Wild Tobago

Carnival is over. And we may be proud of the clean streets on Ash Wednesday. But where does it all go: the glitter, the beads, mylar strips, armbands, feathers, zippers and flag poles, plastic and metallic supports? Dr Anjani Ganase suggests we take a sober look at waste generated by Carnival, and make better plans for the next one. Carnival is rags, flags, beads, feathers and bumsies set in motion to a soca beat. It is symbolic of excess in every way but an integral part of our culture. While the drinking, wining and waving can be put away for another year, the materials in the costumes, the single use plastic containers, cups and cutlery used to water and feed people on the road used on two days of masquerading, as well as at the fetes happening in the two months leading up to carnival can amount to more than a hill of garbage. Hundreds of thousand masqueraders and revellers generate a huge amount of plastic waste. The majority of this will end up in land fills, in our drains a...

Corals and sponges have been around for about 500 million years; humans for just about 300,000 years. Will the mass extinction that our species has precipitated see humans returning in a hardier long-surviving form (like the corals)? Or will we go the way of the dinosaur? Dr Anjani Ganase takes the long view of life from its inception in the oceans. Coral or dinosaur? That is the question. After the earth’s violent creation, over 4.5 billion years ago (bya), the next 700 million years were relatively stable as the earth began to cool. Steam turned to rain and the rain filled our oceans. It is also thought that some of our water was imported through a series of bombardments by meteorites. The oceans were much wilder back then, as the moon was much closer, and so the tidal changes were a thousand times more extreme than now. Over time, the moon has moved further away, about 3 cm away from earth every year.  Yet, life on earth did not begin for another billion years. It is t...