My name is Marc de Verteuil and I’m working to establish a sanctuary giving sharks 100 per cent protection.
I live in Goodwood Park. My parents got a divorce when I was seven, and I moved to the Netherlands with my mother and sister, Genevieve. I never adapted to feeling Dutch and moved back to Trinidad when I was 25. My home has always been here.
I’m undecided about having a family of my own. I’m still single at age 41, and I don’t know that will change soon. My sister has three children, Sebastian, Jordan and Zoe. I don’t think I could love my own children more than I love them. The world population is surging towards 9. 6 billion by 2050. So I also struggle with the morality of putting more children on this planet.
Both my parents are alive. But I “lost” my dad to mental illness a long time ago. He’s severely schizophrenic. My father saw his whole life fall apart. He lives with that pain and the bewilderment of his disease every day. He misses his family. He is shunned by most people. The pain is unimaginable. When something like that happens in a family, it’s like throwing a bomb in a crowded room: everybody gets hurt. My grandfather had to see his son deteriorate.
My mother saw the man she loved change into something she could not understand, or live with. Her nurturing home was destroyed. My sister saw her parents, home and life torn apart.
My dad was my best friend. I don't think anybody will ever fully recover.
But my sister's kids cuddle him, accepting Grandpa and loving him for who he is. So I know there is still something good about his life.
I'm an atheist. I have read most of the Bible and some of the Koran. Neither reading has convinced me that there is a god, or that the god described is just or unconditionally loving.
It must be the grandest arrogance a human being can have to think that he or she is eternal. If there is an afterlife, then it is in the form of our DNA. And humans share 50 per cent of DNA with bananas.
Half the time, my car radio’s tuned in to BBC World Service. The other half, I switch from dancehall to indie to pop to rock.
Just because I use different terms for music doesn't mean I know which style fits what name. I'm just trying to sound like I know what I'm talking about.
If chipping down the road on Carnival Monday and Tuesday is dancing, then I dance.
I'm a vegetarian but I'd have to admit my favourite meal would be rib-eye steak. Rare, with garlic butter and a white wine reduction. And super-thin French fries.
On a reef in Indonesia, sharks were overfished. Without predators, the snapper population exploded. The snappers ate out the grazer fish like parrotfish. Without parrotfish the reef became overgrown with algae and started to die. Without sharks, the oceans will be less productive.
Sharks are apex predators and many species are hurtling towards extinction. A billion people around the world depend on the ocean for protein and income. So protecting sharks means protecting people.
On average, five people per year worldwide are killed by sharks. In the US alone, about 13 people per year are killed by vending machines. Cows, cars, bathtubs and ladders each kill more people than sharks.
The best thing about establishing a shark sanctuary is it gives Trinidadians a chance to view ourselves as responsible, protective, nurturing people guided by rationalism. And not our bellies, fears or general ignorance.
Sometimes people tell me, “Oh, you’re a rich white boy, you could afford to care about sharks, but poor people have to eat a food.” I tell them the depletion of fish stocks hits poor local fishermen first. The rich don’t care. They will buy farmed salmon imported from Alaska.
A Trini is a Nobel Prize-winning author, a Trini is also somebody implicated in a plot to bomb JFK airport. A man who uses his body to stop highway bulldozers. An island scholarship winner, a single mother with six children from six different fathers, a climate scientist with the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, a gangster, the couple trying to make ends meet selling doubles. There is no one prototype Trini.
T&T, to me, means “home” and “pride.” I have a UK passport but I use my Trini passport whenever possible, just because it is more part of who I am.
Read a longer version of this feature at www.BCRaw.com