Any layman can see without any trouble that those thousands of homes on hillsides stretching from Diego Martin to Arouca make
up a major disaster.
Trinidad’s Northern Range is the site of an ‘environmental disaster’. The western half of the hills, clearly visible above the island’s main population centres straggled along the East-West Corridor, are universally seen as being damaged beyond repair, while the eastern half of the hills, stretching from Arima to Toco are believed to be under imminent threat of destruction. The culprit for this environmental disaster is – according to almost all accounts – the squatter, who has illegally cleared hillsides either for housing or ‘slash and burn’ agriculture.
