The price of pollution

PAOLO KERNAHAN

CANCER, IN its varied, insidious manifestations, is the second leading cause of death in TT. According to one study, there were more than 18,000 deaths owed to cancer between 1995 and 2009. While most of the cancers afflicting the population are linked to lifestyle habits like smoking, drinking and poor diet, to name a few, there's also a causal link between pollution and the development of cancers.

In this country we are seemingly oblivious to the menace of pollution. We go about our daily lives either enveloped in or contributing to a poisonous, omnipresent miasma.

We are in the throes of the "fire season." That's not because our hillsides spontaneously burst into flames. Fires are more prevalent because people, some of them farmers, routinely set fires to hillsides and low-lying fields to clear the land for cultivation. The land burns more easily, indeed fiercely, because the vegetation is practically kindling. Moreover, there's no rain to douse these routine conflagrations.

Every evening like clockwork where I live the air is filled with acrid smoke. It's almost as if there's an agreed-upon time to set fires to bush, fields and berms. This diminishes air quality for several hours and it's a torment that's repeated throughout the week.

As it happens, this so-called fire season allows Trinis to bring together their two smouldering passions – indiscriminate and illegal starting of fires and the unlawful dumping of garbage. Oh, the ecstasy of putting fire to mounds of rubbish offloaded onto remote or disused side roads and dead ends. Many of these dump sites, while out of sight, are well within the range of built-up areas; residential communities.

A few weeks ago, again in my area, there was a massive tyre fire – large enough that the plumes of noxious, black smoke could be seen from Port of Spain. The fire was so huge the billowing clouds of smoke blocked out the afternoon sun. This blaze was happening at an illegal tyre dump site.

No one in this country would think twice about burning tyres because a generally poorly educated population can't grasp its implications.

When tyres are burned they free toxic chemicals into the atmosphere. Benzene, xylene, ethylene and acetone are among the deadly compounds swirling in a toxic soup all around us.These compounds are known carcinogens linked to several cancers and even birth defects.

The behaviour of our citizens is, in part, influenced by ignorance. There is no widespread education on the tremendous harm caused by burning these substances. All folks know is they have to make what they've dumped go away. Fire does that even better than throwing it into the drains and canals.

Several years ago when I was producing television shows, I profiled Cumaca village in the Northern Range. It doesn't get more remote than Cumaca. My crew and I were camping out at the primary school, which is at the end of the line of what is, for lack of a better word, believed to be some kind of road. There is no garbage collection in the community so villagers set up a makeshift dump near the school. The rubbish would be routinely incinerated; rubbish that included countless plastic bottles, bags and containers.

As they burn, these plastics give off toxins like dioxins, furans and mercury into the air – this was next to the school. Villages wouldn't knowingly jeopardise the health of their children by torching refuse. There's no other way for them to dispose of their waste, so fire it is.

Citizens don't know it's illegal to light a fire without a permit; not that it matters much because enforcement of the law in TT is restricted to targeting revenue-generating driving offences.

Broadly speaking, the population is likely also ignorant of the causal link between toxic compounds in the air pollution we create and cancers that claim the lives of so many people we know and love.

For all the wealth that flowed through this country, little of it was invested in creating a better educated society equipped with critical thinking to make informed decisions – to know more about the world we inhabit. No state entity sees the importance of creating education campaigns to teach the public about the dangers of pollution to public health.

We curse the ignorance of the uneducated while doing nothing to change it. That's like shaking your fist at a fire without bothering to extinguish it.