BENCHWARMER
Ramon
Dacawi
Sometime
last July, I reiterated before a meeting of the Baguio Regreening Movement
(BRM) a request repeated now and then over the years. The oft-and-on plea was
for the Baguio Water District, the Department of Environment and Natural
Resources and the city forestry to coordinate with volunteers of the Eco-walk
children’s program before assigning any tree-planting area at the Busol
Watershed, one of the city’s few remaining watersheds.
BRM
chair and city councilor Erdolfo Balajadia saw the point and immediately called
a coordination meeting, during which representatives of BRM, DENR, BWD and
Eco-walk agreed to finally harmonize activities within the watershed.
It
was to prevent overlapping or undue taking over by Johnny-come-latelys of
planting areas long
assigned to and maintained for years by groups, especially children who have
been involved in the Eco-walk program since its inception in Busol 20 years
ago. The kids’ program, inspired by indigenous knowledge, was conceptualized by
members of the Baguio media and supported by the BRM, the city, the city
schools and others.
Anchored
on indigenous knowledge, particularly the Ifugaos’ “muyong” system of watershed
management, Eco-walk won for the children of Baguio the Global 500 award for
outstanding environmental achievement bestowed by the United Nations
Environment Programme during the World
Environment Day rites in Shenzhen, China in June, 2002.
Councilor
Balajadia’s “coordination meeting” was triggered by a letter of a teacher of
the Seventh Day Adventist School who expressed his young wards’ dismay when,
during their last visit to their adopted area, they found recently installed
billboards proclaiming it has been adopted by a government agency.
I
advised the teacher to remove the billboards, if only to restore his kids’ “ownership”
over the seedlings, saplings and poles that they have been nurturing for years.
With that and the coordination meeting, I thought the issue would be put to
rest.
Last
week-end, we guided members of St. Louis Boys High Batch ’91 and their young
kids to a walk-through of Busol. As it was no longer the rainy season, they
didn’t do any tree planting. Unless you come water what you plant two times a
week until they survive, we told them. Together with city councilor Peter
Fianza, we led them to a walk-through that
brought us to where the program began 20 years ago.
That’s
when we learned that, two weeks back, an employee of the BWD had guided
well-meaning students of a public high school, to a tree-planting in Busol.
Well and good, it would have been, even if it’s no longer the planting season.
Problem
was, and is, that he led them to planting and overlapping, without their
knowledge, portions of two adjoining sites adopted 19 and 20 years ago. Parts
of the areas he assigned were originally adopted by pupils of Rizal Elementary
School who pioneered the Eco-walk in July, 1992 and by the Timpuyog ti Ili, the
volunteer group of barangay leaders who established their own planting site in
1993, the year they volunteered to support the program as guides.
Members
of the Timpuyog may shrug off the recent intrusion. Despite their being
grown-ups now, the kids who planted since 20 years back the growing pine trees
may find their sense of collective ownership as pioneers of the program truly
violated by a guide’s disregard for propriety and sense of fair play. So would
the high school students who were misled last month feel cheated if informed of
this complication, their pure intention to do something for the environment
dented by a single adult’s lapse.
For
the nth time, and for the kids who passed through and will pass through the
environmental program that runs on volunteerism, we appeal anew for harmony in
the assignment of planting and maintenance sites in Busol, with due respect to
the chronology of things.
Otherwise
the kids won’t believe us, adults, anymore.
*****
We
dedicate a parody, by Ogden Nash, of
Joyce Kilmer’s poem about trees to adult groups who have installed permanent
billboards inside Busol. The forest definitely does not need any of these
intrusive signs that, in the eyes of children who were working there years
earlier but hardly put up their own signs, degrade, rather than exalt the names
and reputations of their companies:
“I
think that I shall never see/A billboard lovely as a tree/ And if those
billboards do not fall/ I shall never see the trees at all.”
****
My
command of the written word gets
spotty each time my blood pressure shoots up, as it did over the BWD guide’s
amnesia over an agreement. To
fill space while I calm down, here’s my parody about all those diggings on
roads and streets, the latest of which wasobliteration of a sidewalk along
Leonard Wood Road to give greater room for cars to maneuver on a road already
spacious even before pedestrians were robbed of their space (and dignity) in
this eastern part of the urban landscape.
It’s
a redo of “Mountains of Mourne”, an Irish ballad written by the 19th century musician Percy French, revived
by Don Mclean as centerpiece of one of his records. I wish folksinger and
weekly paper editor Alfred “Pacyay” Dizon would belt it out one of these
nights:
“Oh,
Alfred this road is a terrible sight/ With people all working by day and by
night/Sure they don’t sow potatoes, nor cabbage, nor beet/ But there’s gangs of
them digging in (pipes) in the street.
“At
least when I asked them that’s what I was told/ So I just took a look at this
repairing of road/ But for all that I find there, I might as well be/ Where the
dug-up gravel don’t sweep down to the sea.
“I
believe that when writing a wish you expressed/ As to know how the contractor
would have it pressed/ Well, if you’ll believe me, when asked to a “bull”
(session, that is)/ They don’t put enough blacktops to press at all.
“Oh
I’ve seen them meself and you could not in truth/Say they were bound to their
timetables and all/Do write a column or editorial piece, Alfred dear/ About
their diggings being swept down to the sea.” (e-mail: mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments).
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