“A DAY late and a dollar short” — this well-known maxim can be used to describe the sudden wave of intense protests that have come about in the wake of the Government’s announcement that it intends to use part of the Botanical Gardens as the site for the building of a new hospital.One wonders where all these protesters were when the idea was first mooted in public meetings on the future of Bermuda’s health care system which I understand were sparsely attended?

Perhaps no one believed the Government was serious when the Botanical Gardens was mentioned along with the Arboretum as a possible site for a new hospital (if the Arboretum had been selected as the site for a new hospital, I assume this choice would also have prompted a similar loud outcry).

Apart from my somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the grounds at Government House be used as the site for the new hospital, there has been little in the way of ideas for alternative sites for a new hospital except for a suggestion that it be built in the city near the back-of-town area.

I don’t know if that would really work. Think of the congestion in an already over crowded area. I can just imagine a part of the city in permanent crisis with ambulances rushing to and fro, sirens blaring almost on a 24/7 basis, stressing the people in the area who are already experiencing more than their fair share of stress just by living there.

This is not to say that hospitals should not be built in cities. For the most part this is precisely where most major medical centres are located. But when you’re dealing with Hamilton, the economies of scale come into play. This is a small town, really, not a major metropolitan area and space is already at a premium in its crowded confines.

One reaction that I got as a result of my Government House suggestion is that the area should be left for open space. Well, I don’t see that the Bermudian public is going to be able to walk around Government House’s grounds freely any time soon given our ongoing fondness for Bermuda’s colonial heritage (but then ten or 15 years ago who would have ever thought the Americans would abruptly leave their bases in Bermuda in the way they did, releasing the land for Bermudian use?)

And this dovetails with the underlying problem, our mindset as to what is and is not in our country’s national interests. We are slow to pick up on that until circumstances are almost forced upon us. That is why I don’t like Bermuda’s current national motto — “Wither the Fates Lead Us” — because it clearly suggests we are not charting our own destiny.

We have to learn as a country to think about addressing potential problems before they are almost upon us. We must learn to anticipate and to act proactively before circumstances force us to make decisions.

We must also learn to face realities, get rid of our fig-leaf mentality that we use to try to disguise problems we don’t want to deal with. The inescapable reality is that Bermuda is only 21 square miles and no one living here is ever more than a mile from the sea.

Now with most of that land in private hands, consider the difficulties faced by Government when it comes to finding sites for major national developments. Don’t get me wrong — environmental awareness and sensitivity are good and important for any country, particularly a small island like Bermuda which has seen the loss of so much open space in recent decades.

However, environmentalism has to be balanced with pragmatism. And the reality is we should be asking ourselves if we can we afford to maintain our environmental concerns if we want to continue our current rate of economic expansion.

Don’t look around for someone to blame, we are all to blame. All of us today find ourselves in a Catch-22 situation — meaning the only two choices available for our future development contradict one another.

Many Bermudians complain that we are becoming overdeveloped and overpopulated and stress the need to maintain green-belt areas — as long as any strict new environmental policies don’t impact on our own little development plans, be it that extra apartment that I want to build onto my house or that mega office complex I want to build in the city or those condominium developments that I want to build up and down the country.

And don’t for one minute think that I am just pointing the finger at the big economic fish — the little man is just as guilty. I think about that every time I am jostled between those increasingly large SUVs in my very small car.

And while I recognise the need to bring in specialist expertise in the financial sector, I must say I am dismayed at the number of middle-class Bermudians who are adding to our overcrowding problems by bringing in unskilled workers from the world’s developing countries so that they can drive their children to school and walk their dogs.

Do I have any answers for Bermuda’s particular dilemma and the situation we have collectively allowed to develop for the sake of maintaining our high standard of living, the envy of much of the world?

No, I do not have a practical answer since any remedy I might be tempted to suggest would be dismissed as too radical, too earth-shaking.

But there are warnings about what could ultimately happen to a society like ours. Social scientists have spoken of the consequences when short-sighted growth is allowed to eclipse long-term planning, anthropologists have studied societies that have suddenly ceased to exist for no other reason except that they seem to have reached the natural limits of possible growth and then collapsed back in on themselves.

Are we embarking on a route that will have this sort of unhappy ending, Bermuda? It’s something to think about as we ponder where are we going to put major national developments in a country that has run out of available land space.