By Kaedin Janvier
As usual, It was a warm day when Peter Wampler, an environmental geologist at Grand Valley State University, stepped foot in Haiti for the first time, but something felt very off. Something suspicious. Something magnificent. Though Peter Wampler had heard stories about how defrosted the country is, however, all around Wampler saw mountains covered in trees. At first Peter shook it off as a mere coincidence… maybe the rest of the county was barren. As he continued across Haiti he continued to see trees. He could no longer believe that this was right. He began doing research. “All the news outlets had this narrative that it’s the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and has 2 percent forest cover. But I’d been to these mountainous areas and seen forest cover that was more than 2 percent. I could see it with my own eyes.” Wampler stated. As he searched for sources to the claims of Haiti’s 2 percent deforestation he was shocked to find… Nothing. A UN agricultural agency stated that Haiti’s tree cover was 4%, but this didn’t match up either. After using satellite imagery to scan Haiti’s tree cover and using google earth images Wampler got a tree cover of around 32%! He couldn’t believe his discoveries. He again analyzed five more times to confirm his research, and sure enough Haiti’s tree cover was 32% almost equal to the tree cover of the US which is around 33%. So then why do people think Haiti’s tree cover is so low?
Ayiti (the true name of Haiti) is a beautiful country, but because of our history of fighting against colonization and slavery there is a lot of Western stigmas about Haiti and about Haitian people. Everyone seems to look at the bad things about Ayiti and ignore the beautiful parts. It seems to me that every other week there is a new article about how deforested Haiti is and nobody is really looking for the truth.
Ayiti is a beautiful country and even though we are not doing as bad with deforestation as people think we are, we, the people of Haiti, could work to make the Haitian forest even more beautiful. And we have been. Every year people in Haiti contribute to help regrow deforested areas. Even children are chipping in. Haiti also has 15 small national parks not including protected areas! With all this good news it is not hard to see the shining bright light in Haiti’s future.