Award Year: 
2012
Award Recipient: 
Charlene Rooke
Category: 
Best Environmental/Responsible Tourism Feature
Category Sponsor: 
TMAC

Published in the Globe & Mail, November 1, 2011

Where sustainable meets sybaritic    Eco and luxe have always sounded as compatible as granola and caviar. But Mustique, the Caribbean’s most glamorous private island, has become a leading destination for green luxury. We go behind the scenes to find out how they do it

M ustique Island is so fashionable British designer Anya Hindmarch created a custom canvas tote emblazoned with “Mustique Green.” On this small private island, part of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, eco-friendly is the new glamorous. But, in no small part because of its inhabitants’ deep pockets, eco isn’t skin deep here, it’s becoming a way of life.

Ty Kovach is the man charged with ensuring Mustique’s sustainability. At 6 a.m., it’s already    steaming hot as we set out for a behind-the-scenes tour. “This is the Mustique standard. We will show that you can have luxury    and at the same time have excellent environmental performance,” says Kovach, who has been on the island for four years, after working in natural resource management in Minnesota for 17 years.   

He is leading the kind of holistic sustainability program that is possible only in a closed-loop system like this: a remote island, with wealthy owners (one, Sir Michael Jagger, sits on the environmental committee), run by a    corporate board with comprehensive vision and control over all the island.    Kovach takes me around Mustique – to the recycling centre, the waste- and water-treatment areas and the other decidedly unglamorous sites.

Later, I soak it all up – the beach, the cocktails at the Cotton House – enjoying every moment in this eco-luxe hideaway. Here, then, is Mustique, both  the glam and the green behind the scenes.    

From eroded to immaculate   
Les Jolies Eaux, the one-time villa of the late Princess Margaret, is on the island’s south tip. It sits on land given as a wedding gift by Mustique’s eccentric founder, Colin Tennant, Lord Glenconner.  The royal uncle-in-law, famous stage designer Oliver Messel, created this sunny yellow, low-slung,    neo-Georgian villa – one of 75 for rent on Mustique. In the distance, hills of lush greenery roll out to the Caribbean Sea, but I’m charmed by another view, the one from the powder room that shows a royal sense of whimsy: a    porthole window at seated-loo height.

Just five years ago, this lush green point looked more like a black, rocky field, eroded in spots down to the volcanic base. Five feet of organic mulch and refores-    tation with almond trees and local plants has brought it back to life. The mulch comes from collecting and chipping leaves, branches and scrap wood. The labour comes from a summer conservation program for local students, who not only plant  trees but work in the plant nursery, hear lectures from visiting experts and learn the natural history of their island.    

Four centuries ago, Mustique  was covered with a 30-metre-high, shady tree canopy, including hardwoods that have long since been felled and harvested.    “We’re taking a 100-year view of how we want this to look for future generations,” Kovach says, “and the standard that we want future custodians of the island to work toward.”       

How a dry island goes wet   
It’s the place to see and be seen: Residents, villa renters and hotel guests head to Cotton House, the only full-service luxury hotel on Mustique, for the Tuesday-night cocktail party. Women in silk tunics and men with tennis tans get acquainted and reacquainted easily. Mustique is not at all snobby; once you’ve arrived, you’re part of the club.

Nobody will ask what you do, and while your accent might give away where you’re from, it’s the villa you rent that shows who you are: A nine-bedroom villa with kids’ quarters, multiple pools and outdoor pizza oven? A romantic white Moorish palace on a hill? Modest, vintage-Messel digs?    

After cocktails, we dine on the terrace of the hotel’s Veranda restaurant, where our companion is Basil Charles, the founder in the 1970s of Basil’s, the beach bar that is home to weekly soca-music jump-up parties, strong rum    punch and fresh seafood. With a booming laugh, he orders the most expensive bottle of red wine and regales us with stories: when Mick dropped in to jam, recent wine tastings in London, the time some escaped convicts took refuge on Mustique…    

Mustique is a “dry island,” with no natural water sources, but you’d never know it. The Cotton House grounds are landscaped fields of green grass, palm trees, tropical flowers and the ruins of an old sugar mill, now housing    the Mustique History Museum.   (Inside are shards of clay pots from as far back as 500 AD that    the island’s natives used on the Endeavor Hills shoreline near here to collect drinking water dribbling out of a natural water-    shed of volcanic rock.) On our tour, we passed a low stone wall with a simple brass tap: It’s a “wall of water” Kovach launched in December, 2009, dispensing    complimentary filtered water, straight from the desalination    plant into free glass bottles.  Kovach wants to return to a more natural process by creating underground aquifers, perhaps using sand-dam filtration and  solar-powered pump technology pioneered in Africa. (His pilot    project will start next year.)   Water treatment is hard on the budget and environment:  Though more than half of Mustique’s water isn’t for domestic use,  all of it is expensively cleaned,  desalinated and filtered. That’s    changing, with initiatives including rainwater collection in cisterns and the recycling of water in seven efficient new plants, for irrigation and other non-potable  uses.

Sweetie Pie and fruit trees    
Downtown Mustique runs on island time. Lovell Village is sleepy this morning: Basil’s serves breakfast, the aptly named Pink House and Purple House boutiques finesse their displays of souvenirs and beachwear, and    the Mustique Great General Store (its sign boasting “Licensed to Sell Intoxicating Liquors by Retail”) is eclectically well stocked with carnaroli rice, French Burgundy and books by British humorist (and Mustiquan) Felix Dennis. Drawn by the smell of baking bread, I buy a sugared doughnut from Sweetie    Pie bakery, then wander over to  Stanley’s beachside produce    stand. He proffers a slice of pear- tasting, white-fleshed soursop, which he calls a cancer-fighting superfood. “Google it!” he insists.  He points up the hill to The View, a local restaurant, where Lisa will make us “real Caribbean food” for lunch, washed down with $2 beers. It’s a quaint slice of island    life.   

Soon, all Mustiquans will be able to pick abundant, free fruit.  More than 1,500 fruit trees have  been planted in six new orchards, many of them germinated in Kovach’s own backyard, then nurtured in his nursery, where I see thriving Juliet mango, guava, sugar apple and sapodilla saplings. Kovach heard that fresh  fruit was once so scarce on the island, locals were picking it    green to snag it first. “We want so much fruit on the island that we don’t need to import it. I want the roads to be lined with fruit trees!” he says. There’s also a deep respect for plant-based healing among the locals, who brew teas and tinctures from local botanicals when they feel unwell. That    philosophy extends to island operations, where natural extracts like chrysanthemum or neem-tree oil are preferred to chemical mosquito blasts and a call to island pest control will bring an expert to find a mouse nest    instead of just set a trap.       

Keeping the sand on the beach    
Lounging on the Cotton House  beach one day, we watch two fishermen haul a 127-kilogram marlin out of a tiny fishing boat onto the dock for a chef ’s inspection (and eventual purchase). On an island that’s largely about hilltop privacy and views, the beaches are beautifully serene. On the east side is Macaroni Beach, the local favourite place to hunker down with a picnic prepared by your villa chef. Nearby Pasture Bay is deceptively gorgeous, but too rough for swimming. But south of that is the somewhat    hidden Black Sands Beach  (there’s a little sign beside the staircase hewn into the hillside),  where those in the know sneak away on weekends to chill on the warm volcanic sand and swim in the Caribbean.

The chicest beach must be on the north coast of the island, at L’Ansecoy Bay: the homes of Tommy Hilfiger and Mick Jagger are nearby and the public section of the beach has powder-fine white sand and lapping waves.    The water churns darker blue just offshore, where a coral reef makes for lively snorkelling to spot parrotfish and sea urchins. As the first and only developed beach on Mustique, L’Ansecoy Bay had a problem: It was disap-    pearing, at a rate of 15 metres over the past decade – the erosion that results when sand is washed away and not replaced by a healthy coral reef. Simply add ing sand or building a seawall weren’t permanent solutions, so the island hired Canadian company Baird and Associates to analyze the sand, water, marine life and reef. “We use the reefs and beaches as indicators of how we’re doing with the entire eco-system, as they are on the outer edge and you can readily see any impacts,” Kovach says.   Kovach points out massive boulders Baird has hauled in, forming groynes, slender arms    reaching into the water. Once covered with heavy Guyanese sand, these will allow gentle water flow-through and thereby reduce the amount of beach    being washed away – a sustainable long-term solution.