Zahra Gor­don

Re­cent­ly crowned Miss One­ness T&T, Am­ryl Nurse, plans to use her new­ly at­tained plat­form to help pro­duce en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly con­scious youth. The 22-year-old beau­ty queen will rep­re­sent T&T at the Miss Earth com­pe­ti­tion in In­done­sia next month. Nurse said she hopes to work with the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) on an out­reach pro­gramme in pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools dur­ing her reign. "I think if peo­ple are ed­u­cat­ed about tak­ing care of the earth from ear­ly they be­come more sen­si­tised as adults. We re­al­ly need to be more aware of how im­por­tant the en­vi­ron­ment is and ed­u­cat­ed about what our sus­tain­able re­sources are," she said.

Pol­lu­tion of wa­ter­ways and seas is one of the most press­ing lo­cal en­vi­ron­men­tal is­sues, said Nurse, who added that in­for­ma­tion about the neg­a­tive ef­fects of lit­ter­ing and re­cy­cling will be part of the pro­posed out­reach pro­gramme. Be­fore par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pageant, Nurse said she had be­gun mak­ing small changes in her lifestyle-such as buy­ing en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly-friend­ly prod­ucts-to re­duce her per­son­al im­pact on the en­vi­ron­ment. Be­ing a par­tic­i­pant al­lowed her to learn more about T&T's nat­ur­al re­sources. She rep­re­sent­ed Paria Wa­ter­falls in the pageant-a place she had nev­er heard of or vis­it­ed be­fore be­com­ing a con­tes­tant.

Al­though she said her ma­jor goal for next month is to bring home a crown for T&T, Nurse shared that she wants to con­tin­ue work­ing to­wards chang­ing at­ti­tudes to­wards to the en­vi­ron­ment af­ter the pageant and has al­ready spo­ken with the man­agers of One­ness En­ter­tain­ment about this. The Freeport na­tive said Miss Earth was just as im­por­tant as Miss World or Miss Uni­verse, in which she was a se­mi-fi­nal­ist last year. Nurse said Miss Earth was of par­tic­u­lar im­por­tance be­cause of its fo­cus on en­vi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion and eco-tourism and she wants to see more cor­po­rate and gov­ern­ment sup­port for the pageant lo­cal­ly.

Next week, Nurse heads to Ja­maica on her first of­fi­cial ap­pear­ance as Miss One­ness T&T.