Tourism toilet on Mt Pulag

LETTERS FROM THE AGNO

March Fianza

Again, we are in a season of exploring mountains. For a mountaineering fan, there is nothing more satisfying than having to spend a night or two under a blanket of stars. That is a come-on that seasonal campers from the busy lowland metropolis look forward to, aside from the bumper to bumper traffic, staying away from office computers, and living outdoors minus the air pollution.

I remember old man Batacagan. Tears rolled from the eyes of 80-year old when he heard Jackson Browne’s song from a Walkman stereo headphone that some friends who were on Pulag in 1984 placed over his ears. Clearly, the old man outside his cogon hut who became part of the natural beauty of the Babadak Lake was moved by the music and the technology that he cannot grasp.

A day or two on the mountains mean simple meals cooked on open fire although regulations issued by an agency required campers to use modern camping gears for cooking. This is an instruction that departs from the skills that are taught in the survival school for boy and girl scouts.

Mountain climbing has become commercialized and distorted that climbers are no longer drenched in their own sweat. Porters who are paid on a fixed arrangement are always around. This, aside from mountain guides who are equally paid. Exactly, these regulations negate freedom and survival that are supposed to be the main goals in mountain climbing.

The regulators have imposed fines and penalties for “violations”. But common sense dictates that rules are better obeyed when these are self-imposed. Ironically, all the more that mountains become mismanaged when managers are positioned as overseers.

Friends and I climbed mountains and have rambled through the mossy forests around the crown of Mount Pulag for countless times but I certify that we never registered our presence at any manager’s table. It was because there was never a government manager before. Only the gods and spirits of mother earth were the overseers of the mountain.

My time on Pulag was before it was recognized as a national park in 1987, before PAMB came to existence, before a ranger station was built, before a government item called park superintendent started to lord over the good and bad over the mountain, and before fees were collected from climbers.

Talking about fees collected from climbers before entering the mountains, many have been asking how much has been collected since the start, how is it disbursed, for what and for whom.

Relatively, the International Union of Alpinist Associations (UIAA), an organization of mountain climbers in the US drafted a proposal during their general assembly. In one of its statements, it said: “The varied Park Service regulations are designed to "get more money" for the government, by issuing citations, fines and threats of arrest to climbers who logically fail to obey the illogical regulations…

The process has become known as Taxation by Citation. Those regulations do nothing to actually protect the climbers or the environment. They destroy climbing freedom, and create paperwork excuses for Park rangers to arrest and fine more climbers, to get yet more money for the government.”

The US experience seems to reflect what has been happening with Mount Pulag. Yet, the rules that were set in place cannot do anything to big-scale forest degradation, whether this happened on Pulag, Mt. Data, Mt. Polis, Paracelis or somewhere nearby like Mount Santo Tomas and Mount Cabuyao in Tuba.  

Somewhere in China, mountaineering groups are up in arms against a wide parking lot and an elevator that will ferry people to a historical and natural limestone arch. This, they say is yet another illustration of how government encourages tourism by constructing buildings and hotels that permanently destroy a rural community and its natural environment.

And have we come across news reports about mountaineers who have collected over 20 tons of garbage and frozen excrement on Everest? This confirms the fact that commercialization destroys the natural environment. If human feces is scattered around Mount Pulag and generates a threat to spread disease, this should be enough cause for alarm to people in Bokod and Kabayan who look up to the sacred mountain with significance.

For Mount Pulag, obviously it is the continuous number of hikers that causes the problems. In answer to a looming problem on human waste disposal, some knee-jerk rule makers constructed dug-out squat type toilet at the camp site. What happened? We saw napkins, tissue paper, dirty newspaper and dirty underwear scattered outside the toilet because humans no longer wanted to use the toilets when the pits were filled.

Now, what about the bulldozing of trees and commercialization on Mount Santo Tomas and Mount Cabuyao? La Presa? You know more than I do when the topic raises its ugly head. And I have never been there.