by: Dioscoro L. Umali
Our once magnificent dipterocarp Forests have been ravaged. Our rivers are polluted with silt; our coral reefs destroyed by blast fishing, its mangroves decimated, and Laguna de Bay is now a dying lake. If this plunder 1s not checked, the Philippines will experience increasing poverty and despair, and spiral downwards into the ranks of the very poorest of nations.
Today, our legendary Philippine Mahogany forests are just that legend. Out of the original 30 million hectares of trees, only 900,000 hectares of virgin dipterocarp forest remain. At present rates of cutting, these could disappear within seven to 12 years - just as the first-born of today's graduating class enter primary school..
For most of my life, I have worked with farmers, here in the Philippines and in other parts of Asia. I came to discover that they have the capacity to distill wisdom from daily life into pithy proverbs. And one of these illustrates the issue of flawed stewardship I have raised.
"We do not inherit the land from our parents," farmers often say. "We merely borrowed it from our children."
Is this then how we, of the fading generation, handled the wealth you entrusted us? We dissipated your environmental capital. In so doing, we endangered your capacity to provide, in the years ahead, daily bread for your families from the land you loaned us.
As prodigal parents, we radically altered your future. Your natural resource base is depleted. Greed of the past has seen to that. We lowered the threshold for violence by breeding social unrest. Above all, you will have little time to correct our failures.
What hurts most is we stripped the land of its beauty.
Your children will no longer thrill, as we once did, to the heart-stopping dive of a hawk. Nor will they breathe in the heady fragrance of pine forests.
The rich texture of Philippine mahogany will be, at best a quaint story for them. Their panoramas will be of drab landscapes, blanketed by sterile cogon grass, not the verdant meadows we knew as youngsters...
There is now an awakening, both in the Philippines and elsewhere, to dangers that threaten our environment. This is strongest among religious groups and organizations formed by Citizens, their wish to come together and husband the thin soil, nurse the blighted landscape, and reforest the scarred land, is growing.
Nature also has an amazing God-given capacity to regenerate. The ruin and debris are soon swept away by nature’s forgiving hand, when the hand of man is no longer raised against her.
