This island is home to a forest of startling beauty where rolling green hills are covered with rare and ancient trees and caressed by tranquil streams. Birds of paradise circle nonchalantly above the green canopy. Something terrible is going to happen to it though. Red flags resembling evil eyes litter the place, plotting the course of a planned highway. Myriad trees carry the mark of death for they are soon to be felled.

The South-East Highway is going to trundle smack bang through the utopian Ferney forest. For a country that has less than 2% of its endemic forests left, such an attack on its biodiversity is nothing less than the crime of the century. Apart from its beauty, Mauritius doesn?t possess much in the way of natural resources and once we?ve desecrated that our children will be hard-pressed to respect anything we?ve done. Especially when we have the hypocrisy to say that we did it in the name of progress.

While the poster boys of officialdom hark on about ecotourism, those who operate behind the scenes are surreptitiously planning the destruction of one of the last patches of the island that has remained unscathed by the hand of man.

The reason why Mauritius is bent on abandoning an endemic forest of inestimable biological wealth to greedy bulldozers is because a handful of men decided that it was in the interest of the nation to build a highway linking the airport to the hotels on the east coast. That the nation was never consulted doesn?t seem to matter. That the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report wasn?t open to the public for consultation and was eventually deemed superfluous anyway matters even less. An example of direct democracy it is not.

This dystopia is highlighted by the Port-Louis? nightmarish traffic. Anyone who?s been stuck in it will be aware of how dire the situation has become. If the capital?s congestions problems were solved, most of the national road network would be freed of the stranglehold of traffic jams. The profligacy of throwing away millions of rupees in lost productivity would come to a much-desired end. And think of the political capital that would be afforded to the party who will be able to boast of having unburdened the population of the inordinate amount of stress imposed by hours of staring at the vehicle in front of them and of the health hazard of spending lengthy stretches of time breathing in exhaust fumes.

This is not about politics though. The crux of the issue is the survival of a centennial forest. Site visits by the project?s monitoring committee have revealed that three species of trees that were thought to be extinct are not. We are told that any rare fauna will be transplanted out of harms way. What is not mentioned is that, by bisecting the forest, we are weakening it dramatically, perhaps even fatally.

Ferney is also home to half the world?s population of kestrels. The developers have given assurances that any nestboxes situated on the highway?s course will be moved, although it is still unsure whether the kestrels will be informed of this change of address via phone or e-mail.

Sacrificing the forest for a highway that is being built against all common sense will mark more than an ecological disaster. It will also mark the departure from reason. And there?ll be no return once the damage is done.