Articles
El Salvador getting B.C. help in planting 75,000 new trees
by Kim Bolan
When New Westminster silviculture specialist Dirk Brinkman went to El Salvador last month, he wasn’t prepared for the environmental devastation he saw.
“There is just two per cent of the original forest left,” said Brinkman, who owns Brinkman & Associates Reforestation Ltd., one of the province’s largest tree-planting companies. “You could see the places where the 500-pound bombs had been dropped.”
Brinkman is working with Salvadoran environmentalists and the Sierra Club of Western Canada on a unique reforestation project in the tiny Central American country, which is trying to rebuild after 12 years of civil war.
They are planting the seedlings for the Forest of Reconciliation – 75,000 trees to represent each person killed during the country’s bloody war years.
With a $75,000 grant form the Canadian International Development Agency, the project will also include an information exchange and the sharing of strategies for reforestation in both Canada and El Salvador.
Salvadoran environmentalist Carmen Barrera is in B.C. this week visiting different reforestation areas and nurseries as part of the exchange. “Our project has two functions,” Barrera said in an interview. “There is a big need for reforestation and the other is to create a living monument to the victims of the war.”
So far, 50 trees have been planted on the dry, barren mountainside of Guazapa, about 30 kilometers from San Salvador. Another 2,000 will be ready to plant this summer and the rest will get done after specially designed containers arrive there from Canada.
“We are working with the communities to create and ecological awareness,” said Barrera. “They always cut the trees to cook and to build houses.”
People there are already learning composting, doing organic gardening and being introduced to alternative herbal medicines.
The trees will help stop erosion in a country devastated by bombings and burnings of all its natural overgrowth. In fact, statistics show the country has become a semi-desert and will become a desert by the year 2000 if something isn’t done to replant and stop soil erosion.
Barrera said that the fact the new government wants to regain tourism lost during the war years might be the best thing for the environment. “It will push them to do something,” she said.
During his trip, Brinkman conducted a two-day workshop for rural people on how to start a nursery. “We want them to go from a planting 20 or 30 trees a day to planting hundreds of trees a day, like we do here,” he said.
Brinkman also has an idea about how the Salvadoran military, responsible for much of the environmental destruction, could help fix the problem. “I've suggested they get the army to go in and bomb the place with seeds – it was done successfully in Hawaii in the ‘50’s,” he said.
1994-April-28. Vancouver Sun.
