Trees

unpublished
Photo of falcattas taken in a reforestation project in Cebu

Although the Clean Air Act has made most forms of incineration illegal, the smell of burning leaves will always remind me of childhood, and the mango tree in the middle of our garden. It was too tall for me to climb, but there was a hammock tied to its branches. My friend and I would sit there and tell stories in between games of piko.

I was fortunate enough to have grown up in a house surrounded by trees, a star apple tree right outside my room to shade me from the heat. After college, I swore I would never work or live in a place without trees. Outside my office window now, an avocado tree keeps me from burning in the morning sun, and even yields enough fruit for a salad on occasion.

But not till later did science teach me just how important trees are. Aside from their commercial value as a source of lumber, food, clothing and medicine for humans, they also provide shelter to the thousands of organisms that keep nature balanced, control the release of rainwater so that rivers and wells don’t dry up during dry season OR flood the lowlands during typhoon season, make sure the soil stays where the crops are instead of getting washed into the sea, AND keep the air clean by providing fresh oxygen and absorbing carbon dioxide that, by the way, can cause crazy extremes in the global climate (think The Day After Tomorrow, which was based on real scientific data). And that’s just the start of the list.

In short, trees are more valuable alive than dead. We have yet to invent the technology that can provide all-around pollution control and the right weather, air quality and temperature, soil quality, amount of food and water, and other basic needs--all for free. Indeed, poems (and essays) are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.

So what was a whole island of dead trees doing in the middle of the sea in last week’s front pages? Illegal logging and quarrying were blamed for the terrifying death toll in Luzon. It was because there were no trees to stop the rains, the President said, no roots to hold the mountain soil and soak up the excessive flow of water.

Perhaps by now I should be used to this split-personality trait of politicians, but does it have to be so blatant? On the very same day the typhoon hit and thousands of logs were swept down the bare mountains along with at least a thousand Filipinos, on the very same page of the newspaper, this very same President celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision to allow 100% foreign-owned mining companies to clear more forests and destroy more mountains--for the “poverty alleviation”, she said, of these very same Filipinos.

The sentiment was heartily echoed by no less than DENR Secretary Mike Defensor, supposed defender of the country’s natural resources who even defended the logging firms that had cut down the trees now floating at sea. It’s those illegal loggers, they said; it’s the NPA. Blame the outcasts who cannot defend themselves. But as Conrado de Quiros wrote, it’s neither the illegal loggers (who don’t have ten-wheeler trucks that can haul hundreds of tons of lumber in a day) nor the NPAs (who actually stand to gain more from protecting the forest, which keeps them hidden), but the LEGAL loggers who have been given the license to take as much as they can.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling, pushed by the President from the very start, the same license has just been given to foreign giants. Not because they care about the country’s “progress” or because they like our beaches, but simply because they have the money that WE don’t to extract all the minerals they want. Money that will supposedly trickle down and buy us better houses, better cell phones, better cars. Money we WILL need to buy clean water, clean food, clean air--and a long vacation to a place where the mountains are still green and majestic, and where rain doesn’t mean death.

But for now, thoughts of science, economics or policy are too much of a burden to add to our daily grind; mostly we just rely on our instincts to get us from one day to the next. Days when I’m feeling claustrophobic and machine-like in the office, I have lunch under an old, old acacia tree in the neighborhood. I stare at the sky through its canopy of leaves, I touch its bark, and I feel whole and human again.

I used to think I could never imagine a world without trees. Now I can.

PS i had so much more to say, including GMA's policy on investing in more carbon dioxide-spouting sources of energy, her glaring lack of an environmental agenda, her myopic view that cash is more important than raw natural resources, and the injustice of the poor having to suffer less than minimum wage and bear all the costs of environmental degradation, i.e. not being able to afford clean water or air-conditioned cars or hospitalization due to dirty air, etc. but i had to keep it coherent and concise because this is coming out in Sun.Star next weekend