The
"fire on the road" of Carnival has ended this week, and most of us good
Catholics headed off to get our ashes for absolution. Meanwhile the
forest of the country are now in the throes of a grimmer ritual; the
prospects of a real burning season as this year’s El Nino conditions
tightens its grip on the island.
It
is often surprising to me, but many people on the island still believe
that the dry season fires occur due to some fanciful natural causes
(lightening or “fire stones” etc.). The truth however, is much more
mundane and disheartening – the fact is, all our dry season fires are
caused by human action. It seems that most of Trinbagonians are happy
to start backyard fires, use fire to clear land for planting or simply
toss their burning cigarettes out the window, without a second thought.
All this despite the fact that it is illegal under the Agricultural
Fires Act, to do so.
The
cost of this burning is more than the growing scar of brown on the
hills, or the persistent rain of ash covering everything in our homes.
No, the real cost will come later, in the reduced levels of stream
water in the future, the flash flooding in the next rainy season, the
loss of tons of forest soils that will never be replaced, the
destruction of irreplaceable wildlife, freshwater fish and timber
resources, and the inevitable wastage of public funds to replant what
was lost, due to these senseless fires.
In
1987, another real burning year for Trinidad’s forests, we lost some
21,420 hectares of forest in Trinidad and Tobago, and much of it, like
the once cathedral like Long Stretch Reserve has never recovered, some
23 years later. In that year, the majestic Long Stretch
Reserve smouldered for weeks, and I recall there being a lot of
hand-wringing at the Forestry Division in the years following that fire.
However,
unlike 2 decades ago, for those of us who work in conservation there
now exist many new tools to plan for, predict where, and actually
tackle forest fires. These include satellites that tell us where the
fires are, computer based GIS models for fire probabilities, wind speed
and direction models that help plan how to tackle these fires, and a
greater range of telecommunication tools than ever existed. We also are
now in the fortunate (?) position to have much more money, and a much
larger number of avenues to communicate to the public about the
importance of preventing these forest fires, than we did a quarter
century ago.
In
spite of the availability of these tools, we appear to be headed to a
fire-season that may eclipse 1987 in its ferocity. We appear just as
unprepared for the scale of the challenge, and the public just as
disinterested about their role in forest fire prevention and control
-if not more so- than two and a half decades ago. Can it be that we
have utterly forgotten the lessons of previous burning years and failed
to have planned for this one? Or is it another symptom of the endemic
apathy towards nature that seems to have become a national trait.
As
I am writing this, I can see 7 metre high flames engulfing an isolated
remnant of forests on the hills near St. Anns, and it occurs to me that
much of our young population will never have seen the forests of the
Long Stretch, and so the loss of these green cathedrals to fires would
mean nothing to them. I read recently that the Fire Services response
to not addressing one of these fires in the St. Anns hills was that no
one had phoned them to say that the fire was underway. Perhaps there is
my answer to why we seem unable to address these fires – we simply
don’t care. I think this is the real reason to go seek absolution this
fire season, to address what George Bernard Shaw called our worst sin “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.”