Saving our hills

This area carries the alluring name Verdant Vale, which suggests rolling pastures and green hills. And once upon a time, this was so. But now it is the home of four rock quarries, where formerly forested hills have been bulldozed and dynamited into hideous, frightening bare earthscapes.

Notwithstanding regulations, none of these quarries have adequate settling pits to collect silt from rainwater run-off. Almost all of the waste overburden created by mining the stone washes down and pollutes the Arima River. The silt will continue to wash down for decades after the stone is all taken.

River life is being buried in quarry silt. As you leave the Vale and the quarries, and start ascending again, you will be in green forested surroundings once more. After winding through a piece of lush forest, where the tall trees shade the road and beams of sparkling sunlight pierce the canopy to create rainbows in the mist, you will suddenly find yourself in the open again — looking at acres of christophene plantation on the hillside, above and below the road. The road winds around perilous corners through this “farm” high in the hills. At first there is an appeal to it all, for the views up, across and down the valley are spectacular.

But then you realise that more than a mile of important roadway is beset all along by landslips.

Land deforested for this farming is slipping from above, across the roadway, sometimes blocking the road altogether; and deforested land below the roadway has slipped, and continues to slip, creating grave dangers to all road users.

If you are brave enough, you will re-enter the forest and find that for the most part, the road is clear, solid and safe for traffic.

And if you keep on driving, whether to beautiful Asa Wright Nature Centre, the villages of Brasso Seco or Morne la Croix, or all the way to Blanchisseuse, you will become aware of something you may not have “studied” before. And this is that all of the major landslips you encounter, all of the retaining walls being built, whether above or below the road, are on sites where the original forest trees have been felled in order to “plant garden”.

There are areas you can look at today which have recently been “cleaned” by food crop farmers to plant their gardens. Monitor these clearings, because within five years, the slopes will begin to slip away as landslides which damage so many of our rural hillside roads.

We need to learn one of nature’s basic lessons — removing trees and forests from hill slopes will cause the hills to collapse and eventually wash away.

That is an absolute fact and in order to try to prevent the hills slipping away we build expensive retaining walls, a total waste of money incurred by unnecessary forest destruction.

Some will rail against these “vandals” who go and cut tracts of our forests in order to plant food.

And I understand that. But these people who have no other land to plant, work ever so hard to fell and clear the forest, then to plant and care for it all before they can reap the food we (well some us!) eat.

We should not need to have to plant gardens on forested hillsides.

But most of us do not drive these hills and valleys. So we do not see the devastation wrought by quarrying and injudicious farming.

Some of us take pride in how we have “developed” some of our valleys closer to town.

Diego Martin is the prime example of the havoc we have wrought.

Destroying all of the lower reaches of the original forest, to clad the valley in asphalt and galvanize; “straightening” all of the former meandering rivulets into efficient concrete box drains, and turning the Diego Martin River into a concrete sewer, we have created the perfect flash-flood scenario every heavy rainfall, and more and more mountainsides wash into the sea.

The Maraval, St Ann’s and Santa Cruz valleys will follow Diego Martin, into development until destroyed.

It may be too late to save Diego Martin, but all of the other valleys can be saved if we take judiciously conscious decisions regarding forestry, agriculture, quarrying and “development”.

Can you imagine what would have occurred if the rain event which fell on the northern slopes of the Northern Range late last year had fallen on the southern slopes? Had all of the Arima, Lopinot, Caura, Maracas and Santa Cruz Rivers, in full flood, hit the silted Caroni River? Ponder that, disaster experts and doubters alike.

And save our forests and hills, for good reason.