A week ago Thursday was a banner day for global conservation and power of people to stand up for what is right.  It was the end of a three-year campaign that succeeded against all odds. And chances are you didn’t even hear of it.

Thursday was the day that Jamaica’s Prime Minister, while attending a Town Hall meeting in New York City, was asked a question to which he replied “there are other locations (for the port) that would do less environmental damage.”  And the question was “what is the status of the proposed port in Goat Islands?”

Unless you were from Jamaica or a big iguana enthusiast, you probably never heard of Goat Islands, but it is adjacent to the last holdout of one of the rarest animals on earth, the Jamaican Iguana.  It is also part of Jamaica’s largest nature preserve and home to a community of sustainable fisherman.

And in direct violation of its own national and international commitments, the Jamaican Government was going to sell the whole area to the China Harbour Engineering Company to build a $1.5 billion trans-shipment port.  Now why you would want to build a deep water port into a shallow coral atoll that’s next to an established national park is a mystery to me.  There are better and cheaper places to build it.  Maybe the thinking was that no one would care about the fate of scrubland, coral reefs and some local fisherman.

Boy, were they wrong.

The Jamaican Environment Trust, with help from organizations like the Global Wildlife Conservation and International Iguana fund (which Brevard Zoo is very actively involved in), worked hard to make the whole dirty transaction visible to both the  local and the international community.

Some of our efforts were major investments like the production of a film about the area (http://iguanafoundation.org/videos/). Others were smaller steps like selling “Save Goat Island” T-Shirts (my family is really sick of me wearing them), a social media campaign and even guerilla actions like projecting the film on the side of the Jamaican Embassy in Washington D.C.  Our Zoo Teens got very involved and raised money for that effort.

And what were we saving? The biggest natural area in Jamaica, a thriving coral reef that supports local fisherman, home  for numerous globally threatened plant and wildlife species and the last hope for the endemic Jamaican Iguana.  This hefty iguana species was thought to be extinct but was rediscovered in the Hellshire Hills in 1990.

Since then 25 years of hard work has brought the species back from the edge of extinction.  Most of the work was raising baby iguanas to the size that they would not fall prey to introduced predators like feral cats and mongooses.

“Headstarting” works but takes tremendous effort.  So the long-term solution was actually moving the iguanas to the Goat Islands right next door which are free of these predators.  Overall, the revival of the Jamaican Iguana was recognized as “one of the greatest success stories in conservation science” and it was about to become a Chinese trading port.

Exactly why the Jamaican government reversed course, we might never know.  Was it the international pressure, the local indignation or maybe constant education efforts that helped them see what was at stake?  In any case, the islands and mainland adjacent to them are now safe due to the persistence of a small group of dedicated people, including a bunch of teenagers in Brevard County.

I’m thinking in a little over a month, we will have our “Goat Island” moment when the lagoon sales tax shows up at the polls.  We can put our money where our mouths are, and vote to tax ourselves and fix the lagoon. Or we can sell ourselves down a green polluted river for a few pieces of gold.

Keith Winsten is the executive director of Brevard Zoo

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