In the beginning, there was just the land: two beautiful islands off the coast of South America.
There were islands of mountains, plains and beautiful wetlands, forests of great trees filled the mountain valleys and clear cold water cascaded down the valleys.
The first people came by canoe, paddling across from the mainland. They named the larger island Iere, “Land of the Humming Bird”. They lived relatively quietly among the copious wildlife, which included flocks of the astonishingly brilliant Scarlet Ibis, and a proliferation of other colourful birds.
Strangers arrived in 1498, in the form of looters who came to take away anything of value to them. They named the island Trinidad, after a vow made by their leader, Christopher Columbus on “Holy Trinity Sunday”, to name his next landfall after the Christian “Holy Trinity”.
Presciently, the first land was seen as three mountain peaks, and Columbus saw this as a confirming sign and named the island La Trinidad. Notwithstanding the blessed portents, Columbus and future voyagers found nothing of value to take away, and Trinidad, and indeed Tobago, with a different history of early settlement, was largely ignored by the European colonisers.
In the late 1700’s, first the French, then the English, came as settlers and conquerors, respectively.
But it was the English who “developed” the colony, by destroying the forests to plant sugar and then to drill for oil. Towns were built, and railroads and roads constructed.
Soon the new settlers, that is “All ah we”, were bulldozing our mountains and forests, filling in the wetlands with the land taken from the hillsides, and “improving” the flow of our rivers by turning many of them into large concrete sewers.
In later years, when the price of the oil we produced soared beyond our dreams, we strove to turn our little islands into images of the concrete cities of Europe and North America, and we were doing this at a time when Europe had already discovered that, like King Midas, what they had acquired was not what they wanted.
They, who we were seeking to emulate, had realised that they wanted — nay, needed, the trees and grasslands, the rivers and lakes that they had destroyed.
But we plunged on.
Desperate in our insecurities to copy the vision which they were already denying, we became a people who seemed to hate all the beauty and natural wonders which once existed here.
The rush to desecrate our hillsides, destroy our wetlands, and to dump our garbage in every stream and along every beach, accelerated over the years. And those who had already made these mistakes, and who came here to enjoy our forests, birds and pristine swamps expressed their horror that we, who still had some of this, seemed intent upon destroying it all, trying to be “just like away”.
Our Vision 2020 Statement was a vision of concrete towers, of huge smelters and industrial complexes, of high-speed trains hurtling through the countryside, and of enclosed concert halls mimicking the structures of alien cultures.
All of these would be built by further destruction of the mountains, to take the stone, and in so doing to destroy the watersheds, and deny future generations the right to clean water, and clean air to breathe.
But, within the larger population, most of whom had been seduced by the “vision” of concrete and poisoned rivers, were little groups who were the true visionaries.
“Enough!” they cried. And they began to speak out, from the earliest efforts in the 1970s when they moved a gas plant from within the Caroni Swamp, thus saving our Scarlet Ibis from extinction, to the present, when they, through their courage and in defiance against government and commercial interests, began to turn the tide.
“Stop the Smelter”, multiplied by three, stopped the proposed aluminium and steel smelters. The proposed rapid rail project was also sidelined, because simple, caring people, caring about their children’s futures, said no. Caring people began successful campaigns to save Leatherback Turtles, the endemic Piping Guan (the Pawi Bird), and to protect our forests, water sources and fisheries.
People are beginning to appreciate the beauty of our wilderness areas, and are demanding that we do not allow destruction in the name of misguided development to continue.
We still dump our garbage indiscriminately, and too often deliberately, in our pristine wilderness, but now people are going out to clean it up. In the future, maybe we will not need to clean-up, because, as we become truly “first world” in our personal attitudes, we would not have dumped litter in the first place.
How curious to discover that the “First World” was always here with us, in its original form: the beauty of our islands! Now, let us embrace it.
There were islands of mountains, plains and beautiful wetlands, forests of great trees filled the mountain valleys and clear cold water cascaded down the valleys.
The first people came by canoe, paddling across from the mainland. They named the larger island Iere, “Land of the Humming Bird”. They lived relatively quietly among the copious wildlife, which included flocks of the astonishingly brilliant Scarlet Ibis, and a proliferation of other colourful birds.
Strangers arrived in 1498, in the form of looters who came to take away anything of value to them. They named the island Trinidad, after a vow made by their leader, Christopher Columbus on “Holy Trinity Sunday”, to name his next landfall after the Christian “Holy Trinity”.
Presciently, the first land was seen as three mountain peaks, and Columbus saw this as a confirming sign and named the island La Trinidad. Notwithstanding the blessed portents, Columbus and future voyagers found nothing of value to take away, and Trinidad, and indeed Tobago, with a different history of early settlement, was largely ignored by the European colonisers.
In the late 1700’s, first the French, then the English, came as settlers and conquerors, respectively.
But it was the English who “developed” the colony, by destroying the forests to plant sugar and then to drill for oil. Towns were built, and railroads and roads constructed.
Soon the new settlers, that is “All ah we”, were bulldozing our mountains and forests, filling in the wetlands with the land taken from the hillsides, and “improving” the flow of our rivers by turning many of them into large concrete sewers.
In later years, when the price of the oil we produced soared beyond our dreams, we strove to turn our little islands into images of the concrete cities of Europe and North America, and we were doing this at a time when Europe had already discovered that, like King Midas, what they had acquired was not what they wanted.
They, who we were seeking to emulate, had realised that they wanted — nay, needed, the trees and grasslands, the rivers and lakes that they had destroyed.
But we plunged on.
Desperate in our insecurities to copy the vision which they were already denying, we became a people who seemed to hate all the beauty and natural wonders which once existed here.
The rush to desecrate our hillsides, destroy our wetlands, and to dump our garbage in every stream and along every beach, accelerated over the years. And those who had already made these mistakes, and who came here to enjoy our forests, birds and pristine swamps expressed their horror that we, who still had some of this, seemed intent upon destroying it all, trying to be “just like away”.
Our Vision 2020 Statement was a vision of concrete towers, of huge smelters and industrial complexes, of high-speed trains hurtling through the countryside, and of enclosed concert halls mimicking the structures of alien cultures.
All of these would be built by further destruction of the mountains, to take the stone, and in so doing to destroy the watersheds, and deny future generations the right to clean water, and clean air to breathe.
But, within the larger population, most of whom had been seduced by the “vision” of concrete and poisoned rivers, were little groups who were the true visionaries.
“Enough!” they cried. And they began to speak out, from the earliest efforts in the 1970s when they moved a gas plant from within the Caroni Swamp, thus saving our Scarlet Ibis from extinction, to the present, when they, through their courage and in defiance against government and commercial interests, began to turn the tide.
“Stop the Smelter”, multiplied by three, stopped the proposed aluminium and steel smelters. The proposed rapid rail project was also sidelined, because simple, caring people, caring about their children’s futures, said no. Caring people began successful campaigns to save Leatherback Turtles, the endemic Piping Guan (the Pawi Bird), and to protect our forests, water sources and fisheries.
People are beginning to appreciate the beauty of our wilderness areas, and are demanding that we do not allow destruction in the name of misguided development to continue.
We still dump our garbage indiscriminately, and too often deliberately, in our pristine wilderness, but now people are going out to clean it up. In the future, maybe we will not need to clean-up, because, as we become truly “first world” in our personal attitudes, we would not have dumped litter in the first place.
How curious to discover that the “First World” was always here with us, in its original form: the beauty of our islands! Now, let us embrace it.
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