The US Marine occupation of Haiti from 1915 to1934 marked the end of a beautiful city set in the middle of the country’s laughing geographical outline. The Marines built highways that all focussed upon Port au Prince. Before that time the roads that linked the capitol with the rest of the country took time to travel, so the need to go to the capitol was either economic or bureaucratic or to visit a relative. There had to be an important reason to travel to the capitol.

With the roads also came communications. This was needed for control purposes because the U.S. Marines were at war with those who did not want the country to return to slavery. These dissidents saw the occupying force of a country that maintained trade embargos since the founding of their country. They saw the face of the white man, because the U.S. Marine Corps was the last military organisation in the United States of America to be integrated in the 1950s, and that face was not a friendly one. There is a saying in the Marines that they are 90% Texans and 10% men, and Texans were not racially tolerant during and after the First World War and Great Depression.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson saw that 80% of the Haitian economic trade was controlled by Germany and that there was a war with that country looming, and Mole St. Nicola controlled the approach to the underbelly of the United States, the Windward Passage. Wilson wanted to control Windward Passage and the economy of a major bauxite (aluminium), copper and gold producing country in chaos. Haitians had just torn to pieces the ghoul, President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, who was selling unearthed and prisoner body parts to American medical institutions, as well as executing 167 mulattes. The country was thrown into complete disorganisation and Wilson knew it was either the U.S. or Germany. The day after Sam’s disposal the Marines landed.

In order to control the roads and communications the U.S. needed to control the politics of the country, so they appointed a president (General Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave) and had him declare martial law throughout the country. The U.S. also created a treaty that allowed them (the U.S.) to control the economy, disband the Haitian Army, establish a U.S. officer police force of Haitians and had their president re-write the Haitian Constitution so that it now allowed foreigners to own land, against one of the basic tenants of the Dessalines Constitution of 1804.

With a U.S. military campaign running through the country, people gravitated to the cities, especially Port au Prince, a capitol purpose build for legislation and commerce and a population limit of 270,000. Port au Prince had parks and boulevards that rivalled Paris. A seafront of elegance, leisure and grace as its permanent trademark. It was chosen as the destination for the first Caribbean tourism by PanAm flying ships.

Public works were also coordinated by the Marines, who improved schools, hospitals, port facilities, plumbing systems, waste disposal. It brought the relaxed Haitian into the 20^th century. Louis Borno was put in place and a power crazed Dartiguenave was pushed out of place. A full scale civil war broke out due to the almost slave labour practices of the foreign investing companies, and the Marine activity increased with human rights violations to answer for but never amounting to anything. The people ran to Port au Prince where peace was strictly enforced and as a result the population reached over a million within six years of Marine occupation.

Today, nobody knows how many people live in Port au Prince or the country generally. People, country people, have never stopped coming to the Prince’s Port and possibly a third of the population of the entire country now resides or exists in Port au Prince, a city designed for a quarter of a million…

With the natural tragedy of an earthquake sitting upon too many of this over stressed population it would seem that this might be a chance not to re-establish this grossly underserved populace in this extremely confined area of mountain back and sea front but to establish new towns and even cities with ordered infrastructures outside this area. This would seem like an opportunity to establish the infrastructures for agricultural and maricultural sustainability research centres. As the testing place for environmental development for the world Haiti could invigorate a stagnant and resourceful population by simply creating towns and cities dedicated to assisting our future in place of just providing refugee camps. Or, re-building a slum of a city.

When Port au Prince was just a government centre and commercial port, Haiti was the wealthiest agricultural producer in the Western Hemisphere and that was for most of its rich and hidden history.

Real time green programmes such as greenhouse production, salt water conversion systems, waste conversion, wind power, solar power, forest establishment in the vacated country sides of Haiti have a chance to be initiated because of a dreadfully cleaned slate called Port au Prince 2010.

And I feel the most qualified person to organise anything toward economic-environmental sustainability in the Republic of Haiti is the former Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis.

H.E. Ross

London