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A tale about what’s killing coral and making sponges the dominant animal
By W Goodwin
In 1897 the Irish poet William Butler Yeats was writing about his fellow poet William Blake when he said, “There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them … so in the beginning of any work, there is a moment when we understand more perfectly than we understand again until all is finished.”
If Yeats had been alive today, he might have written those words with Don Stewart in mind.
Captain Don, as he preferred to be called, had a vision of the future for the Caribbean island of Bonaire and he made it one of his life’s goals to protect the island’s coral reefs. Captain Don was a forward-looking environmentalist though it was sometimes hard to show him gratitude. Toward the end he became crusty and grumpy, hard of hearing, and often spoke in riddles. It didn’t help his pride when the owners to whom he sold the dive resort he founded so many years ago trundled him out once a week for a “Meet the Captain” sideshow that was more humiliation than communication.
Until he died in 2014, Captain Don lived with his gal Janet at their kunuku about half-way between Bonaire’s wave-lashed east coast and the tranquil west coast. Their home, which he had equipped with solar cells and a windmill, was an environmentally-integrated house amidst the gardens and greenhouses of their landscape business. Inside the…
