Students Recreate Historic 1776 Parliamentary Debate

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:01]At a time when forests were being cleared all over the world, a group of decision-makers chose something different.

[00:00:10]They chose to protect the Main Ridge Forest Reserve, not just for themselves, but for the future.

[00:00:19]Secretary of Environment, Climate Resilience, and Energy Darren Henry wants students to consider how a decision taken today can affect the future. In the same week, Commissioner Soong Jennings did in 1776.

[00:00:33]That year marked the end of an 11-year campaign by Jennings to secure legal protection for the Main Ridge Rainforest. At the time, sugar production in Tobago was booming, and plantation owners were rapidly clearing land to expand outputs, making legislators hesitant to curtail the land grab.

[00:00:51]Complicating matters further, Britain was preoccupied with the USA's fight for independence, making environmental preservation a low political priority.

[00:01:01]The debate was re-enacted by secondary school students as part of the Main Ridge Commemorative Week. Jennings sought to convince the parliament of the importance of the rainforest to the watershed. That rainfall feeds the feeds the streams that water the estates.

[00:01:18]And that rainfall, I will argue, and the science will demonstrate, is the is maintained by the forests of the Main Ridge. Remove the forest, lose the rain.

[00:01:30]If the theory is wrong or incomplete, we would have made an irreversible mistake.

[00:01:37]Has the honorable gentleman himself been to Tobago? Has he stood on the Main Ridge and measured the rainfall?

[00:01:44]Mr. Speaker, I have not been to Tobago, nor has Commissioner Jennings, but someone has, and their letter is before this house today. That letter was written by James Campbell, a planter from Tobago's Argyle estate in the Queen's Bay division.

[00:02:02]Today, in the months of January and February, the streams that feed my Argyle estate run so thin that I could step across it.

[00:02:13]This past the dry season, I lost a third of my estate of my eastern cane fields, not to diseases, not to storms, but to droughts. But parliament continued to oppose. Tobago is one of the few Caribbean islands still producing reliably under British control. And the demand for sugar has not reduced. This is not THE MOMENT TO RESTRICT TOBAGO'S PRODUCTIVE CAPACITY. Debate got HEATED AT TIMES.

[00:02:51]IN THE END, THE MOTION WAS passed with a little assistance FROM MEMBERS OPPOSITE.

[00:03:01]THE LEGISLATION WAS accepted by the then Tobago House of Assembly and signed into law on May 1st, 1776.

[00:03:09]Jennings never saw the impact of his decision. He died 11 years later in 1787 without ever setting foot in Tobago.

[00:03:19]Candace Jackson, TV6 News.