Bonairians look after their nature well, she says, because they have to. Live on a small island ringed by coral and delicate marine life, and you learn quickly that garbage and sewage can't simply be dumped and forgotten — not without making the island unliveable within a generation.
Tourism cuts both ways here. Visitors bring their own waste with them — batteries, plastic bags, things the island is actively trying to phase out — and a large share of them dive or take part in other water sports, which puts direct pressure on the reefs. But tourism also generates the income that funds the cleanup: weekly domestic waste collection, street-sweeping machines, and public information campaigns aimed at both visitors and residents, built around a simple message — keep Bonaire clean.
She's careful not to lay every environmental problem at tourism's door. Pollution drifts in from other islands; overfishing is emptying the surrounding waters on its own terms; and global warming threatens every island community equally, tourism or not, by pushing sea levels higher.
Still, there's plenty tourists could do. Bonaire's sewage isn't purified before release into the sea, so conserving water matters more here than most visitors realise. Some hotels have already adopted a simple towel programme — leave your towel on the rail and it stays; drop it on the floor and you get a clean one — that's cut water and detergent use substantially.
I would like to point out to tourists: don't leave the air-conditioning on all day if you're not in your room. It doesn't make sense and it costs a lot of energy.
Batteries are a smaller but persistent headache — the island has no way to process them, so she asks visitors to simply take used ones home. And then there's the recurring disappointment over beaches: many tourists arrive expecting long stretches of sand and find something rockier and more coral-fringed instead.
A few hotels have floated a fix for that disappointment — building an artificial sand beach. She doesn't mince words about the idea. It would be disastrous for the environment, and for the coral in particular, trading a real ecosystem for a picture-postcard expectation that was never accurate to begin with.
The reef doesn't care what the brochure promised. It only cares what actually gets dumped in the water.