Dear Editor,
I’d like to thank your staff writer for a very good article about the issues regarding Baishanlin and the road in the Rupununi. In particular, the writer covered the proposal that traditional trails be replaced by roads, and that these traditional trails are not mapped. But the trails are ‘mapped’ in the community memory. The proposal is to put roads in their place and by geodetic mapping stake a claim to these routes by a more powerful entity.
It seems clear that the argument between forestry as a science and the cupidity of exploiting a resource will continue with little good result until the forests are recognised for more than their cash value as wood products. An old rationale for forest harvesting in the tropics was the belief that such forests were of rapid growth and turnover (short life cycle of the trees); and, thus, a belief that a felled forest would be rapidly replaced by new growth.
The paradigm has shifted with the discovery that many tropical forest trees in South America are of great age and slow growth.
As it was 200 years ago, Guyana is divided between the front lands (coastal) and the back lands (interior); and still, the front lands are generally ignorant of what is happening in the back lands.
I hope that the coastal people will have some understanding that the interior forests retain a critical proportion of the rainfall; destroy these forests and there will be greater run-off of this water with an increased incidence of severe river flooding.
Yours faithfully,
John L Wilmer
