Environmentalist Faraz Abdool wants Trinidad and Tobago to fall in love with nature again

WHILE working as an electrical engineer in Point Lisas, Faraaz Abdool was supposed to be reading about control valves, generators and more, but instead, he was reading about animals.

This passion to know more about the natural world led to photography, environmental activism and ecotourism.

The freelance wildlife photographer, writer, environmental advocate and tour agent is currently exhibiting Trinidad and Tobago’s Untold Tapestry: a 53-piece exhibition at Haagen-Dazs, corner of Queen's Park West and Dundonald Streets, Port of Spain. It opened on November 8 and goes until February 29.

It is being staged in collaboration with Hadco Experiences, which also works in the ecotourism sphere with Abdool. They share a common cause of wanting to help people fall in love with the natural world so they can protect it.

Abdool, the author of Casual Birding in Trinidad and Tobago, speaks to many birding clubs and Audubon chapters across the US. He has also featured on numerous radio shows and podcasts in other countries.

The "untold tapestry" is the unseen glue holding humanity together and the many living species on earth of which many people are unaware.

The exhibition is an invitation for people to look around and understand “who we are living with and reconnect with nature.”

In his large framed photos of various species of birds, howler monkeys and other animals, Abdool deliberately did not use the scientific names.

“Europeans came here and said, 'This is this, this is that and end of story.' This means that this animal or this plant has a certain use for us that we can get something from it.

“We are all products of that extractive system, whether we came here as the coloniser or as labourers or slaves, or whatever cheap labour they brought here to extract things,” he said.

Telling the visual story of these animals is much deeper for him. It is about getting people to reconnect and know about the environment in which they live, and he wants to reach TT’s youth. He has already has the permission of the Ministry of Education for secondary-school students to attend. Abdool is asking interested schools to contact him.

He said climate change and other factors are altering biological processes and putting nature in a precarious place.

Using the example of seeing poui trees blooming as early as November instead of May/June, Abdool told Newsday, “All of those things operate in a rhythm, nature operates in a rhythm. Right now, we are off the rhythm. We are out-of-time.

“It is a very strong system, but there is a balance, and it is a very delicate balance that is required for human life to be sustained.”

All plants and animals exist in a given space for human life to have a chance of survival, Abdool said.

“If we remove these things, we are undermining our survival.”

He said some people see enjoyment of nature as a luxury, but it really is not.

“The truth is, before there were phones and internet, before life was moving so quickly, we would be walking down the road and looking around.

"Now we are walking down the road and our head is down and we are watching a nature video on YouTube.”

He said the same things peopleare looking at on videos are happening all around them.

Using the example of a photo he titled Leaf Litter Terror, Abdool said the grey-throated leaftosser could be found in people’s backyards or in the forest hopping around in leaf litter, flipping leaves and feeding on whatever was hiding under it, like pill bugs, centipedes and spiders.

Leaf litter is fallen leaves that decay and feed the soil.Abdool said the fact that the birds that help to control the bug population are currently endangered is easily overlooked.

“In the leaf litter you have all of the creepy crawlies (such as pill bugs, centipedes, spiders; things we are little iffy about,” he said.

Apart from education, Abdool said it is also important for more research to be done on animals in the country.

Speaking of his photo of an all-white Southern tamandua (family of the anteater), Abdool said there were two species of them in TT, and he has only seen them once. Every other tamandua in South and Central America is black and white, he said.

“There is a lot of room here for scientific discovery. Trinidad was part of South America up until about ten, 11,000 years ago.

“So we have inherited a lot of South American and Central American floral and fauna. Because we have separated, what we have now is endemism (being peculiar to a region) starting to take hold …

“Animals that can’t move around on an island eventually, over millennia, start to develop their own genes and start to form their own species.

“We may have our own special endemic species of tamandua, but we will never know if we kill them out,” he said, adding that these often die as roadkill or are eaten.

Even if the research is not being done, Abdool believes it is his responsibility as a photographer and visual storyteller to make these stories known so the younger generation can learn about these animals if properly guided.

“Here is a system that has been created by somebody else that has been imposed upon us to make us live unnatural lives. You have a child; a child is best capable of learning by themselves. Then when the child is left to their own devices, they follow their inclinations.”

But, Abdool said, children are given devices and are guided into certain careers.

“What are the highest paying jobs? Doctors, lawyers, engineers. Let us see if the child could fit into these things. You have maths, science, languages, literature.

“You see, that academic system that we are currently sending everyone through is simply a means to make workers for the workforce for the global economic system, which is not what most people want to do. It is not what we have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.”

He said while formal education is necessary, it should also be flexible and allow for a genuine appreciation of the natural world.

His own inborn curiosity about nature was developed and fostered by his parents, Abdool said, and he kept learning and always read about birds and animals. He liked dinosaurs as a boy and spent a lot of time reading encyclopaedias.

He spent copious amounts of time also learning about photography.

Although he did not formally study biology, he values his non-academic approach to nature.

“It has served me in a way I never could have predicted. An academic approach categorises, and academia itself is a reductionist, patriarchal way of looking at what many people term is a feminine structure – nature.”

Having a “romantic” view of nature allows people to study themselves, he said.

He described seeing an iguana walking along a tree which had sprouted new leaves.

“Fresh new leaves along the branch, and the iguana was walking along it, and in each bunch it would pick one or two leaves and go on.

“I laughed, because if it was a person and they realised there was value in those leaves, they would strip every branch.”

He said there are many lessons a person can take for their own life from nature.

“Many ancient cultures would have had depictions of certain things on walls because they saw characteristics in certain animals and they wanted to emulate that.” He described learning about the natural world in a non-academic way as a “never-ending journey that teaches us about ourselves,” and taking that view of the world could help the world with many of its problems.

Abdool would like to extend the exhibition’s closing date if there is a demand.

He has contacted a number of corporate entities to come on a guided tour and buy some of the pieces. So far he got a response that said, “Thank you for the invitation.”

“I don’t know if corporate TT is interested in something they cannot immediately make money from.”

Whether corporate TT is interested or not, Abdool wants all of TT to simply enjoy the environment, learn from it and keep it safe.