Teaching to save TT

At last, at long, long last on Tuesday, May 13, it is raining — but not, tragically, soon enough to save Tucker Valley, the hillsides of Maraval, St Ann’s, Cascade — and who knows how many other fire-ravaged valleys in the south-facing slopes of the Northern Range.

After one short, sharp shower caused minor flooding on the Eastern Main Road last week, it wouldn’t have surprised me to see photos and read stories of more floods in yesterday’s Newsday (May 14). And in the days and weeks to come when the rains set in in earnest — well, I don’t have to draw you a picture, do I, after all the pages of print I’ve filled with dire warnings of floods following the wholesale burning of bush and forest by the mischievous, the slash-and-burn gardeners and criminally stupid hunters and dotish burners of garden rubbish? But did anyone take me on when I wrote this on May 27, 1981 . . .? “The first few words of a newspaper article headlined ‘New Dawn for the PNM’ would have Dr Eric Williams turning in his grave — if he had one. As it is, his ashes must have stirred in the currents of the Gulf of Paria as the columnist wrote ‘The giant oak of the forest has been felled’ — and then compounded the insult to the shade of the late Prime Minister by more references to that potent symbol of Empire, the true, blue British oak. However, that insult is easily explained and forgiven in TT where children learn more about trees of temperate climates in the developed world than the native and imported tropical trees growing all around them. Almost every book, be they children’s fairy tales in primary school or set texts for English Literature in the GCE examinations, has been written by authors living in and writing about cold countries.

(2003 note: Today, thanks to new syllabuses and textbooks for primary and secondary schoolchildren, most now know a little about local trees, fruits and flowers). And so the child learns, without being taught, the distinctive shape of an oak leaf, the silhouette of a Douglas fir and the silken, papery smooth bark of the silver birch tree. Outside the classroom the child is exposed in supermarkets and stores to songs urging them to tie yellow ribbons round old oak trees . . . Not even our local songwriters, the calypsonians, praise the glory of the poui, the petrea, the silk-cotton and the canonball trees. Inside the Ministry of Education and Culture itself an official didn’t know that when you slash a bloodwood tree it “bleeds” thick, blood-red sap — until a foreign Field Naturalists’ Club member told him it was so. Nature programmes on TTT find no favour in the almighty advertisers’  eyes and so are never ever screened on prime time. The result is that only children of eccentric, nature-loving parents learn anything at home of the plants and animals of Trinidad and Tobago. Primary schools concentrate on getting children through Common Entrance;  in secondary schools there is little demand for the natural sciences. Young people leave school with heads crammed full of mathematics, social “science”, foreign languages — including English and its temperate country textbooks — and the arts.

The majority of adults young and old know little and care less about the causes of soil erosion, the value of both commercial timber and the ‘useless’ bush that protects water supplies, prevents erosion and controls flooding. Most can recognise a poui (when it is blooming), petrea, canonball and silk cotton tree and the native bois canot. But bloodwood, the naked Indian, the crappo, even the famous bois bande (to name but a few of the 138 trees species listed in the Forestry Division’s Manual of Dendrology Volume IV) are only known by name to some, and (with the exception of bois bande, which is the only local tree that appeals to calypsonians) not at all to others. Most of us know little of the forces of nature that affect all our lives. Yet knowledge of Nature is the key to protecting our homes, our lives, our environment. How can we expect a hillside gardener to understand the damage he’s doing to farmers, homes, business, factories, warehouses on the plains after he clears land by ‘slash-and-burn’ — when he’s never been taught in school the immense power of water pouring down the hills, and that leaves on tall trees are a protective umbrella preventing erosion and controlling flooding? How can we expect those who never had lessons on nature and environmental protection in school to realise that dumping causes floods and that health depends on keeping a clean scene? The parents are a lost cause, they’re too old to change. To save the TT environment, we must begin in primary school. This is why the Ministry is adding science to the Common Entrance syllabus.

Parents may hold their heads and bawl, but as long as education via Common Entrance is the gateway to success, there is no other effective means of saving Trinidad from the ignorance of Trinidadians. Provided that syllabus is well planned and those who teach it inspire our children with a loving concern for their country, there is hope that sometime in the future, when a next powerful citizen breathes his last, a columnist will write these words “The giant silk-cotton tree of the forest has been felled . . .” Although it seems the Ministry of Education took me on back in ‘81, it appears most of the nation’s teachers didn’t. Or weren’t given enough time in class to make sure their charges understood the importance of tree cover on hillsides. If they had, government ministers and those in opposition today would make the connection between bush fires and flooding — perhaps even understand that the only answer to forest fires is water bombers. We can only hope they’ll come to their sense in time, while we still have forests to save . . .