Earth Day is Tuesday, but many groups and organisations are getting a jump on the celebrations and holding events this weekend.
One such place is Boatswain’s Beach, home to our treasured Turtle Farm, where Cayman Islands residents will pay only $5 to get into the gate Saturday.
If you are a resident and haven’t been to Boatswain’s Beach yet, we encourage you to take advantage of the offer on Saturday.
Also Saturday, the National Gallery will help you get up close and personal with the environment through a guided Mastic Trail hike and a mangrove boat tour.
The Chamber of Commerce will be in full force Saturday with a variety of beach cleanups.
On Sunday the Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Park will be open free to residents. All you have to do is show a valid Cayman Island’s ID.
Focus on the environment is coming more to the forefront in the Cayman Islands every day.
Hotels and resorts are becoming more responsible to our Earth by finding ways to conserve water, save energy and use biodegradable cups and plates.
Affirmation of Little Cayman’s commitment to the environment was given recently when the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration teamed up with the Central Caribbean Marine Institute on that island to install a sophisticated weather and oceanographic monitoring station off that island.
The equipment will be used to measure temperature, winds, barometric pressure and ultraviolet and photo-synthetically active radiation around Little Cayman’s reefs.
Basically it will give the world an insight into how climate change is affecting coral reefs and provide us with better information about threatening storms.
The monitoring station is only one of four throughout the world. That means NOAA considers the reefs around Little Cayman to be in near pristine condition; they haven’t been damaged by too much human contact like most reefs around the world.
Even our supermarkets are getting on board the go green wagon. Foster’s Food Fair offers cloth grocery bags that can be reused on each visit to shop for groceries.
The bags are sturdy and hold more than the plastic bags, which find their ways into our trees, bush, sea and overflowing landfill. We’ve used this space before to ask for Government to ban the use of plastic shopping bags in the Cayman Islands. We make the appeal again.
Other organisations, such as the Chamber of Commerce, also offer cloth shopping bags.
Some businesses are also doing their part in the recycling effort like Caybrew, which recycles beer bottles when you return them to the brewery.
While we don’t yet have a true recycling programme, aluminium cans can be recycled. Look for the bins throughout the Islands.
We take this opportunity to once again urge Government to either come up with a good, solid recycling programme or help the private sector set up and support a viable programme.
Global Green Caribbean seemed to be going in the right direction with recycling last year, but we haven’t heard much from that group lately and can’t see that anything tangible has been accomplished.
While we wait for a mandatory recycling programme, we can all do our part to help keep Cayman clean.
Recycle at home – find uses for glass and plastic bottles and jugs and other items you would normally toss in the trash bin. Cut down on energy consumption and conserve water.
If nothing else this weekend and Earth Week, which begins Sunday, get out of the house and go clean up a beach.
We have only one Earth. It is up to each of us to keep it clean and healthy.
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