Where have Goa’s trees gone?

MAYA ROSE FERNANDES

Friends of mine, landing in Goa, or driving around the villages, still burst into song every time they round a corner and take in a widespread vista of Goa’s greenery.

It isn’t even monsoon season and everything gives this appearance of a lush, coastal state in full bloom. I always wonder what their reference point is.

These are mostly cityfolk, whose eyes are starved for the sight of something green and lush in their lives. Their souls don’t even know what they hunger for.

Everyone is happy about the road developments happening – the new highways connecting us from a hotel to an airport, that allow for smoother trade across state borders, that enhance the mobility of people, getting them to their workplaces ten minutes faster than before. But, at what cost?

Trees provide a myriad of benefits that extend far beyond their aesthetic appeal. You might have studied this is school, but do you fully realise their importance in helping your everyday life?

We’ve all heard how beneficial they are from a climate change perspective: they absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, which helps keep us breathing while also combating global warming.

Then, there are the unseen benefits that are only felt during monsoon season. Trees regulate the water cycle by soaking up rainfall while also preventing soil erosion.

There’s nothing quite like cutting down the tree in your driveway and paving the soil over to make you realise the increased level of flooding in that area the next time there is a heavy bout of rainfall.

If you want to reduce or even stop flooding along low-lying areas, roadways or streets, plant trees. Even one tree has an extensive root system capable of soaking up much more than you could imagine.

It’s still a simple way of reducing the risk of inundation and protecting vulnerable communities from flash floods and other disasters.

A tree canopy is an invaluable ecosystem that not only allows for biodiversity to thrive unnoticed, as they use it for their habitat, source of food, shelter or to get other basic needs met, but don’t we all feel the difference in temperature between walking exposed under the hot sun versus strolling under a cool canopy?

Are we so used to driving around in air-conditioned cars that we’ve forgotten what that feels like?

I have friends in Goa who are recording people’s memories of their favourite or most beloved trees, many now long gone. Someone was speaking to me the other day of a Tree Memory project.

Another was telling me how she’d written a collection of poems about her favourite trees.

Someone else was telling me how they tried to convince a site manager to preserve a line of trees along the border of the construction site where they were building a hotel. The manager agreed one day and the next, the person was broken hearted to see the trees had been uprooted anyway.

Goa’s unchecked and rapid development of roads, highways, construction projects and urban expansion is leaving behind barren patches of land, stripped of our natural guardians of the land and the soil.

Where is the enforcement of government replanting programmes to line highways and roadways, to re-establish tree canopies and root systems that protect and preserve us?

Non-compliance abounds, and I haven’t even mentioned the large scale ravaging of Goa’s mangroves, disregarding their ecological significance.

When did our measure of development become the number of roadways and buildings, instead of the number of trees and effectiveness of tree cover in an area?

When did we become a society that has no qualms at destroying something overnight that takes at least 50 years to grow, only compounding its benefits decade by decade?

This disregard of Goa’s arboreal heritage and veering towards state-endorsed ecological vandalism is something everyone has to keep in mind the next time they cry about drought, flash floods or difficult micro-climates, among many other things that are kept in check by trees, but long forgotten by us.