Puno ng Pagasa
One of my proudest creations in the environmental movement is this t-shirt featuring several tree species found in the Philippines. It can be hard to depict characteristics of trees, but once you get to know some of them they become easier to connect with. They take a life of their own in our imagination – much like they used to for most of humanity since antiquity – when we depended on plants for food, medicine, tools, clothing, shelter, and more.
Today though they’ve become ignored as “green blobs” in Philippine cities, as a colleague put it.
In fact the latest environmental issue involves trees having been cut in Manila. Residents and environmentalists have rightly questioned the cutting, asking why trees that have long provided shade to Manileños were cut knowing that green spaces in the metro are already so few and far between.
My art features a simple, single-color “tree-shirt” for a campaign that highlighted trees native to the Philippines. “Puno” is the Filipino word for both “full” and “tree”, giving the slogan “Puno ng Pag-asa” a dual meaning: full of hope or tree of hope. The slogan was made via a contest run on Facebook. The winner, Philip Andaya, came up with the slogan.
I’ve been asked often, “hey, so how can we prevent more cutting?” “How can we get more people to help?”
The answers to these are in places where people actually participate in conserving the environment. I’ll cite first one of the last remaining homes of Philippine Eagles in Luzon.
Near the center of the Sierra Madre, the longest mountain range in the country and home to one of the largest areas of pristine forests in the Philippines, is Mt. Mingan. When you look at the mountain “from above” on a map it looks like an upside down triangle.
It was here, I think back in 2014, when a group of botanists spotted Philippine Eagles as they were conducting plant research. Haribon’s Philippine Eagle expert at the time, J Kahlil Panopio was notified, and a joint research expedition began with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources or DENR and the Haribon Foundation. Sometime later, the towns of Gabaldon and San Luis in Nueva Ecija, and Dingalan in Aurora I think, established the area as a Critical Habitat or CH. Residents of Gabaldon got dibs on calling one of the eagles Gab-E or Gabaldon Eagle. To this day I don’t know how residents from neighboring towns feel about that, but that’s probably a story to discover for another day.
Anyway, today the CH is still there. In fact Haribon is back 10 years later working with the Alta Edimala Indigenous Peoples and local communities living in and around Mt. Mingan to establish a full-fledged nationally-protected area called, well, a Protected Area. Will it work? Well to this day the eagles are assumed to still be there, and so far no tree cuttings have been reported in the said area, at least to my knowledge.
The second example I’d like to cite is a little island not so far from Dumaguete on the island of Negros. Apo Island, not to be mistaken with Apo Reef (which by the way could be a third example) is to this day a Marine Protected Area or MPA. It was here a few decades ago that the late National Scientist Angel Alcala worked with local fishers to establish the MPA.
There was a time before this that fishers observed declining fish catch. This was verified by Alcala after collaborating with the fishers and science-ing the sh*t out of the area. I like that term, I got that from the movie “The Martian.”
Together with the fishers, they designated the area as an MPA and fishers were no longer allowed to fish in the area. Low and behold fish populations increased. Not only that, despite a specific area being excluded from fishing, the fish population in the reef area grew so much that it “overflowed” into areas surrounding the “no-go” zone. The MPA to this day is a eco-tourism success (though, as always, there are new problems).
These case studies are not perfect, but they are near-perfect examples of what happens when both science (which I call “the search for the truth”) and local community knowledge and effort are combined. The rest, as they say, is history.
Now how about those trees cut in Manila? Will Manileños continue to allow this to happen in their backyards? Indeed there are no Philippine Eagles in Manila (however there is one in Metro Manila – Quezon City is home to “Girlie”) – but will the last remaining trees of Manila also become history?
I don’t have answers to that, except for examples of what happens when people not only care, but act and create preventive, sustainable measures to project what protects us. There is always hope in that.
