St Helena National Trust

Cherish our past, value our future

newsletter no.7 - nov 2004 - related news

New Land Development Control Plan

This has been taking up quite a lot of time as the Director is the representative of the Trust on the Agency, and it required a lot of reading and comment. It is important we get this right for St. Helena as this Plan will set out the Land Development for the next 10 years. The Plan will become available to the public on December 6th, and several meetings for discussion will be held in all areas of the island. Written comments must be received before 17 January. The new Land Development Control Plan will be on sale from SHG at a cost of £5 from 6 December 2004, and will also be on the Government Website.

St Helena Visit by UK Overseas Territories Conservation Forum

For decades (we are from the stamp collecting generation!) we have wanted to visit St Helena, and this wish has been strengthened throughout recent years while Mike has been Chairman of the UK Overseas Territories Conservation Forum, enjoying working with colleagues from St Helena, both distantly and while they were in UK.

Peaks visit with Mike and Ann Pienkowski,, Adrian Mallia, Vincent Williams and Monica Ludwig.

Our opportunity arrived this year when St Helena Environmental Advisory Consultative Forum invited us to visit St Helena as facilitators, working alongside Isabel Peters and colleagues, to help develop a strategy to implement the Environment Charter. This arose because Mike and a Forum colleague, Dace Ground, had facilitated a pilot programme to implement an Environment Charter in Turks & Caicos. Mike had been keeping St Helena colleagues in touch with the progress on this, and St Helena had bravely decided to be the first other UK Overseas Territory to see if the model could help St Helena. The programme to do this would include two visits to the Island, the first by both of us.

We were delighted with the good response, with strong involvement from senior government officials, voluntary organisations, the new staff officer and Councillors, among others. The first visit in August 2004 was essentially concerned with identifying what was already being done and what else would need to be done to meet the Charter Commitments; and the second visit in February/March 2005 will aim to set priorities and how to integrate this into normal procedures. In between the visits, the latest of a series of working document has been collated, and circulated in St Helena for comment.

Although we had a very full programme to achieve this, there were lots of other things to do as well. St Helena National Trust is a member organisation of the Forum, which had arranged some time earlier for one of its Council members, Martin Drury (recently retired Director-General of The National Trust [in England, Wales and Northern Ireland]) to visit and assist the establishment of the Trust. Therefore, we were keen to have the chance to join the Trust’s Council, meet the representatives of several of the diverse member organisations, learn of progress and challenges, and offer advice where we could.

It would, of course, be a sin to visit St Helena and not see some of its special features. Indeed, barely had we stepped off the RMS before Rebecca Cairns-Wicks and her children had whisked us off for an invigorating walk to Lot’s Wife’s Ponds – made even more challenging in that Ann was recuperating from a dislocated shoulder and broken arm, so that rope-assisted stages were one-handed. During both work sessions and any spare moment, we joined the Conservation Group on a walk to Great Stone Top, explored Jamestown endlessly, walked around parts of the peaks with Vince Williams and his colleagues at the Agriculture & Natural Resources Department as well as Rebecca and the project team, joined Emma Bennett on exciting dolphin surveys, found some fossil birds, planted some more gumwood trees to add to those planted for us in the Millennium year, visited Longwood House of course, searched for nocturnal spiders in this area of global significance for unique invertebrates, drove around to try to work out how the vast number of exciting and hugely different features fitted into such a small island, and took many pictures including several hundred of wire-birds. As Mike’s PhD was on plovers, this last was a must, and our bank balance was only saved from excessive spending on film by the existence of digital cameras! Something of a breathless list of activities, but St Helena has rather a lot of special places to fit into a short visit.

The chance to visit various places, with people who know them, as well as being a treat, was important for another task. Mike is coordinating a review of actual and potential Wetlands of International Importance under the “Ramsar” Convention. St Helena is rather different from most places – in fact anywhere! – and we were keen to work out how the Convention might apply. This was very useful, and the cloud forest of the peaks, as well as the coastal zone, and the oasis-like streams through the dry-lands most certainly have global significance.

Impressions:

Sadness that so much of what had been present before settlement had been lost;
Delight that so much still remained;
Impressed at the heroic efforts of Islanders to save species from extinction and help them recover;
Enthusiasm that more of this can be done to restore the peaks and other areas;
Hope that some of the recently lost invertebrates and plants will be found in some nooks and crannies;
Profoundly grateful for the welcome, friendship and hospitality of the Saints, both those we have long known and new acquaintances;
Enthralled by Jamestown and the other historic sites, and potential features like the flax-mill;
Absolutely astounded by the natural variety; where else (apart from baby-sister island Ascension) can one stand in a cloud forest and look at a desert a few kilometres away?
Excited by the prospects of Saints looking after this natural and built heritage, and building a high-value, low-volume tourist industry to show it to the many other visitors who would love it.

Thanks to all for your help and welcome. Mike looks forward to returning in February, and Ann wishes that she could too.

Mike and Ann Pienkowski, UK Overseas Territories Conservation Forum, 102 Broadway, Peterborough PE1 4DG, UK. E-mail: pienkowski@cix.co.uk web: www.ukotcf.org

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