If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it.

May 9 marked the third day since reclamation work resumed after the Golden Week holiday.

On the outer periphery of the landfill zone where land reclamation continues, work to lay down wave-dissipating blocks has made progress. Meanwhile, by the neighboring K8 seawall, sacks filled with rocks were being laid down one after another.

 

We were a small group this day, with just five canoes and one boat. But some of us managed to slip through a rocky area in the shallows. And while we were unfortunately unable to stop the work being carried out atop the seawall, we did not give up. We held up our placards and protested, while the skipper of the single boat we had out on the water voiced objections toward the workers and members of the Coast Guard through a microphone.

The K8 seawall, which cuts through the waters between Cape Henoko and Nagashima island, is already some 170 meters long. The flow of water is expected to change dramatically as a result, which will undoubtedly have a massive impact on the environment of Oura Bay and the vegetation and creatures that grow and live there.

In 1992, then 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki from Vancouver, Canada, spoke to world leaders at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro—also known as the Earth Summit.

“You don’t know how to bring the salmon back up in a dead stream. You don’t know how to bring back an animal now extinct. And you can’t bring back the forests that once grew where there is now a desert. If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it,” she said.

Twenty-seven years have passed since Severn gave that impassioned speech.

I was a child myself then, but as an adult now, I would like to say, just like Severn did all those years ago: You don’t know how to bring back the dugong who have lost their feeding grounds. You don’t know how to bring back a dead coral reef that has died because it has been covered in red soil and algae. We don’t know how to fix it. If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it. Please stop breaking it.

May 11, 2019

Original post (Japanese)
English translation by C.K.