opinion

No environmental issue has ever had more emotional significance for me than that posed by the CEMIS project.

I grew up in the area to be affected. The jungle there was not just my playground. It was my protector.

I'm the son of a mad scientist. No, my dad didn't invent a death ray, nor did he meet his demise at the hands of a monster that rose from the slab. He was a brilliant and decent man, someone who finished high in his class at the world's most prestigious medical school. He died of complications from bipolar depression, a condition he aggravated by substance abuse. The newspapers and the death certificate said something else and I won't argue, but it was that mental illness that runs in the family that did him in.

At the time I didn't know all the details of the disease or the drugs, but I came to know that when he came home after a long shift at the hospital with a certain look in his eye, he was dangerous. When I saw that look, my frequent response was to grab my fishing pole and go out in the jungle to see what I could catch in the Coco Solo River.

That jungle was my playground and my protector.

But that was nearly 40 years ago.

I left Panama in 1966, and returned for a visit nine years later. At that time the Coco Solo River had turned into a dump and was no longer the fishing spot that I knew. These days it flows with trash and human sewage.

They used to have big jungle cats in the bush between the hospital and the airstrip. It hasn't been that way for a very long time.

When seasons changed from dry to rainy or vice-versa, the road around France Field used to become smelly and hazardously slippery with smashed land crabs, and Colon's poor would forage crab dinners in the mangrove swamps through which Randolph Road passed. Now most of the mangroves and virtually all of the crabs are gone, and Colon's poor are hungrier.

Can the Coco Solo River be revived? Sure it can. Polluted rivers in many places around the world have been cleaned up. But it takes money to do this.

People can be educated about dumping in streams. Proper sewage collection and treatment systems can be installed. Those who persist in polluting can be caught, prosecuted and punished. All of this costs money.

Now where does an impoverished Third World community like Colon get the money for these things? Forget about the gringos coming back to play the role of savior. Forget about some new scam by some slick operator with a kind heart. Forget about manna from heaven or Colon hitting the Powerball lottery. The only way Colon can get the money to clean the Coco Solo River is gradually, through economic development.

Moreover, how does Colon, and Panama for that matter, remain an economically relevant world transportation hub in the era of post-Panamax container ships? We can argue the merits and numbers of a larger third set of locks, but even if that comes to pass, the ability to efficiently shift cargo containers among our seaports, airports and the Colon Free Zone --- or the inability to do that in a quick and affordable manner --- will be a far more important factor in the future economic importance of the Panama Canal.

The CEMIS project is a cargo transportation interface. It's designed to link the Panama Canal Railroad, the Colon Container Terminal, Manzanillo International Terminal, Cristobal and Balboa seaports, the Colon Free Zone and a France Field airstrip expanded into an international airport. Without CEMIS, the investments already made in the ports and the railroad won't be very productive and the Panama Canal itself will slide toward economic irrelevance.

With CEMIS, there will be more industrial jobs for Colon's working people. The municipal and national governments will collect more taxes and have to spend less to fight the costly social problems that unemployment and hopelessness generate.

But CEMIS will displace much what's left of the jungle where I used to find refuge. The banks of the Coco Solo River will no longer be wild. Yes, the promoters promise to plant new forests to replace what they destroy, but I know that even if they do the best they know how they won't be able to duplicate what I knew as a kid. Yes, they say they'll be as gentle as possible with the river and I hope they will.

It IS possible to be kind to an urban river.

After I left Panama, I spent most of my years in the states in an industrial town, a Rust Belt city with a river whose color used to change when the factory switched chemicals, a river whose banks were covered with trash and construction rubble. I saw that river cleaned up over two decades. I saw local, state and federal governments invest in law enforcement to stop the dumping and pollution. I saw jobless people hired to remove the refuse. I saw the construction of a beautiful park system along the river. I saw the fish come back.

What I knew, loved and depended upon as a kid will never again be what it was. But the Coco Solo River can be revived, and the people who live around it can prosper to the point that they will be naturally inclined to protect it rather than destroy it.

For that, Colon needs economic development. CEMIS is the necessary link among existing and projected industrial infrastructures for that development to take place.

It's time to look ahead, not behind, and give hard-pressed Colon the jobs and hope that it needs. Let's get on with building the CEMIS project.

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