Signing away our birthright?

News of smelter officials ignoring summons to a meeting of the Joint Select Committee sounds a warning to all opposed to the smelters (both of them) and even more to those who find the latest news of a proposed ethylene plant(s) alarming – to say the least – with talk of 2,000 acres here, 800 acres there being signed away.

That news raises the spectre of a repeat of the horrific scenes reported in the Press when, so it’s said, sadists in bulldozers and backhoes encircled the area to be cleared and, driving all before them, worked their way inwards, to the centre, laying waste, terrifying and slaughtering wildlife that could not escape the machines.

The wholesale destruction of huge swathes of the natural environment to make way for industrial complexes is only part of the story. The tower blocks rising in Port-of-Spain tell another, even more destructive tale of woe: the destruction of the land itself as bulldozers and backhoes dig sand and gravel from the Northern Basin, leaving behind heaps of sterile spoil, and pools where mosquitoes breed.

Photographs of quarries tell only part of that story of desolation. You have to tour the quarries to begin to appreciate the scale of the destruction.

Fifteen years ago, in another place, I wrote a series of articles featuring the quarries in the Northern Basin, an area which was and, if all I hear of recent developments in the construction industry is true, still is a veritable Wild West where laws protecting the natural environment and protecting water supplies are flouted, where no one dares even to attempt to halt the devastation.

As a result of that series the Field Naturalists’ Club organised a field trip to the Northern Basin quarries; on seeing the second of four or five quarries on that trip, the late Noel Vaucroisson, artist and architect, turned to me and said: “You described these abandoned quarries as looking like moonscapes but I’d no idea they were this bad. It’s appalling.”

It was, and still is. Indeed it is even worse. But I doubt that worries those posing for photo opportunities, signing away acres, (surely that should be hectares since we went metric a decade or so ago?) and shaking hands with those who swear their plants pose no threat to human health. I doubt any of those signing contracts for, or cutting ribbons to open yet another multi storey office block have seen the abomination of desolation created by the quarries in the Northern Basin.

I repeat, only when you have seen the extent of the destruction for yourself can you begin to appreciate the problems future generations will face. A decade or so ago when last I visited National Quarries, I stood on the edge of what can best be described as a series of mini-canyons, the size of two-three American football fields from side to side and, as it were, goal mouth to goal mouth in the triangle of lands from Long Stretch to the quarry entrance on the road from Valencia to Toco Main Road.

But at least National Quarries is extracting all the material in one area, digging down to the next layer when the first is exhausted, and then the next.

When the digging has, perforce, to stop it’s possible that, like Frencham Ponds in the UK, the excavations will fill with water, creating lakes for recreation, for fishing and sailing.

Illegal quarriers scoop up the sand and gravel lying just below the surface and move on to destroy a next hectare or two of bush leaving the abandoned land a wilderness of heaps of spoil and stagnant pools because it’s too expensive, not “cost effective” to uncover a next layer of material; it’s much cheaper to destroy a next few hectares of bush. Land abandoned by the illegals will cost a pound and a crown – and then some – to level to make the land fit for use for housing, agriculture, or for recreation.

The loss of bush and wildlife is bad enough, the destruction of lands worse, but what will be the costs in human health and happiness when (for, as things are at the moment, what’s to stop them?) National Energy moves in to clear land for ethylene plants?

Every child born alive in TT has the human right to food, shelter and a clean, unpolluted environment – but what will be left of fertile land to grow food, rear cattle, pigs and poultry when a next who-knows how many hectares of productive land and protective bush have been bulldozed to make way for yet another industrial complex?

Surely, in a country as small as Trinidad, there are whole families living on land that is part of the 2000-or 800-acre tracts of land to be set aside for the new industrial complexes? Who knows how many more small farmers, how many little people, will be dispossessed, forced to move whether they will or no.

“Shelter is shelter – wherever it may be”, argue the powers-that-be as the ink dries on doom-laden documents signing away the land, and press photographers record the historic moments as the mighty pose with smiles and handshakes all round.

However, it is not the powers-that-be who will have to stand by and watch while their homes and gardens, their whole neighbour communities are destroyed.

And what effects may those plants have on our health? Is our birthright being signed away? What is ethylene? We’ll be answering those questions next week (annehilton@ rave-tt.net)