Oct. 21, 2007 — St. Croix’s Onaje Jackson is a major force in fostering environmentally and socially sustainable development throughout the Caribbean. As a founder and president of Sustainable Systems and Design International, Jackson makes his living designing and building; state of the art solar and wind powered electrical systems for homes and businesses, environmentally sound water treatment alternatives and by assisting developers with environmental impact assessments and ecologically sustainable design. To put it another way, he does well by doing good.
In his spare time, Jackson promotes a vision of heritage, nature and culture tourism, as a founder of Crucian Heritage and Nature Tourism. CHANT is a coalition of St. Croix residents and businesses promoting the advancement of Crucian heritage and nature tourism as a vehicle for sustainable development of the St. Croix community.
Jackson moved to St. Croix in 1988, to help get a solar energy program going in the V.I. Energy Office and to direct the territory’s coastal zone management program. After a few years in the Caribbean, observing resort and development projects come online, he was struck by some common patterns, inspiring him and his partners to found SSDI in 1994.
“I saw a tragic situation,” Jackson said. “Bad solutions for development in the Caribbean were leading to divisions in communities and environmental damage that was not necessary. And a lot of it had to do with developers not being armed with better solutions, better designs and plans at the outset.”
Jackson felt he needed to put concepts of sustainable development into play to provide an alternative set of environmentally sound plans for island development.
“The idea was to bring a more holistic approach to planning, design and engineering of island infrastructure,” he said. Since then, as his company has chugged along, growing slowly, the progressive concepts SSDI embodies have grown in appeal, becoming mainstream.
“In 1995 when I talked to developers, they didn’t know what I was talking about,” Jackson said. “Today, everyone knows about green solutions. Eventually the country caught up with what we are doing.”
From the beginning, SSDI has done projects throughout the Caribbean and Central America.
“In the first years of the history of the company we did almost all our work in very remote areas of Central and South America,” Jackson recalled. SSDI built a sustainable potable water system in rural Guyana with a World Bank grant in 1996, using solar and wind power to pump the water. A year later in Belize, it helped design and build an independent, self-powered, low environmental impact ecotourism center.
“They wanted to showcase ecotourism as an alternative to clear-cutting,” Jackson said.
Jackson and SSDI have been implementing solar powered and environmentally sound development in the territory since the beginning too. In 1996, SSDI helped fix up Coral World on St. Thomas after Hurricane Marilyn.
“We did an evaluation of the whole plant after it was devastated by the hurricane,” he recalled.
”We looked to energy conservation and also some renewable energy, making the place more efficient and putting in independent solar power.”
About 50 percent of SSDI’s work includes straightforward design and engineering of renewable energy systems. Much of that is concentrated in photovoltaic systems, and wind power generating systems. It also does a lot of technical work on natural wastewater treatment systems.
“These alternative systems use gravity, vegetation and a combination of natural materials,” he said. “Man-made constructive wetlands and vegetative sand filters, those are two types of alternative natural waste treatment systems.”
The rest of SSDI’s work consists largely of doing environmental impact assessments and consulting with developers on lowering their impact and increasing sustainability. Both in the territory and in the wider Caribbean, Jackson and SSDI have been gradually stepping up the pace. SSDI did the environmental assessment and sustainability plan for the ongoing 20-acre expansion at Carambola Beach Resort and are currently doing an environmental assessment for a project at The Palms at Pelican Cove on the big island’s north shore. And it is starting three new projects in the British Virgin Islands; one on Virgin Gorda and two on Tortola.
“In every case, on every island we call on the local island brain trust about the site before we do any planning,” Jackson said. “You might call it a science-first approach. We have found developers can do what they like and more, but sometimes in different areas. Developers would typically start with standard layouts, with design principals from stateside projects, and then after environmental impact studies were done, change plans in a piecemeal way to lessen their impact and adapt them to fit the landscape. Instead of superimposing a design on the natural system and later having science tell you how much damage your design will cause, instead of starting with a poor design and trying to make it green, we design it that way from the beginning.”
With each passing year, more and more of the company’s systems dot the territory. In 2003 the V.I. Energy Office and the Water and Power Authority hired SSDI to build the first photovoltaic system to be connected to the St. Croix power grid. It was the first of a number of private photovoltaic projects partly paid for by Energy Office grants. SSDI installed private solar power systems at Camp Mt. Victory, Bamboula Haven and in Clifton Hill under the program.
“It was the first program of its kind in the Caribbean,” he said. “Once those systems were shown to work well, they formed the technical basis for the net metering implemented nine months ago.” With net metering, if you have solar, wind or some other way of generating your own power, you can deduct what you produce from your electrical bill and sell whatever extra power you produce back to WAPA.
Jackson said the information gathered and practices established by the program provide a template others may follow.
“The precedent the Virgin Islands has established in ensuring that alternative systems of electrical generation meet international and U.S. codes and standards could be used as a model throughout the region now,” he said.
In his spare time, Jackson helped found and is one of the directors of CHANT.
“CHANT has brought together a large group of proponents of nature tourism on St. Croix,” he said.
”Nature, history and culture are the god-given advantages of St. Croix and we should focus on selling them.” Jackson and CHANT say small-scale local entrepreneurship and expertise should play a major role in the economic future of the territory.
“CHANT is very much focused on building and expanding a network of heritage and nature experience providers,” he said. “People like Ras Lumumba and Veronica Gordon with their firsthand knowledge of natural medicinal plants, or the music of Bully and the Klafooners and Astor Williams and her masqueraders — these can bring a unique experience to St. Croix’s visitors.”
Jackson grew up in and around New York City. He received a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Yale, and master’s degrees in architecture and city planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His wife, Barbara V. Jackson, is the director of V.I. Perinatal Inc., a nonprofit organization focused on perinatal healthcare access.
Having met and married in New York, they moved down here together, raising two children on St. Croix. Their son, Lamin, is attending the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Co. and their daughter, Zaha, is a junior at Good Hope School.
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