Looking out the plane window at the Valencia forest below, utterly ravaged by open-pit mining, I felt glad Prof Julian Kenny was dead. The man whose last public act before his death last year was to resign the chairmanship of the Environmental Management Authority in frustration over his inability to make the Government halt the very same quarrying, could never have resigned himself to what I was looking at: vast wounds in the rainforest, immense scars of red earth. These open pits, I thought, reveal Trinidad for what it really is: a ragtag band of barbarians who give not one firetruck about the paradise they occupy, philistines who would happily sell their soul or a-- for whichever orifice raised more ready cash. Not long ago, all you would have seen from the air between Piarco Airport and the North Coast would have been a rainforest canopy, teeming with life; now, all there is is murdered ground, the evidence of millions of dollars going into someone's pocket. If you've not seen this scandal from above, the destruction is unimaginable. The most shocking pictures of last year's mega-flood are trivial in comparison. The worst part is not even that it is not an "act of God," but a deliberate, greedy and shortsighted act of barbarians; the worse part is that it is totally wanton. There is no plan. They bulldoze forest at random, drive excavators through the path of least resistance, open the face of the Earth and dig wildly. When they've extracted all profit from that particular cavernous hole, they turn in another direction, bulldoze another path at random into another area of forest that has been standing for millions of years and begin destroying that spot. They stop at their convenience and move on at their whim.
You can tell it was small-timers who perpetrated this just by looking at it. Businesses providing employees with health plans, responsible operations run by citizens would at least have done it methodically, might have given some thought as to what happened to the families of monkeys before they started or the poor ground when they were through. The thugs who did this to Valencia could call themselves whatever they liked, but they pick topitam-bo with a rod. I wouldn't scrape dog excrement off my shoes on them, for fear of dirtying my plastic sneakers. In a real country, whoever did what they did would be in jail. But they did this with permission! David Rudder never meant this, I thought; you had to jump the wall 'bout 12 o'clock into another song: this was not a certificate of environmental clearance down there, this was madness. Does no one in the Cabinet fly to Barbados? Has no one noticed how horribly this land, in their charge, has been treated? I was looking at ecological rape. From my seat, without craning my neck, I could see a cumulative area 40 times the size of the Queen's Park Savannah, gouged and bleeding. Other, deeper scars abounded, huge lakes of blood red water, each capable of floating an oil tanker. In all her many trips away, did Kamla never fly over this devastation even once? Or was she tilting her head up, finishing a coconut water maybe? What human being could look upon that, even once, and not want to slit his own throat? What person in authority could register that sight and fail to take action? If ever you really needed a state of emergency, this was the hottest spot in the land.
I wanted to cry. Julian Kenny did. And the quarrymen laughed-and are still laughing-all the way to the bank. If you want to see how far "eating ah food" can be taken, if you want a graphic illustration of the real cost of letting "poor black people make a duller," take a trip to Barbados and sit on the left side of the plane. And look down. And carry a firetrucking razor blade. In shock, I put away my book and stared at the sea in silence. In time, Barbados appeared in the distance. Even from cruising height, you can see the ring of concrete that now encircles the whole island, give or take a few cliffs on the East Coast. The luxurious hotels and villas of the West Coast-their golf courses are prettier versions of the Valencia forest open-face quarrying-segue into the light industrial/heavy commercial Warrens area, which bleeds uninterrupted into Bridgetown via the all-concrete swathes of St Michael; and then the buildings thicken, like warts, into the equally heavily populated Christ Church. Between them, St Michael and Christ Church return 15 of Barbados' Members of Parliament, the same number as the other nine parishes combined. In the four years or so I've been living in Barbados, I've watched pastures turn into apartment and office blocks, farmland turn into factories, cane pieces into strip malls. You don't need a calculator to work out what will happen. The old ecologist's riddle about the pond comes to mind. You have a circular pond. Dead in the centre, you have a circular water lily. The lily doubles in size every day. It will take 30 days to cover the pond. One day, you look at the lily and notice it is covering half the pond; the riddle is, on what day will that be? Everyone answers, "Day 15." Half the pond, ergo, half the time. But it will really be day 29. The lily doubles in size every day. You have one day to save the pond. The last time I flew that route over Valencia, there were not even half as many open pits. I touched down at Barbados Grantley Adams. But I'd been shot down over Valencia.
BC Pires is sabotaging tractors in Valencia. Read more of his writing at www.BCRaw.com
