Go Then and Rebuild Our Scarred Land
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.
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