Paradox? Are we impoverished by our affluence?" last week.

While a number of presenters and panellists participated in the conference on a variety of topics, the most consistent message to emerge was that Bermuda's considerable affluence allows residents to consume far more than is necessary while its relative geographic isolation allows the Island to ignore the real environmental costs of local habits which are sustainable neither locally nor globally.

Within Bermuda, there are disturbing environmental trends such as the increasingly wide gap between the "haves" and "have nots" of our society, Dr. David Wingate said.

The split has caused two waves of new development, Dr. Wingate told one of the panels, "with Government creating housing for the poor while at the other end, we have people demolishing $2 million mansions in Tucker's Town and rebuilding them to three times the size they were before".

He added: "Before the area was fairly rural. Now we have a huge environmental impact coming from a small segment of the wealthy."

The message that Bermuda's environmental issues are intimately tied with its social issues also surfaced repeatedly throughout the course of the day.

The competing concepts of environmental sustainability and economic growth also consumed much of the discussion on Friday.

Forty percent of the Island is now covered in concrete, pointed out Dr. Wolfgang Sterrer.

Both Dr. Sterrer and Jack Ward of the Bermuda Aquarium suggested the Island needs to consider a new economic approaches such as applying "natural capitalism" principles to our decisions rather than industrial capitalism.

As industrial capitalism focuses only on outputs with measures such as gross domestic product (GDP) and fails to attribute value to the resources used up, the true cost of consumption-based economies are lost, it was said.

For example, Dr. Sterrer said the natural benefits from one tree have been estimated at $1 million but those benefits are lost forever when this tree is chopped down.

"The biological savings from natural capitalism have been estimated at $36 trillion annually," Dr. Sterrer said. The current gross world product is $500 trillion.

Similarly, Craig Simmons of Bermuda College said we must change our mindsets from measuring outputs to measuring through-puts and Bermuda has to address the issue of carrying capacity.

"If you adopt a `no-growth' framework, you still have to deal with the issue of economic distribution in Bermuda which is heavily skewed on the bases of race and gender," Mr. Simmons added.

Mr. Simmons said such decisions would involve ceasing to court international businesses and stating the Island does not want any more tourists because 300,000 a year will suffice.

The business community would find such moves Draconian, he added, and it would be difficult to put through such messages in a democratic manner.

"I don't know if we are psychologically ready to change," Mr. Simmons said. "Quite frankly, we are not courageous people. We are, essentially, cowards."