An aerial view of the stalled “Carbon Grove” development and the damage inflicted on the hillside. Developers appear to have clear-cut the land to build, and the project now stands as a monument to short-sighted planning and failed development, leaving a permanent scar on the landscape. (Photo by Serb Tember)
~ Are we saving our green? ~
By Rajesh Chintaman
PHILIPSBURG--In Cole Bay, a long-time resident still remembers the tamarind tree that towered beside her family’s home. “From the time I was five all the way until I left for university, I had memories with that tree,” she recalled. Its branches were for climbing, its fruit for sharing, its shade for cooling. Neighbours once fought to protect it from development, but storms and construction finally won. Today, the tree is gone, replaced by the unfinished concrete skeleton of a stalled project, “Carbon Grove”. “It’s definitely a lot hotter,” she said, pointing to the hillside stripped of its shade.
Her story is echoed across the island, where the quiet loss of trees rarely makes headlines. Each unchecked removal chips away at St. Maarten’s ecological backbone and slowly shuts down its ecological lungs. Soil washes away after rain, neighbourhoods bake under sweltering sun, and the canopy that defined the island thins permit by permit, cut by cut.
Each felled tree destabilises hillsides, shrinking the green buffers that once blunted the brunt of climate change and eroding the natural beauty underpinning the tourist economy. The result is an island increasingly exposed to the determined march of development.
The urgency of this erosion is not anecdotal. The April 2024 CORENA Terrestrial Baseline Biodiversity Assessment, led by Environmental Protection in the Caribbean (EPIC) with the Nature Foundation and the Ministry of Public Housing, Spatial Planning, Environment, and Infrastructure VROMI, laid it out plainly: St. Maarten’s trees are both its ecological backbone and among its most endangered assets.
Upland ridges like Sentry Hill and Naked Boy Hill remain refuges of native tree diversity, while low flat areas, battered by development and invasive species, are shadows of what they once were. The report’s conclusion is stark: conserving trees is no longer optional if St. Maarten is to withstand stronger hurricanes, harsher droughts, and rapid development.
Nature’s backbone under siege
The CORENA study, spanning 13 local areas, exposes striking contrasts. On Sentry Hill, researchers recorded 49 species of trees, while Naked Boy Hill holds the roots of 38. These hilltop forests, although battered by numerous hurricanes, remain biodiversity refuges.
Elsewhere, the picture is bleak. Secondary bushy growth now dominate St. Peter’s Hill. Once home to towering canopy trees, shorter, weaker, and more vulnerable to erosion fill the space. The culprits are familiar: livestock grazing, poor vegetation regeneration and repeated hurricane damage. Invasive plants like Acacia (Vachellia farnesiana), commonly known as “cusha bush” and Wild Tamarind (Leucaena leucocephala), advance steadily, displacing native species and further weakening resilience.
Most sobering is the rarity of the Coccothrinax Barbadensis: “thatch palm” forests. Once widespread locally, they now survive only at two sites: Cole Bay Hill and the ridge between Sentry Hill and St. Peters Hill. Fragile and fragmented, these remnants embody what little is left to protect.
According to the report, these central ridge and wooded summits are the last contiguous tracts of native vegetation on the Dutch side. Their value resides in soil stability, shade to lower ground temperature, and wildlife shelter. Their further loss would mean not only ecological decline, but also cultural and economic fallout.
Policy promises vs. reality
On paper, St. Maarten appears to have the tools to protect its green cover. The Tree Ordinance requires a permit for cutting tree trunks more than 20 centimetres in diameter. The iconic silk cotton is treated almost as a monument. And civil works permits, reactivated in 2021, were meant to close loopholes that had allowed developers to bulldoze unchecked for nearly a decade.
Further, Minister of VROMI Patrice Gumbs frames the government’s recently updated Nature Policy Plan 2025-2030 as a “shift in mindset.” The policy positions trees, mangroves and green spaces as economic assets rather than obstacles to growth. He cited Project CORENA’s findings that nature-based solutions can reduce hurricane damage, and promises that zoning plans, including a new “Green Zoning framework” will guide future development.
These, however, remain aspirations. Zoning has not been finalised since 2014, and the Ministry’s own timeline suggests meaningful updates will not arrive until mid-2026 or early 2027, long after today’s bulldozers have cleared sensitive land.
Tree protection, Gumbs explains, is guided by the 2008 Historic Tree Policy, which sets thresholds for preservation or replanting. That policy predates Hurricane Irma, the island’s current urbanisation pressures, and climate realities. Enforcement of the policy, when it happens, is inconsistent and largely invisible to the public.
The Nature Foundation sees the same gaps from another angle. It is sometimes consulted after the fact, once permits are already issued or damage has been done, said project manager Sabrine Brismeur. She suggests that without stronger public awareness and a seat at the table for environmental groups, enforcement remains a closed loop. “Most people don’t even know a tree policy exists,” she said. If citizens don’t know their rights, and non-governmental organisations cannot intervene, then who really protects the island’s trees, she questioned.
The failures are also visible in the government’s own publications. In 2025, 75 building permits were published in the National Gazette. Only eight included any note of a civil works request. Just one specifically referenced tree felling. In 2024, 82 construction permits were issued, and four out of five were published too late for residents to exercise their constitutional right of appeal. By the time a Simpson Bay beach bar permit was finally published, excavators had already remade the coastline. In 2023, at Cay Bay, commonly called “Indigo Bay”, the multi-million-dollar Vie L’Ven resort was posting drainage updates online before its building permit surfaced and without the civil works permit that is supposed to precede such activity.
The Ministry is aware of these shortcomings and is working to remedy them. Gumbs points to plans to strengthen procedural transparency by ensuring permits are classified and published correctly, as well as to embed environmental considerations more firmly into each step of the approval process.
The minister points to one case in Simpson Bay where inspectors halted the destruction of a large tree, offered as proof that enforcement does occur. But with just two inspectors covering the Dutch side, such examples feel more like exceptions than evidence of a functioning system. Even when violations are caught, penalties or follow-up measures remain unclear.
Former head of the VROMI Department of Infrastructure Management Claudius Buncamper, with decades in the sector, was blunt: “Nine times out of ten, no one checks.” Developers clear entire plots, knowing accountability is virtually non-existent.
What emerges is a familiar pattern: ambitious frameworks and speeches on one side, bulldozers and unchecked clearing on the other. A legal framework exists mostly on paper, while the pace of construction outstrips the island’s capacity to enforce it. As Buncamper put it: “When you talk about the environment versus the economy, you can’t really speak of sustainable development here. One always comes at the cost of the other.”
Memory and loss
Behind the policy gaps are personal stories of loss; Trees that once shaped daily life, now remembered in fragments only. Dr. Jay Haviser, archaeologist and founder of St. Maarten Archaeological Center SIMARC, sees trees as more than landscaping features. They are living anchors of St. Maarten’s cultural identity. Silk cottons once served as gathering spots. Tamarind trees are land boundaries. Mango trees are tied across generations. “We are taking away one of the jewels in the crown and replacing it with boxes,” Haviser warned.
One memory still weighs on him: the giant mango tree at the “Midass” intersection. Crews tried to save the leaved giant during roadworks. It was carefully excavated and replanted at the then-new Osborne Kruythoff roundabout. Against the odds, it bore fruit for two years before withering from neglect. For Haviser, this summed up the country’s mindset: the will to save in a dramatic moment, but not the follow-through to keep it alive.
On L.B. Scott Road, the story is more complicated. A massive silk cotton tree, already a landmark when Fire Chief Clive Richardson was a boy, had begun to rot earlier this year. Called in for safety reasons, the Fire Department felled it. The Chief admits the fire service does not have expertise in handling and caring for heritage trees, as they are trained for safety.
For Sandra Cheung, Commissioner of the Tzu Chi Foundation, which owns the land the tree was on, the loss was bittersweet. Two more massive silk cottons, each with a trunk more than a metre thick, remain on her property. Their roots are cracking building foundations and damaging septic systems. She is aware of their cultural significance. “We need a fair policy,” she said, “fair to people and fair to nature. With these trees, we need to find a way to build around them, not against them.”
Together, these voices tell a story larger than any one tree. They show what is lost when memory and policy fail and what is possible if heritage, safety, and design are balanced. Trees are threads of identity, binding past to present, culture to ecology and economy.
Who watches the roots?
If the laws lack bite, who is left to guard the country’s trees? Land developers such as the Plantz family are willing to hold themselves to higher standards. Rice Hill Gardens Development Managing Director Astrid Gartner-Plantz said Rice Hill Gardens’ tree protection regulations are stricter than those of the country. Here, preserving trees with trunks over 15 centimetres outdoes the 20 stated in the law. “Preserving mature trees requires little to no irrigation. It’s a way to give back,” she explained. Yet even these voluntary measures are uneven, with no formal registry of heritage trees and no requirement to integrate green space into permits.
Across the border, the French side of the island shows both the promise and the pitfalls of stronger frameworks. French laws protect species such as the Silver Thatch Palm and the slow-growing Guaiac (Guaiacum officinale), but the Réserve Naturelle, charged with protection and conservation, has only eight staff. Of those, only four have policing powers. Enforcement often comes down to luck and citizen vigilance.
In Oyster Pond, a protected Guaiac tree was saved because neighbours reported the felling in progress. “It shows how much we rely on chance and community vigilance,” pointed out Ashley Daniel, Chef de Garde for the French-side marine park.
“There are signs of a cultural shift,” said Anne-Karine Fleming, President of the Réserve Naturelle de Saint-Martin. “Citizens are filing more reports, schools are demanding more environmental education, and prosecutors are treating environmental cases with greater seriousness. Cross-border cooperation with Dutch authorities is also improving. Still, we trail countries with stronger environmental systems. Progress is happening little by little, but we need more training, more policing resources, and far more consistent enforcement.”
The lesson is stark. Neither voluntary pledges nor underfunded reserves can substitute for real accountability. The rules, regulations or laws on both sides of the island will remain decorative only, without inspectors in workable numbers empowered to halt violations in the moment.
Compounding the problem is the absence of hard penalties for tampering with trees or vegetation, coupled with a dearth of public awareness that might otherwise prompt residents to act. The island is left with a familiar dilemma: laws on paper, green rhetoric in speeches, but follow-through so weak that trees remain at the mercy of short-term convenience. Accountability is the missing root system and without it, St. Maarten’s green canopy will continue to thin, branch by branch.
Roots of resilience
What happens next will determine whether St. Maarten’s future is shaded by green or stripped and built of concrete. The Dutch side’s population density is now one of the highest in the Caribbean, a reality made sharper by a 147% surge in the construction sector from XCG 30 million in 2014 to XCG 74.3 million in 2023. In his 2025 Parliamentary Address, Governor Ajamu Baly warned that this boom, coupled with soaring real-estate activity, has placed “unprecedented pressure on our infrastructure and spatial planning capabilities.”
Every permit now carries consequences: hillside clearing for villas, coastal excavation for resorts, and unchecked development all chip away at resilience. Climate change adds another layer, stronger storms, harsher droughts, and the urgent need for natural buffers.
Culturally, there are still touchstones. The late Ruby Bute, the island’s first dame of cultural arts, captured the reverence for silk cottons in her poem “The Mama Tree.” She described them as matriarchs, homes for birds and iguanas, gathering places that anchored communities. Today, such giants stand fewer and more fragile reminders of what is at stake.
Education may be the missing link. Few residents even know a Tree Ordinance exists. Myths persist that trees inevitably crack foundations, prompting pre-emptive cutting or slow-kill tactics. As Haviser argues, that mindset can be changed: “Kids should be able to name their trees and see them as part of society, not just accessories.” When a teenager plants a tree and returns 20 years later to stand in its shade, he says, a generational bond is forged.
For now, the hillsides tell a sobering story. Where lush canopies once cooled and protected, skeletal projects and bare slopes stand exposed. Trees are not luxuries. They are storm shields, heritage markers, and essential to the tourism economy itself.
The question remains, haunting every hillside cleared and every root exposed: Are we saving our green, or watching the island’s living backbone being cut away, tree by tree, permit by permit?
(This investigative piece has been created with the support of the Dutch Fund for In-Depth Journalism (FBJP).
