Friday, March 11, 2011

ARTICLE - SAVING HAITI'S NATIONAL PARK

AMID THE FLAMES, SAVING HAITI'S NATIONAL PARK
(Miami Herald) - By Edwidge Danticat

Last week more than 400 acres of Haiti’s La Visite National Park (Parc National La Visite) were ravaged by a raging forest fire. This park, about 7,400 acres of pine and broadleaf forest, is one of only two remaining official national parks in Haiti — the other is Pic Macaya, where six endangered frogs were rediscovered last October after 25 years.

Only 13 miles from the Haitian capital and with peaks towering above 5,000 feet, Parc National La Visite is, in a vastly deforested Haiti, one of the last sanctuaries for the country’s rarest birds.

According to a 2000 study conducted by experts from the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University’s Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, the park is home to 23 species of island endemic, forest-dependent birds, which might not survive if the park were destroyed.

In charcoal-dependent Haiti, the park is a rare, but constantly menaced treasure.

Each year for the last 20 years, during which it has shrunk from more than 40,000 acres, Parc National La Visite has suffered from similar fires, which conservationists at the Haitian-run Fondation Seguin (http://www.fondationseguin.org/) believe are arson-related.

A few years ago, I visited the park, which is on the edge of a beautiful mountain town called Seguin. I had taken a side path, where wild cacti mingled among the hundred-plus-year-old pines. During my walk, I would hear the sound of water crashing against rock and would happen upon a series of layered cascades with startling, bright green moss-covered grottoes. Every now and then I would find myself on the ridge of a massive canyon with clouds hovering above and below me, the clouds at times blocking portions of lush ravines and valleys.

I imagined all this disappearing as the fires burned for four days last week.

And if not the valiant effort of many concerned Haitians and friends of the park, along with a hand from Mother Nature via some rain, perhaps it might have vanished.

In many ways, La Visite National Park, with its equally environmentally-embattled twin, Pic Macaya, is a symbol of Haiti’s environmental future.

As part of Haiti’s reconstruction efforts, clear and strategic steps taken to preserve these parks — to protect them from illegal logging and arson — will send a strong signal that the country is critically serious about maintaining its less than 2 percent remaining tree cover. A fragile country, still attempting to recover from a devastating earthquake, the aftermaths of hurricanes, questionable elections and a cholera outbreak, can ill afford to lose its last remaining natural treasures.

Parc La Visite has become one of the increasingly deafening canaries in Haiti’s precarious environmental mine, reminding us that, no matter what else is going on politically, the country’s extremely urgent environmental problems cannot, and should not, be ignored.

Otherwise, as the folks from Fondation Seguin somberly reminded the world in their urgent online SOS from among the flames, we are simply watching another desert emerge.

Born in Haiti, Edwidge Danticat is an award-winning author living in Miami.

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