Battered Paradise: The Progressive Destruction of St. Thomas Harbor, St. Thomas, USVI

• In Event: Rationalizing Tourism: Neoliberalism, Neocolonialism, and Self-Care Culture

Abstract

Following the ravages of two back-to-back hurricanes in 2017, many St. Thomians lost their jobs when hotels and other tourist amenities shut down. Sparse U.S. mainstream news coverage of the devastated VI territories, compounded by the isolating impact of cruise line suspensions, left many US Virgin Islanders feeling, as Caribbean author Tiphanie Yanique observed, forgotten and “American-in-name-only.” Even before the storms, the Virgin Islands’ jobless rate exceeded twice the U.S. national average. And today St. Thomians (like other Virgin Islanders) remain in a state of economic precarity, with all the attendant consequences.

Ironically, for decades before 2017, marine scientists had been reporting on trails of destruction being inflicted by the very cruise ship traffic that Irma and Maria immobilized. Studies found that shipping vessels routinely dumped a litany of toxic pollutants associated with cancers and respiratory and other ailments—raw sewage, heavy fuel oil spills, hazardous solid wastes, diesel exhaust, and more—into St. Thomas Harbor. Noting that toxic residues, some traceable back to the mid-twentieth century, were decimating coral reefs, endangering fish and other species, and triggering turbidity currents in waters that had once been crystal clear, researchers warned of an existential threat to the natural environment—the very thing touted as St. Thomas’s greatest asset.

My proposed paper explores this conundrum: Why has the specter of hurricanes and other natural disasters consistently overshadowed the progressively corrosive impact of the cruise ship industry on St. Thomas Harbor and its environs? For more than a century, the development and management of St. Thomas Harbor has fallen under the purview of the West Indian Company (WICO), an entity created as a private company by Denmark in 1912, and sold to the US Virgin Islands government in 1993. Despite the likelihood of further irremediable environmental harm, WICO is pushing proposals for dredging and the construction of an additional pier to accommodate mega cruise lines.

The doggedly persistent view that prosperity for St. Thomas is necessarily tied to cruise ship tourism is, I argue, the historical product of longstanding European and American imperial capitalist framings of the harbor and the US Virgin Islands as a whole. Far from reflecting an unavoidable rational choice, the idea is an extension of the logics of two hundred and forty-five years of Danish colonial rule and American military and modernization enterprises dating back to the early twentieth century. It is a twenty-first century expression of what scholars have termed “settler colonial anxiety.” As indigenous scholar Dean Saranillio and Judy Rohrer have argued, such anxiety exposes the US as an inherently weak and “forward-failing unsustainable…settler state” predisposed to side with capital rather than the well-being of people and the planet.

I examine the cultural history of the foregoing conundrum and certain paths not taken—such as proposals for homesteading paradoxically outlined in a 1930 report of the now defunct US Bureau of Efficiency. In doing so my goal is to illuminate how alternative perspectives might take root and alternative futures might be imagined.

Author

• Mora McLean, George Washington University