The less experienced and knowledgeable you are, the more brash the statements you tend to make. I'm new to the environmental movement, new to being an activist. I have made my share of brash statements. Some were spot on; others I have lived to regret. Back in 2010, when, as a founding member of the now defunct Trini Eco Warriors, I launched my activist career by campaigning to ban turtle hunting in T&T, I did not know the difference between a green turtle and a hawksbill turtle. I could recognise a leatherback turtle–after all, those are the huge grey ones; but that was more or less where my knowledge ended. I did not know much about the environment, except that it was in trouble. That conviction was enough to give me the passion I needed to overlook my own mistakes. And the mistakes I made were many! I would constantly misquote laws and species and biodiversity facts. Either the public forgave me because they knew even less than I (the blind leading the blind?), or they felt that the cause was more important than the details. Maybe they just wanted to believe, because protecting turtles fits in to their worldview. It's called information or opinion bias, when you accept facts in favour of your cause, and disregard all else that don't support your position. Sometimes the public willingly follows with a "the end justifies the means" attitude.
At the beginning of 2011, my Trini Eco Warriors colleagues and I got a request from Molly Gaskin to meet at the Pointe-a-Pierre Wildfowl Trust. I was tickled pink. It was the first time I was meeting a "real environmentalist." At the Wildfowl Trust my colleagues Stephen Broadbridge, Kyle de Lima and myself were waiting for Ms Gaskin. Stephen and Kyle were warmly received, but for some reason I did not receive a handshake. My questions were answered very curtly or ignored altogether. At the end of the meeting, as we were leaving the Wildfowl Trust compound, Stephen Broadbridge leaned towards me and said: "Well, boy, I don't know what you did, but Ms Gaskin says she doesn't want to talk to you. You said that the environment in T&T is in such a bad shape because the older environmentalists did nothing to protect the country." Broadbridge then went on to tell me how Ms Gaskin was instrumental in saving, among others, the Nariva Swamp from rice farmers and oil drilling. I don't know where I said it. Maybe it was on TV, maybe it was something I wrote online, but it was certainly something I thought at that time. Ms Gaskin took justified offence at something I had said in ignorance, and I was left red-faced and feeling foolish. And to this day, I still do. I had to think of this, speaking from ignorance, when the Attorney General recently made statements that though he "noticed people from Bayshore and Westmoorings protesting against the segment of the highway at Debe to Mon Desir" nobody protested against the levelling of the mangrove at Invaders Bay to establish MovieTowne, or Bayshore or even Wrightson Road. Tongue in cheek, I wonder how the AG can tell where in Trinidad a citizen comes from just by looking at them! But that is really not the path I want to go down, because it comes from a T&T that I had hoped we had left behind us. I asked Gary Aboud, a much more experienced environmentalist, to verify what the AG had said. Me: "Do you have any knowledge of any protest against the development of areas like Westmoorings/Bayshore or even Wrightson Road?" Aboud: "These developments occurred under the watchful eye of the oldworld NGOs, who were well lubricated at their regular cocktail events. There was limited knowledge in this country at that time, and Westmoorings was created when I was ten years old! Wrightson Road before I was born! And the foreshore road was the most expensive road ever built on the planet when it was done! Building in mangrove is extremely expensive, as some like the IDB argue today." Me: "Was there a protest against the building of MovieTowne? Aboud: "Yes.
The protest was against the hypocrisy of Parliament. They laid the National Environmental Policy in Parliament after years of lobbying, (it included 'no net loss of mangroves,' and not a single tree or branch could legally be cut!). Two weeks later the bulldozers went into Invaders Bay. "At that time I had the cell number of the Prime Minister (Basdeo Panday) and I called him. He said he had no knowledge of who or what they were doing. "So Parliament was being used as a bus station for documents that were being disregarded outside of Parliament." Me: "How many people participated?" Aboud: "About 100 total. About 30 shared nighttime guarding of the camp. We called it an information centre– this was a platform to raise awareness of all of the critical legislation which had laid on the shelves for over a decade, one being the Environmental Management Act (EMA Act) itself, and all of its rules, including the air and water pollution rules, which today have been made into a laughing stock for any logical mind!" The MovieTowne protest was nearly 20 years ago. History repeats itself, and as the clich� goes, those who don't know their history are bound to repeat it.