Our adults and children must be taught not to cut down a tree without replanting one first

I like Tony Vieira’s letter in yesterday’s SN. It was refreshingly nationalistic and un-greedy – something so lacking in Guyana, I like how he began about the people being hypocrites, hinting and hitting at big people in high positions. Tony knows a thing or two. There was a time long ago when we could say, almost everyone was a hypocrite. Not anymore. Today I can unapologetically say everything and everyone about politics and journalism is hypocritical and so are the people who racially enslave themselves to today’s hypocritical politicians and journalists.

A hypocrite is far more dangerous than a convicted crook because the hypocrite parades in sheep’s clothing and is able to escape all efforts to indict him.

I have pessimistically come to believe everyone in Guyana is a hypocrite unless proven otherwise. Having said that, I wish to relate two situations. Three weeks ago, a very close, trusted associate of mine told me an incredible “nancy’ story about how he was traveling in the ferry from Supenaam to Parika and struck up a conversation with a “businessman” on board who he observed was behaving in a paternalistic manner and buying food for a bunch of young women, about forty of them, bunched together, and observably Venezuelans.

By the end of the trip my associate learned that the “businessman” was smuggling these young ladies, of ages between 16 and 24, from Venezuela, and had bribed his way past Charity Police and Charity Custom officers, and he claimed to have many big political leaders in his hip pocket, and that having reached his destination, a certain guest house in Georgetown with his human cargo, it would take him less than 24 hours sell off all of them for a thousand US dollars each, and that that was one of several successful trips he had made. I pray some investigation will be done to prove me or my friend wrong. But who cares?

How many of us know or care that the most lucrative economic activity in the world today is - human trafficking? The other issue is about the hypocrisy of buying and selling carbon credits which we all know is glaringly done for mercenary motives. Greedy motives. It was greed, in the first place, that caused the problem, and thus greed cannot be a part of the solution. The solution lies in teaching the populations of both selling and buying countries to develop a conscientious responsibility to subscribe in maintaining the ecological and carbon balance of this very fragile world in which we live. Nothing is more hypocritical that marketization of our conscience.

The solution is to simply teach our people to save the trees, not to cut down trees without first planting one in place. For the dirty countries that Tony mentioned, they should devise their own independent programs of controlling carbon emission and deforestations in their own countries, and not piggyback on countries like Guyana. They should be kicked out or regulated.

Especially China who has totally and irresponsibly destroyed all their own forests and are now recklessly trying to exploit other countries’ forests. From the air I have seen and have pictures of their destructive handiwork in the Guyana’s interior. Who should be blamed? Right, the hypocritical tin gods in Guyana.

Here is another carbon related hypocrisy. Instead of running all over the world, what has the government done to educate our children and politically hardened adults right here in Guyana that the simplest contribution they can make is to not cut down trees? Three weeks ago, hiking through the Sagarmatha National Park in the Himalayas, towards Mount Everest, I saw a beautiful sign posted next to a tree: “I alone absorb 22 kg of Co2 in a year. All I ask in return is to let me live.” In 1976 the Sagarmatha National Park was officially incorporated to encompass a 440 square mile region of the Himalayas including Mt. Everest to preserve and protect its ecological nature and rich diversity of flora and fauna.

Today, people living within the National Park are not allowed to cut any living tree to use for fuel. Absolutely no litter, not even a gum wrapper, must be left on the slopes. Even mountain and motorized bikes are banned within the national park. And all power generated in the Park is from renewable sources, primarily, solar – even though the Himalayan mountains are far cloudier than those in Guyana. We in Guyana have to be less political, hence less hypocritical.