Wild Tobago

People are hard at work in vacation places. Fortunate are those who vacation and are allowed into other working lives, other enterprises. Pat Ganase visits Charlotteville, centre of the Northeast Tobago Man and the Biosphere Reserve. (All photos courtesy Anjani Ganase)   It is late August in Charlotteville. The rising sun lights up Campbleton. Rainbows from the misty horizon dance over Booby island. The sea is a pond, calm, clear to the bottom; its channels of sand shimmer between boulders and bouldering corals. This is our holiday place on the northwest coast of Tobago where the water is warm, the rainforest resplendent and the sunsets startling. Here is the heartland of the Northeast Tobago, as different as can be imagined from Southwest Tobago.   Walk along the beach from the Man-o-War Bay cottages to the village. Check the Heron keeping an eye on you while chasing a crab on the sand. Pass the end of Bay Road looking for what the sea washed up overnight, m

  Faraaz Abdool discusses how national parks and other protected areas bring benefit to people and communities. (Photos by Faraaz Abdool)   Parks, reserves, or sanctuaries are usually designated for conservation and for environmental awareness. Their effectiveness and continuity however might be best served if they are seen as tools to be used by the present for the benefit of future human populations.   National parks, forest reserves, and wildlife sanctuaries are used as a means of insurance: to safeguard biodiversity and ensure resilience against the ever-increasing effects of climate change.   Approximately half of all carbon emissions we produce is absorbed by the land and sea, despite forests only occupying 30% of terrestrial space. Reserving land for conservation may not have immediately discernible effects, as the geological time scale has a much slower pace than that of our own lifetimes. To wholly reap the rewards of a long-term project such as a national park p