Ital Itineraries: Rastafari Eco-Tourism in St Lucia/Iyanola and Visions for Community Autonomy

Abstract

The island of St Lucia has undergone a dramatic transformation in a matter of decades, metamorphosing from a monocrop banana economy to a high end tourist destination which generates billions of dollars of revenue for those who operate it. This transformation has, however, seen a tourism industry develop that relies on Western models of environmental destruction and degradation. For Rastafari communities in St Lucia this represents a direct challenge to a deeply green ecological ethic which lies at the heart of the movement. Instead, some offer an alternative—eco-tourism. Several Rastafari are today engaged in offering an experience to visitors which brings them closer to this naturality rather than separating them from. To do so, however, is not without challenge. Many Rastafari seek to avoid as far as is possible all forms of engagement with a ‘Babylonian’ system that has persecuted the movement and debased all around it. For these individuals, it is only through the establishment of agrarian communes entirely separate from governmental systems and means of production that Rastafari might achieve a spirituality and a living modality free from corruption. These Rastafari eco-tourism ventures offer an alternative to this vision in presenting a different path to a shared ambition of self-sufficiency. Through ethnographic research on the island this paper seeks to situate and explore Rastafari eco-tourism as a vision for community autonomy in St Lucia.

1. Introduction

Iyanola/St Lucia1 has undergone a dramatic economic transformation in a matter of decades. Previously dominated by a ubiquitous banana trade, a legacy still visible from the remaining groves that peer out from roadsides and country tracks, the 21st century has seen the island metamorphose into an high-end international tourist destination with a brand that increasingly positions itself as luxury. This shift has bought with it enormous change on numerous fronts, including the nations outward national identity, how the national government seeks to represent itself to the wider world and how global businesses and investors view the island and the opportunities within it. Spaces have shifted from agricultural to amusement, and the working lives of the island’s population have swayed from one wholly dominant industry to another. Such prominence renders tourism a frequent topic for conversation and critique for St Lucians and for those who form part of the Rastafari community on the island. A community deeply critical of environmental degradation, Western cultural and economic hegemony, and neo-colonial power structures. Not only is the industry as it manifests in St Lucia implicated in all of these, it has also recently fallen down on its very raison d’être—capital generation. As an imperious pandemic stretched its arms around the world in early 2020, the well at the centre of St Lucia’s economy dramatically caved in, leaving businesses shuttered and entire communities without work.2

There are those within the Rastafari community who argue that tourism need not operate as it does presently, and that a different model which shifts power back to those on the island is possible. Inherent within this is a desire to protect Indigenous practices and foreground the ecological, something at the core of Rastafari panentheistic cosmologies. For some, the notion of eco-tourism has emerged as a popular idealisation of this rebalancing. Those in this position advance the view that ecotourism offers a means of economic empowerment which can utilise an inimitable economic foundation in tourism towards the widely held ambition of Rastafari self-sufficiency. Such advocation, however, lies at one end of a continuum within the movement—between those who would seek to utilise and engage with the tourist industry, and with mainstream society more broadly, and those who would seek to remove themselves from it and the ‘Babylonian’3 vestiges that surround it. What emerges is a tension which speaks to a pervasive spectrum within the Rastafari movement of withdrawal and isolation at one end and societal engagement, either willingly or unwillingly, at another. Two differing economic models emerge, as eco-tourism and agriculture represent alternate, although not mutually exclusive, visions of the future for Iyanolan Rastafari communities.

It is these tensions and the ideas that underlie them this paper will explore, as I seek to examine some responses to tourism and ecotourism in St Lucia within the Rastafari community on the island. I will first outline the growth and development of St Lucia’s tourist industry, before going on to contextualise Rastafari ecologies and then examine Rastafari models of eco-tourism which present a transformative reinterpretation that in the outlooks of its advocates offers the St Lucia a model for sustainable growth. Finally, I will turn to a tension within the movement highlighted by further engagement in tourism. One which underlines a spectrum between those seeking to utilise the tools of the new economy, and those who would rather gather the ploughs and scythes of the old.

2. Methodology

This paper is informed by three months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out by myself in St Lucia towards the end of 2020 and the start of 2021 as part of my doctoral fieldwork. This fieldwork was primarily oriented towards exploring Rastafari ecologies and ecotheologies, with this interest in tourism emerging organically as I absorbed the local concerns of those around me. I had initially planned to travel to the island in April 2020 and to stay for a year, but the outbreak of COVID-19 forced these plans to be reconsidered. During a brief window of restriction lifting I was able to travel in October before a second wave of lockdown measures prevented inter-household mixing and I was forced to travel home. When I was ultimately able to travel I was required by government protocols to spend two weeks in a ‘Covid Secure Facility’, which for me was a beach hotel popular with American and UK tourists. This experience gave me an unexpected brush with mainstream tourism on the island, and what would prove for the purposes of this paper, a valuable window into the ‘market’.

After receiving government certification that I had spent sufficient time in this quarantine I was able to leave the hotel and join up with my host Bongo Wisely who lived on a small farmstead outside of Vieux Fort in the south of the island. After staying here I moved on to rented accommodation in Micoud village. Across my time on the island I spoke and interacted with seventy-one self-identifying members of the Rastafari community. This took the form of participant observation, informal conversations surrounding daily life, and interviews, often in group settings, engaging many individuals on multiple occasions. All of this informs the data and analysis in this paper.

Tourism was a feature of many though not all of these conversations, with an array of interlocutors having varying degrees of attachment, either themselves or through family members, to the juggernaut the industry represents. The views within conversations were invariably skeptical or hostile towards mainstream tourism as it existed on the island, embodying as it does neo-colonial power dynamics, environmental degradation, the shipping of profits off island and, as shall be discussed, a modern monocrop in itself. Some of those I spoke with actively engaged in eco-tourism themselves. Some described they lacked the start-up capital and support to do so whilst others rejected the sector entirely and looked elsewhere.

It is important to reflect here also on positionality. I engaged in this fieldwork as a white British male in my mid-twenties, who does not identify as Rastafari. My background, appearance, and accent inevitably influenced the research process, as I was tacitly perceived to be an ‘outsider’ to the community. While some individuals were aware of my prior research experience spanning several years with Rastafari communities in the UK and Jamaica many were not. Some participants approached our conversations with caution and engaged with me warily, something I have experienced across field sites before. A history of persecution at the hands of colonial and neo-colonial regimes can engender a fear of infiltration and/or ‘informing’ from those outside (Powell 2023, pp. 1–4), likely heightened by my status as white and British. Others engaged me enthusiastically, perhaps keen for the opportunity to further educate an ‘outsider’ potentially assumed to have a rudimentary understanding of the movement. These responses may have been influenced by my status a researcher from Cambridge—an institution within a nation deeply entangled with the legacies of colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. My role as a white British academic studying Black spirituality within the Rastafari movement also reflects and replicates broader historical patterns of colonial knowledge production. These dynamics generate power imbalances that, though experienced differently by each individual, are inherently unequal and shape the data collected.

The names used in this paper are those of the individuals who contributed to research. As I have written elsewhere (Powell 2022b, p. 23), I had initially decided to anonymize participants in line with established social scientific protocol. I was, however, encouraged by several Rastafari scholars to reconsider this, and to view my outputs not only as pieces of analysis but also as living archives and records of moments in time within a largely oral community. For this reason I went back to key community figures to ask participants for any objections to this approach to which there were none. My doctoral research received ethical approval from the research committee in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Verbal consent was recorded for participants and data was stored in line with UK GDPR regulations.

3. St Lucia Tourism Context

The centrality of St Lucia’s tourism industry today represents the second post WWII phase of island’s economy. After the West Indies lost its unique selling position in the early 20th century as sugar beet farming and domestic sugar production took off in Great Britain, St Lucia turned its established agricultural base to banana cultivation which would then become predominant in the 1950’s. In the same decade, Iyanola’s economics Nobel laureate Sir Arthur Lewis wrote in advocation of a holistic model for domestic agricultural connections in which the growth in a variety of economic sectors and the broader industrialisation that would be central to them all would lead to increased demand for domestic agricultural products. This was not to be the case, however, as a piecemeal approach manifested in which sectors stood disconnected and foreign multi-nationals were prioritised over local concerns (Timms 2006, p. 2). Whilst domestic agricultural production declined, St Lucia’s banana exports, governed by an exclusivity contract with UK founded Geest Industries, boomed. By 1992 export production stood at 274,539 tonnes,4 although this steadily reduced into the late 1990’s as global trade arrangements impacted production and St Lucia’s elevated position amongst global banana exports began in decline. Despite this banana exports still made up 4.75% of the island’s GDP single handedly in 1998, at a 59% share of domestic exports (Government of Saint Lucia 1998). By 2012 this number had fallen to 22% of exports (OEC n.d.), and, drastically, by 2020, to 0.34%, with crude petrol, chemical products and beer all now sitting above the formerly indominable banana.5

In direct contrast to this decline comes the rise of the tourism industry. From the 1990’s onwards St Lucia has actively sought to establish itself as a luxury tourism destination, primarily marketed at Europeans and North Americans. The offer to those targeted—an irresistible package of sweeping white sand beaches and crystal blue shores to jump into, all against a backdrop of lush, verdant forests and the impossibly picturesque Piton mountains.6 Prominent in this marketing has been the establishment of St Lucia as a honeymoon destination. A poll of 1500 US based couples from travel firm Expedia placed St Lucia within its list of top ten honeymoon hotspots, alongside the ever popular Maldives and the very metropolis of love, Paris (PR Newswire 2022). From 2011 onward the island has seen the share of its GDP that emanates from international tourism leap from 20.36% up to 48.08% in 2018 (Global Economy n.d.), today representing an industry responsible for almost a majority of the island’s international income. The totality of this shift, however, from the homogeneity of one industry to the homogeneity of another, has rendered all of the island’s eggs in another demonstrably precarious basket, an unfortunately familiar pattern since the monocrop days of the sugar industry. World Bank data shows the St Lucian economy to have taken a 24.4% hit in the year 2020 as Covid induced lock downs and the immense uncertainty generated by them saw a once vibrant industry shrivel almost overnight. Neighbouring Barbados, a more diversified economy where tourism is estimated by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) to contribute around 29.5% to the island’s GDP (WTTC 2022a), shrunk a comparatively modest 13.3%. These numbers, striking in their enormity, are regrettably far from existing merely as economic models. The WTTC describes that whilst in 2019 tourism made up an again monumental 80.1% of total jobs on the island, the COVID-19 disruption of 2020 saw this drop 21.9% to 58.2%, before recovering to 69% in 2021 (WTTC 2022b).

This shift towards tourism has seen the island’s international image shift with it, something successive national governments have been keen to shape. Leaving Hewanorra International Airport just outside of Vieux Fort on the south of the island, or at least when I did back in 2020, you are greeted by a large billboard which reads, familiarly, ‘Welcome Back!’.7 On its left side appears a woman dressed in colourful kweyol fabric garments with a headwrap obscuring her hair and several beaded necklaces. Displayed prominently and overtly from the only road heading out of the airport, patently, this is the image of St Lucia and its people that the national government wants to offer its visitors. A vibrant, energetic, welcoming island. An island in touch with its continental roots and the African heritage that underlies St Lucian kweyol culture. An island with its own unique cultural identity for visitors to explore.

On my own journey out of the airport and on greeting this sign for the first time, I wondered how much such attempts at representation are informed by a Jamaican blueprint in which a distinctive cultural and spiritual force, the Rastafari movement, is utilised in the islands own marketing of itself.8 Utilising this same blueprint, St Lucia and its citizens are presented with plentiful opportunities to tap into the broad international familiarity of a Rastafari movement incredibly vibrant within its own borders. A movement which is able to offer visitors the opportunity to visit a Rastafari stewarded and operated natural waterfalls brimming with verdant beauty and spiritual energy, or a Rastafari guided botanical tour through the islands central rain forests. Whilst the government is yet to seek to engage the Rastafari community to any meaningful extent in this, some of those in the community are already busy maximising these opportunities.

4. Rastafari Theology, Environmentality and Tourism

Rastafari is a monotheistic spirituality which first took shape in an identifiable form in 1930 in Jamaica. This year saw the coronation of emperor Haile Selassie and empress Menen Asfaw to the Ethiopian throne, an ascension recognised by several Jamaican preachers imbedded in the syncretic Revival movement as the anointing of a messiah appointed to deliver Black communities and to redeem the world. The movement is deeply heterogenous and decentralised with no core texts or doctrine beyond a recognition in some form of ‘King Selassie’s divinity. Whilst some members venerate and study the Bible others vehemently oppose it and cast ‘fire’ on it as a tool central in imperialist conquest. Within an often panentheistic outlook, members frequently articulate a cosmology in which all are seen to exist in and through the Almighty, with a pervasive communicative force described as ‘vibrations’ serving to connect every single being in the universe.

The movement is born out of and represents still today a fierce anti-colonial critique and a desire to both castigate and repair the ruinously evil damage meted out to the world through imperialism and slavery. An immensely prominent strand of this has been advocacy of repatriation of African descended communities ‘back to Africa’ to be reunited, physically and spirituality, with a land forcibly removed from ancestors. In this, the Western corrupt and wicked world is identified in Biblical parallel as ‘Babylon’ whilst the ‘Zion’ of Africa is seen as the pure, original and unadulterated. Being deeply imbedded in this pain often manifests a deep suspicion and hostility towards Western power structures and knowledge systems.

Ecological concern and a grounding in the environmental are integral to the Rastafari Livity (lived philosophy)9 of those I researched amongst and of Rastafari communities globally. An important locus for the development of the Rastafari movement came amidst the pain, poverty and contamination of the ghettos of 1930’s Kingston. Lacking the means of achieving physical separation from the filth and artificial pollutants of these surroundings, the nascent Rastafari community, building on its Myal and Revival foundations (Chevannes 1994, pp. 16–25), developed a means of ritual separation which sought to reject in its entirety this industrially, colonially, manifested squalor. This ritual separation would eventually develop into what now today constitutes the ‘Ital’ rubric, an idealisation of, and a yearning towards, all acts of being and consumption, the greenest and most natural forms of all in creation—human, non-human, earth, spirit. It is the amongst these most natural forms that we are able to witness all things as being as close to the original form the Almighty placed them into existence. Now apart from Kingston’s slums the Rastafari movement still finds itself amidst the contamination and pollution inherent within a life in the industrialised, neo-colonial abomination that is Babylon. As such, physical separation from this in a return to a primordial existence in the hills and forests is yearned for. If this is not possible, and indeed even if it is, separation is achievable through aligning oneself with the primordial as much as is possible—letting one’s body exist naturally, adopting foodways which centralise the organic and eschew the processed, and avoiding interaction with anything that represents artificiality. An ‘Ital Livity’ in which ones personal spirituality and materiality aligns itself as closely with the natural as is achievable.

Many articulate a panentheistic cosmology which sees all in this Iration, broadly the created universe, as connected in and through God. In this I am in agreement with Anna Kasafi-Perkins that many Rastafari embody a spirituality which attests that ‘God is Iration’, and that ‘everything that exists is in God even as God is beyond everything exists’ (Perkins 2022, pp. 14–15). In this, the Rastafari I have researched amongst invariably offer the view that every single being in Iration right down to the very smallest microbes are connected to the Almighty, and through this ubiquitous connection also connected to everything else in Iration. As described this connection is often described in terms of ‘vibrations’, an energy which is wholly pervasive and through which its inhabitant parts communicate in every action and every utterance. Through this veneration of the primordial alongside a sense that all in creation exist in and through the Almighty, the protection of and desire to be amongst the organic forms a central part of Rastafari spirituality and serves to contextualise the forms of eco-tourism engaged in by those in St Lucia today.

Beyond St Lucia, Rastafari ecological perspectives from diverse locations are increasingly being documented in scholarship. Fox & Smith’s excellent exploration of Rastafari women’s activism for the welfare of water and woodland in Trinidad and Tobago stands foremost amongst these. Charted is the work of Fondes Amandes Community Reforestation Project (FACRP), a Rastafari cofounded environmental initiative which has over decades successfully bought the Fondes Amandes area back to its verdant, primordial best. FACRP cofounder Akilah Jaramogi speaks vividly to this sense of connection in nature. ‘I see the bush as a sacred space where I can connect with my Creator, be myself, connect with nature, connect with the animals […] it was the callings. It was for me a mission’ (Fox and Smith 2016, p. 151). Sibanda has extensively charted Rastafari lived experiences in Zimbabwe, making the case that localized Rastafari perspectives enhance ‘the ecological and social responsibilities of the entire globalized village in the context of the climate change challenge’ (Sibanda 2017, p. 424). This is pertinent within a global ‘village’ ever more interested in visiting its Caribbean corner. Ever since visitors, predominantly from the West, started travelling to and holidaying in the Caribbean from the 1950’s onwards, the Rastafari movement has found itself in contact with tourism. These encounters came to the movement largely without its consent, and today in parallel the region marketize the movement often without its consent. Chevannes describes a present reality in which Rastafari, and particularly the reggae music that has sprung forth from it, is engaged with as part of a “culture tourism”, which seeks to commodify the movements sound, imagery and philosophy ready for mass market consumption (Nettleford 1989, p. 5). Niaah and Niaah further this in noting the centrality of Rastafari spirituality in Jamaica’s marketing of itself as the home of Bob Marley to the point where the island has ‘almost been simplified as being just a backdrop for a Bob Marley tale’ (Niaah and Niaah 2008, p. 46). This picture is, however, not simply oriented in one direction as this paper will explore. In Jamaica numerous Rastafari operated tourism endeavors have grown to become established, commercially successful enterprises. Perhaps foremost amongst these is the Rastafari Indigenous Village (RIV) outside Montego Bay. Lewis offers a case study, and notes that for this community acknowledging that ‘tourism could be used as a mechanism of development, sustainability and outreach was difficult for the group because of its anti-capitalist tradition’. A Rastafari movement which has decried tourism as “whore-ism” (Lewis 2017, p. 58). The RIV embodies a sentiment raised by some including those in this paper, that it is crucial that Rastafari reclaim its cultural assets and begin to channel the vast profits made in its name into the movement. The RIV continues to flourish, and in 2017 was highlighted by the Jamaican government as a success story during a United Nations World tourism Organization (Gleaner 2017). We will explore this tension between commodification and empowerment in the pages ahead.

More proximately is the Mount Kailash Rejuvenation Center up in the hills on the Castries/Dennery district border in St Lucia. Operated eponymously by the ‘Rt Hon Priest Kailash Leonce’, a Rastafari spiritual leader and ‘grand master herbal physician’, Mount Kailash offers nature oriented tutelage and retreats to visitors interested in experiencing ‘all natural-nourishment’ that ‘aligns with the ancient ways’ (Mount Kailash 2025). Priest Kailash is a figure of wide recognition across the Caribbean having featured on TV and radio throughout the region offering guidance on health and natural botanical remedies whilst the Center has been featured in National Geographic (Monk 2025). The Center is popular with both Rastafari and non-Rastafari globally, and many Rastafari I encounter in the UK have expressed a desire to pay a visit at some point. I took a brief trip to the Center during fieldwork and met with Priest Kailash but did not engage in prolonged discussion about the Center’s business operations which seem to provide those at the site with self-sufficiency. Mount Kailash stands as an example of a St Lucian Rastafari ecotourism venture of international repute, and serves to speak to both to the global demand for experiences such as these and what might can be achieved by Rastafari on the island.

5. Rastafari Endeavors

Tourisms status as occupying the very centre of economic life in St Lucia, an industry in the recent past and likely close future responsible for around four out of five jobs, renders the trade almost inescapable in the day to day life of the island as you move around it. The roadside bars, restaurants and vendors looking to entice with the promise of refreshment. The drivers who ferry visitors back and forth from the airport in the very south to the resorts in the very north multiple times a day. The hotels that loom from hillside and seaside spots. The fisherfolk in the markets whose produce is prized by hotel buyers aiming to offer guests a taste of local, yet is imperilled by those same tourists who take it upon themselves to cut open fishing cages when scuba diving.10

For the Rastafari communities in Iyanola levels of willingness towards engaging with this industry are varied. Those willfully and gainfully employed in it, and those found in the wake of an economic vessel of cruise ship magnitude, bobbing and dipping in the waves as it passes in and out of port. In the former category, I encountered hotel employees and tour operators. In the latter, farmers selling produce to fellow citizens employed in the industry whose purchasing power was inextricably tied to its fortunes. Somewhere in the middle perhaps, traders whose business was prior to the pandemic constituted in part by tourists such as a restaurant operator and a natural cosmetic goods manufacturer whose main stall was in a city centre mall popular with those visiting the island. Such a context represents both opportunity and oppression for many Rastafari I spoke with, often simultaneously. Some are wary of a totalitarian economic input bringing large amounts of capital onto the island, but one which by this same measure is hegemonic and hard to forge ahead without. One which generates large amounts of fiscal revenue but is inextricably tied to colonial expansion, replicating its patterns and furthering unequal power dynamics. As one of my interlocutors Empress Dannie put it, the ‘crass’ reality of the presence of luxury hotels on former plantations. Former plantations where invariably white guests ‘play volleyball under the tree they use to hang people from’ as they are served by the ‘descendants of those who use to hang from it’. Concern was also levelled at the environmentally degradative nature of an industry that throws up huge concrete shells that stand as ‘monuments’ to a ‘neo-colonial age’, but one whose vast financial resources might just as easily enable future protection of the island’s wild expanses were it to manifest differently. As Ras Jeg put it, ‘a building you have to maintain it, an environment maintain itself. So which is cheaper? You maintain the environment and you can still create livelihoods out of the environment’. This does not have to preclude tourism. ‘You could build a hotel in the environment without building a building, yuh see?’. Huts and houses constructed out of natural materials like those seen in Rastafari communities all over the island and indeed on Mount Kailash can provide a connected experience unavailable within concrete. Ital inspired eco-tourism can as such offer lodgings within the environment rather than on top of the environment.

The fragility of the industry as demonstrated by COVID-19 was also in the minds of many. Jah Lamb, a restaurateur whose business had before lockdown been frequented by tourists and cruise ship passengers, had been forced to ask fundamental questions of his livelihood. ‘COVID-19 a big lesson on how to be self-reliant and how to go back to your roots, because St Lucia is based on tourism and Covid show us a lesson, like where it is now yu nuh? […] I feel after the Covid lesson more people gravitate back to the land because agriculture is keeping us right now […] agriculture is the backbone and its always been the backbone’. For Jah Lamb Covid served as a potent reminder that agriculture offered an ultimate reliability that tourism never could. Something that had always sustained the Rastafari people and always would. This critique was furthered by others, with COVID-19 demonstrating not just the fickle nature of tourism but the over reliance of the island on imported agricultural produce. Empress Dannie put it that ‘COVID-19 has showed us that tourism could be no more within hours of a simple shutdown […] what you find is to keep the community, to keep the country, to keep the village going you need food and I do not think in St Lucia presently we have any sustainable farm that could provide us with the amount of food we need’. These articulations represent dual motivation for those who would advocate agriculture over eco-tourism, a pursuit not only freer from Babylonian taint but one with immediate self-preservation inbuilt. For some I spoke with the critiques here overpowered any potential benefits and drew a stance of resentment and resistance towards the industry. For others, tourism was something not to be repelled but utilised. An entirely pervasive economic reality that represented great potential in empowering the island’s Rastafari community towards its own goals and ambitions.

Those who were of this persuasion did not advocate a vision for tourism as it was so pervasively practiced across Iyanola in the present. Instead, the ventures operated by those I spoke with in the community could be counted under the category of ‘eco-tourism’. The UN World Tourism Organisation defines eco-tourism as ‘nature-based forms of tourism in which the main motivation of the tourists is the observation and appreciation of nature as well as the traditional cultures prevailing in natural areas’. One which ’contains educational and interpretation features’ and ‘minimises negative impacts upon the natural and socio-cultural environment’ (UNWTO n.d.). During my time on the island I engaged with Ras Jeg, a prominent conservationist who operates tours of the island’s mangroves and nature reserves whilst also serving as a government advisor on conservation who very much grounded his operation within these terms. Eco-tourism, he described, represented the opportunity to move away from Western defined, and Western benefitting, models and towards one which offered protection of the environment, self-sufficiency for the Rastafari community and the spreading of indigenous knowledge of environments and landscapes. Here, guests are toured through the local environment whilst being instructed about how indigenous modes of conversation are in operation to ensure their long term survival. These tours, he said, ‘have to be environmentally friendly’ in guiding visitors sensitively through protected landscapes. This extends to the materials employed to render these areas accessible, such as steps made from mud and local wood or railings made from bamboo. A means of observing and feeling an environment, a place shared by human and non-human alike, utilising only that which was in this space to begin with.

Further, his tours have also offered those communities based around the mangroves alternative revenue streams as they are now able to sell locally produced handicrafts to those who come through a few times a month.11 This is particularly significant given that the previous primary revenue stream had been the production and sale of ‘mangrove sticks’, a fuel source made from the felling and processing of ecologically crucial mangrove trees. As Jeg explained to me it is these trees that not only constitute and support an ‘ecosystem’ in of themselves, but also serve to ‘buffer’ the island’s coast line from wind and waves and thus minimise coastal erosion. Jeg was conscious, however, not to replicate the monocrop nature of the island’s tourism industry as it currently exists. As well as the production and sale of crafts, he was currently engaged in connecting the mangrove communities with the ‘ancient’ practice of sea moss farming and the production of a variety of food and cosmetic products from it that appeal to tourists and locals alike.12 In this instance, eco-tourism has empowered local communities and helped to limit the destruction of ecosystems essential to St Lucia’s coastal protection.

Ras Faiye served as the proprietor of an eco-tourism venture in a verdant rainforest relief towards the centre of the island. After our first meeting he offered to take me on a tour of the site he had been working on for several years which featured some villas for holiday rental, a gentle stream at its foot, a landscaped slope into the valley and a manicured garden peeking out through the lush wild of its surroundings. Now operating the site with a business partner, Faiye saw ecotourism in the form of a walking trail he had established as the most self-sustaining and sensitive option for the land he served as guardian of. An operation which revelled in the wild nature of the island rather than seeking to obscure or destroy it. ‘I just developed a [walking] trail because the terrain was not conducive for hiking’,13 recognizing and working with the land as it lay rather than attempting to alter its topography. Today, it offers a route which takes visitors on a ten kilometre journey up and down the nearby hills and forests. With the trail in place accommodation was advertised online, and Faiye described that interest was starting to build. He stated that this was largely coming from tourists explicitly seeking out ‘ecotourism experiences’, but he had hoped that a venture such as his, one which fused comfortable accommodation and well maintained landscapes with a very nearby ‘wild’, might serve as a ‘gateway’ into ecotourism excursions for those residing in resorts who make up the bulk of St Lucia’s tourist numbers. Those for whom the hotel beach often represents greater appeal than that which surrounds it. Faiye thus saw his work as part of a process which can change attitudes and itineraries, gently bringing tourists away from the artificiality of the resort and towards the authenticity of the rainforest.

Perhaps the most established Rastafari operated tourist enterprise I encountered came in the form of Latille Falls, a natural waterfall complex close to the town of Micoud on the island’s eastern flank, headed up by Ras Sly and his son. As well as its primary attraction, the site boasts a pond, several areas of planted gardens, a bar area, and several guest accommodations huts for those seeking a longer stay. During my time frequenting the site one of these was occupied by a woman from the UK seeking respite to recover from a cancer diagnosis who described the tangible spiritual ‘energy’ of the place as a particular draw. The waterfall itself included several bamboo walkways linking various fall areas all reached by a journey down a steep incline of wood and mud steps and flanked by a variety of tall, lush green ferns and towering trees. The site itself was powered entirely through the solar energy collected by several large panels dotted around the site and a hydroelectricity machine located upstream. At the entrance to the largest of the pools came a set of steps hewn into the smooth rock that surrounded the water. ‘Dat is Lalibella’, Sly solemnly informed me, in reference to the rock hewn churches of Ethiopia frequently venerated by Rastafari the world over. Sly saw the falls as not only offering visitors a very primal physical connection through a dip in the pool or time spent amongst the greenery, but a very spiritual one as well. He described that ‘on earth what you recognise is there are certain energy spots’, places that tangibly ‘embolden the human spirit’ and instil a sense of tranquility. ‘You see here, here is a big earth spot. This is why everybody is attracted here. I see some kind of wisdom here, the whole topography and the way even the stream there. There [is] some type of spirituality going on here’. A place then whose popularity is attributable not only to the beauty of its naturality, but to the spirituality which surrounds it. Sly’s assessment of this attraction certainly bore out, as the site remained busy throughout my time there mostly with local St Lucian visitors even in absence of the regular busloads of tourists who descended on the falls before COVID-19.14

Jeg and Faiye’s’s operations were fairly small scale and operated by themselves and an occasional colleague, whilst Sly’s venture might be seen as a medium scale enterprise providing as it did for himself as well as several family members who maintained the site and served guests making their stay. All of them present opportunities for scalability in different ways. Jeg was keenly aware of global directions toward increased interest in ecotourism, and was keen to make himself increasingly available to hotels looking to connect guests with these experiences. His individual expertise is impossible to replicate and is a unique selling point but with training employees could be bought into the operation to allow multiple tours to run in different locations simultaneously. Faiye was actively pursuing this objective and was on the lookout for more property adjacent to rainforest that he might add to his portfolio. Sly’s offering was geographically fixed but expansion around it was very much ongoing, with plans for more guest accommodation in the offing. Sly had previously hosted young Europeans interested in Rastafari on workaway schemes to aid in their building which he described as having been edifying exchanges of both wisdom and labour. The establishment of an on-site restaurant offering Ital cuisine to the steady stream of visitors represents another easy means of scaling up.

6. Ecotourism and Governmental Engagement

These Rastafari led ventures form part of a wider global ecotourism context. Stronza’s review of anthropology of tourism engagements with ecotourism notes a disunited consensus on its potential to empower locals and to protect native ecosystems. She rightly notes a ‘fear’ present amongst some scholars ‘that the rhetoric of ecotourism is a guise for business as usual’, quoting Vickers who puts it that ‘most of what passes for “ecotourism” is comprised of business ventures whose aim is to maximise the profits of tourist agencies and professional guides’ (Stronza 2001, p. 275). Rastafari endeavors in this vein proceed from a deeply ecological spiritual foundation which distances the movement from allegations of opportunism such as these, though of course does not render them an impossibility.

Beyond this reverential spirituality and deep, intimate connection with the earth, the above enterprises are distinctive in an international context by their entirely self-driven nature. Ventures born out of the energy and will of those at the heart of them, aside from governmental support. This reality puts these operators at odds with those highlighted by Das and Chatterjee in countries such as India, Mexico, Thailand and Turkey where ‘strong centralised public administrative system[s]’ and an ‘unwillingness of politicians’ to ‘distribute power’ serve to act as barriers to a form of ‘community participation’ in eco-tourism (Das and Chatterjee 2015, pp. 9–10). Such centralisation limits the ability of local communities to empower themselves and to establish a means of economic subsistence, contra to the example of the mangrove communities, which might further allow for the protection of their immediate environments and the intimate and inimitable knowledge they have of them. Those featured in this paper fall at the complete opposite end of such a spectrum, as organisations entirely without government involvement, often even at a regulatory level, and thus without government funding and support. Something of a middle ground between this and the over regulation of those countries described above, of government investment in and prioritisation of ecotourism, may yield benefits for a variety of stakeholders.

In July 2019 the centre-right United Workers Party (UWP) administration of Alan Chastanet launched the ‘Voluntary National Review’ of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The report highlights tourism as one its ‘key result areas’ or KRA’s, intended to propel the nation forward to economic growth, job increases and a better environment for all St Lucians. Any mention of eco-tourism or even sustainability is, however, conspicuous by its absence. The potentiality of this quiet laying in a desire not to unsettle the large tourism multi-nationals that lay behind the economic behemoth that fuels, predominantly petrochemically,15 so much of what the island is and what it has, should not be discounted.16 The 2021 general election bought in the centre-left St Lucia Labour Party (SLP) administration of Phillip J Pierre. Pierre himself addressed the delegates of the COP26 summit in Glasgow by describing that small islands like his own were ‘in crisis’. These islands, he decried, were facing a ‘code red’, as sea level rises and ocean acidification threaten their very existence (The Official YouTube Channel of the Saint Lucia Government 2021). Whilst the blame for these impacts of global pollution undoubtably lies primarily with the industrialised nations of Europe, North America and Asia, there is action and example setting Pierre could engage in in his own patch. Moving the island’s predominant industry away from large construction projects and their associated destruction of natural environments towards a focus on smaller, more bespoke offerings such as that offered by Ras Faiye through governing funding and subsidies. Reducing reliance on fossil fuels in favour of renewable solutions like those present at Lattile Falls with Ras Sly. Such moves would allow the island to do as much as it might towards environmental protection.

Shifting the island’s model represents further opportunity in this. The Rastafari operators in this paper offer a blueprint for a model which embraces the emerald environs of the island, and governmental co-operation here might allow for these to be expanded and refined whilst the expertise of those behind them might flow in the other direction. The foundations for such a collaboration exist in Iyanola already, with engagement between the island’s Rastafari umbrella organisation the Iyanola Council for the Advancement of Rastafari (ICAR) and the national government and PM’s office already visible across several channels and issues from COVID-19 vaccine take up (Powell 2022a) to agricultural initiatives.17 Indeed, specifically within the tourism space one interviewee I spoke with who ran a boat tour business had received help and support through the ‘Recover St Lucia’ scheme which sought to aid the island’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic through subsidies and grants (Gaillard 2020). Elsewhere in the Caribbean the National Rastafari Organisation of Trinidad offer similar example of Rastafari/government engagement around developmental aid work. Engaging with the group, Alvaré identifies within Haile Selassie’s legacy of modernization in Ethiopia ‘explicit instructions for how to carry out development work’, something he denotes as ‘Selassie’s “Gospel of Development”’ (Alvaré 2014, p. 136). Such collaboration might not, however, be universally embraced.

7. Tourism—To Embrace or Resist

All of these enterprises were described by those who fronted them as seeking to move the Rastafari community towards a commonly held vision of complete self-sufficiency. Tapping into the enormous wealth bought to the island through the tourism industry a meaningful way could represent the opportunity for Rastafari communities to become reliant on their own means of production—to offer food and gainful labour to community members, and, importantly, render a community answerable to itself.18 This desire, common amongst Rastafari communities across the world, came across to me in Iyanola as informed by two primary sources. First, a history of persecution, commodification and co-optation in St Lucia and the broader Caribbean (Powell 2022b, pp. 44–52). Decades of government transgressions including violent harassment, denial of education and employment and confiscation of land and property have rendered an inability to trust a ‘system’ which has caused the community immense pain and suffering and has manifested a desire to no longer be dependent on its swaying whims. Second comes a broader cosmological foundation within a Babylon/Zion dichotomy which lies at the very heart of the global movement. Babylon, the epitome of wickedness, artificiality and impurity. Zion, the peak of the good, the natural and the pure. Babylon is often epitomised in human terms by the immense wickedness of Western imperialism, colonialism and the enslavement it manifested. Its tendrils are understood to be immensely far reaching still now, defining global and national economic landscapes, informing racist cultural policies and laying at the foundation of a cosmological rift in which torrents of deleterious energy have been unleashed into an ‘Iration’ which continues to suffer the ill effects from it (Powell 2022b, pp. 64–66). For this reason, the expression of Babylon that the modern nation state is often considered to be, is to be avoided and eschewed.

A fusion of these two aspects alongside a historic and deep spiritual connection with the earth and the environment most frequently results in an agrarian manifestation of this vision of self-sufficiency. I have explored this notion elsewhere, as many in the community idealise Rastafari farming communes operated in an ‘Ital’ philosophy which provides for all of the humans and non-humans residing within it whilst bolstering all of those surrounding it (Powell 2022a). Self-contained and entirely isolatable from the pervasive pollution inherent within a life in Babylon. Here, pouring ones positive energy, or vibrations, into the soil is capable not only of producing the edible means of this separation, but of healing the hurt unleashed by centuries of colonial ‘sufferation’ and the negative energy it has manifested (Powell 2022b, pp. 65–67). These widely held notions of separation and self-sufficiency are, quite literally, well contained within these agricultural models. They are, however, presented with an alternative by those Rastafari who would seek to advocate for engagement with and profit from a tourism industry which is by its very nature dependent on interaction with the outside world. Further, particularly in St Lucia’s case, interaction with those emanating from nations carrying significant Babylonian baggage such as the US and the UK. Indeed, tourists replicating journeys made by their colonial forebears. For those I spoke with making such an advocation, a sole focus on agricultural endeavour limits the impact that the community might be able to have on the island and on Iration more broadly. Whilst agriculture, domestic and large scale, is invariably seen as a vital means of provision and of endowing the environment with the good energy held within the hearts of those tilling its soil, those advocating eco-tourism offer the industry as capable of achieving an effect which is not just enriching but protective. In this, eco-tourism can transform the island’s tourism industry away from concrete megaliths and ‘back’ towards something which much more closely resembles the primordial blueprint for this world as it was laid out by the Almighty. As can be seen in the enterprises described above, all of those who have contributed to this paper operate their respective endeavors in a way which seeks to showcase the earth in its most natural form. Any modifications made to the land are done in a way which simultaneously utilises natural resources to enhance natural resources, with bamboo and local wood employed to create pathways and steps. Intervention, as with Rastafari Ital farming, is low. The naturality and the primordiality of these destinations and experiences serve as their very selling points which are pitched to those who might be tempted towards them. Not only entertaining or intriguing, but restorative. For Jeg and Faiye seeking to increase awareness of the environments around them, educational. For Sly and the pools which emanate this alluring energy, overtly spiritual. In this, Rastafari ecotourism can be seen to have a similarly anti-establishment and decolonising impact as the agricultural communes which occupy so much of the movements romantic imagination. Openly and implicitly critiquing a destructive model which would seek to promote, in typically Babylonian fashion, the artificial over the natural. The all-inclusive pool-side bar over the rainforest trek. Further, demonstrating to an all-conquering tourism industry that those making decisions in Iyanola today need not continue the ruinous legacy of the island’s colonisers in blindly prioritising extraction and exploitation over the wellbeing of all within and upon the island. Indicating that a model of local and community ownership works and can generate capital which can provide autonomy and independence.

These views are, however, not universally shared. For some in the island’s Rastafari community, engagement in eco-tourism still inherently relies on interaction with an overwhelming level of taint from the vestiges of a Babylonian system. Monetary exchange, industrialised transportation and production, governmental regulation, national identities and passports. All of these are wholly corrupt instruments of a regime which seeks to control and weaken Rastafari physical communities and the spirituality within them. As such any interaction with them is far too grave a prospect to bear, and the only option for Rastafari self-sufficiency and autonomy is the establishment of an agrarian commune entirely separate from these corrupting forces. Even within this there are layers. Rastafari engagement with government through ICAR has previously sought to establish an memorandum of understanding that would include the provision of land for Rastafari communities and the establishment of agrarian communes (Powell 2022a, p. 94). Whilst this has the backing of some, for others this initiative is inherently corrupted by its association with government. Those advocating engagement with tourism might forward the view that without a concerted challenge to a Western model of construction and displacement in an industry which dominates the island wholly eventually these agrarian communes might emerge as the last remaining verdant spaces in St Lucia. Islands of green surrounded by seas of grey concrete.

St Lucia’s history of uneven and hegemonically geared land distribution, one shared with many Caribbean neighbors, is also worth noting here. The means by which those I encountered throughout fieldwork acquired land is varied. Whilst some had inherited family land or established themselves on a plot alongside family members others had occupied ‘Crown Land’, land de jure owned by the state but upon which they had established themselves to the point of de facto ownership (Powell 2022b, p. 117). Others had started agriculture operations on the often large plots previously under the ownership of plantation families long since departed but still in legal ownership of the land. Perhaps a newer incarnation of this phenomenon are the vast banana groves of varying degrees of activity left over from the heyday several decades prior, whilst St Lucia’s new monocrop industry and its hotel and tour operators continue to purchase land across the island.19 Though this represents a complicated picture for those seeking to establish large scale agrarian communes, few are deterred. The successful establishment of Rastafari agriculture operations at Roots Farm in Dennery and Zimbabwe Farm in Des Barras offer clear demonstration that Rastafari farming is viable.

At their core these outlooks on agriculture and tourism perhaps offer two differing views of self-sufficiency. One which foregrounds economic autonomy over a model of absolute self-dependence. In practice, as with all in a Rastafari movement defined by its heterogeny, they exist on a continuum. At one end, isolationist agrarian communities and the other, those named above, reaching out and attempting to draw visitors in. Such a continuum, however, offers the suggestion of a middle way. Agricultural enterprises alongside a tapping into the enormous industry that tourism represents in St Lucia. This is indeed a model that bears out for many who cherish their own small scale agricultural endeavors but who have a connection to the tourist trade in one form or another. The path to Rastafari self-sufficiency and autonomy in contemporary St Lucia, and indeed towards the proper care and protection of its environments, may yet find use for both.

8. Conclusions

The Rastafari models of ecotourism outlined in this paper demonstrate the multi-faceted means by which the community challenges Western epistemologies and means of operation whilst seeking to establish its own forms of self-sufficiency. Within them, a central spiritual orientation toward the organic and away from the artificial manifests functions which foreground and celebrate the natural. In a contemporary St Lucian economic context dominated by tourism, these operations serve to critique and to exemplify different models within a largely homogenous industry. Operations which have the potential not only to tap into the vast financial wealth bought onto the island by tourists, but to win the hearts and minds of those making these journeys to seek out naturality in their future ventures.

Such engagement, however, is not without challenge, as the negative forces of Babylon present the possibility of corruption and taint for any of those engaging with the capitalist behemoth that is the industry. Within this a spectrum emerges between separation and integration. Avoidance and embrace. Whilst the aims of self-sufficiency and autonomy underly both of these varying outlooks, they offer two different visions as to how these goals might be attained. Ultimately, both present opportunities for Rastafari communities in Iyanola to reach the same idealised destination.