Ironwood and banana orchids

The eastern half of Grand Cayman is replete with indigenous animals and plants, including the national flower, the Wild Banana Orchid, that have been living in the area for thousands of millennia.

The eastern half is now also the target of developers seeking (relatively) wide open spaces for ambitious projects, most notably Health City Cayman Islands and most recently the Ironwood golf course and community.

That has led to the classic quandary of man versus nature, or how man can extract benefits from nature without destroying the parts he’s deemed worth saving.

There’s a lesson to be learned, perhaps, from the banana orchid. The orchid is what’s known as an “epiphyte,” meaning it is a plant that grows on another plant, without doing harm to its host. In their common struggle for survival, the orchid and the tree have managed to come to an arrangement whereby, at least, they’re none the worse for it.
Whether it’s an orchid and a tree, or Ironwood and the Mastic Trail, inherent differences don’t necessarily have to lead to undue conflict.

That’s why we were pleased to hear that the National Trust for the Cayman Islands has been engaging in apparently cordial and helpful discussions with government and Ironwood developers, who have proposed building a highway extension through the Trust-owned Mastic Reserve and Trail.

The rub here is clear: Asphalt and nature reserves cannot easily coexist.

But rather than airing their concerns on the Information Superhighway, the Trust, behaving like a group of sensible adults, has chosen to engage in direct conversation with the relevant parties.

The Compass does not know the substance of the negotiations, or the specifics of proposals for the highway, so we’re not prepared to endorse or oppose the elements of the project.

Generally, though, we support the ability of Ironwood and the Trust to develop (or not) their private properties as they see fit, and we support extending the East-West Arterial from Hirst Road to Frank Sound Road and beyond. The road (like the landfill) is necessary and needs to go somewhere.

Mornings and evenings, thousands of Grand Cayman residents languish in rush-hour gridlock from West Bay to Savannah — the result of poor planning decisions, and politically motivated indecision, by one government after another.

Traffic is a scourge on the local quality of life. Sitting bumper-to-bumper breathing in noxious fumes from autos and the dump, you might as well be in New Jersey on a day Gov. Chris Christie’s staff gets up on the wrong side of the bed.

While the New Jersey governor’s staff has allegedly inflicted selective gridlock to punish political opponents, we innocents in Grand Cayman must suffer likewise, every day.
It may be way too late for any easy fix to traffic woes on the western half of the island; the development is already there, along with seriously congested choke points (such as the Grand Harbour roundabout).

However, the eastern half of the island poses opportunities to build transportation infrastructure before it’s needed, anticipating growth rather than ex post facto responding to it. It’s a far more rational and cost-effective approach than building first and thinking later.

To learn that lesson, we don’t need to consult banana orchids growing along the Mastic Trail. We can just look at the jam (albeit traffic) we’ve already made for ourselves.