By Ramon Dacawi
Benchwarmer

First of two parts

(The original of this piece was done some two years back, after a visit to two indigenous community projects in the Cordillera. With the recent interest on the region's role as the watershed cradle of Northern Luzon, it finds print in slightly different form - as a tribute to a forester's initiative and to our upland tribal villages whose indigenous knowledge for generations preserved the vital but now neglected and vanishing mossy forests of the Cordillera...)

VILLAGE leader Paul Casiwan said they found four types of acorns in the remaining mossy forests. He sounded like he was trying to hold back his excitement over the find.

Arroyo Watch: Sun.Star blog on President Arroyo

The acorns sounded like coffee beans as he poured them out of jute sacks and into iron buckets. His group had spent days gathering and sorting them according to shape, texture, size and variety.

They were of four sizes. The three smaller ones were ovate, shaped like bullets, but with short pins at the tip and looking like light, shiny chocolate nuggets. The biggest was round, like a dull chestnut.

Casiwan cracked a shell, popped the kernel into his mouth and chomped. He cracked another and offered the white meat to visitors. It was hard, with an astringent taste like betel nut.

Acorns are basic food for birds and other animals that enrich the biodiversity of the mossy forest, he said.

Fellow worker Dominga Baliaga raked her hands into one of the aggregate piles, looking for those with tiny, whitish sprouts that must and damp had coaxed out of their shells - through the pins. Contrasted with the dominant color of chestnut, those with shoots were easy to spot.

Soon the germinating seeds will be sown in pots in tree nurseries they had carved and flattened out of steep mountainsides overlooking tributaries of the Abra River.

When their leaves develop, they will be replanted in open spaces to expand the vanishing mossy forest cover of Agawa.

Until they started picking and examining seeds, villagers in neighboring barangays in northwestern Besao town, Mountain Province, took for granted what their mossy forests contain.

They now have to have an eye for detail to properly identify the different tree species, together with the herbs and plants they'll have to propagate as source of tribal medicine.

The seed propagation of "payen"(the native name for oak), "da-il" (petroleum nut) and other mossy forest species was part of a forest biodiversity project began July of 2006 for Agawa and the adjoining barangays of Ambagiw, Gueday, and Lacma-an in Besao.

Three months later, a women's group in Bayyo Barangay in the capital town of Bontoc also launched a similar community-based forest biodiversity project.

It concentrated in Mt. Polis, the fragile water source for several towns in Mountain Province and Ifugao, a watershed of the Chico River flowing into the rice lands of the Cagayan Valley.

The two projects, set for two to three years, were supported by the Small Grants Program, of the United Nations Programme then headed by Angie Cunanan.

Forester Manny Pogeyed, now the provincial environment officer of Mountain Province, set the ground work by helping the two communities conceive and draft the proposals.

Back on 2003, Pogeyed, then the head of the community environment and natural resources office in Sabangan, Mountain Province, also mobilized the northern barangays of Sagada town for headwaters enhancement project, also in a tie-up with SGP-UNDP.

Pogeyed admitted that regular government outlays for forestry programs are very limited and spread too thin, prompting the need to tap other support institutions for the preservation of the mossy forests.

Until now, the mossy and pine forests that are unique to the village and most of the Cordilleras have been overlooked in the national forestry master plan.

Conservation efforts are focused more on the lower and more common tropical foliage of these islands, from the mangrove to the dipterocarp and molave found up to 800 meters above sea level.

Unlike the lower forests, the dwindling pine and mossy forests have been classified only for protection, without provisions for reforestation and expansion.

Yet these higher ecosystems, specially the mossy forests, make the Cordillera the vital watershed cradle of Northern Luzon, the source of water that is the lifeblood of the electric dams and the lowland farms.

"Mossy forest conservation and development had not been given attention by development agencies in the past," noted the Agawa project paper.

"The ecological and scientific significance of this type of (forest), with its diverse vegetation endemic in a highland environment, is worth providing a conservation push at this point in time."

As headwaters, the mossy forest acts like a sponge that gradually releases rainwater into the tributaries of river systems.

While its damp condition insulates it from heat, its natural elevation immediately above or beside the easily combustible pine stands makes it partly vulnerable to fires.

"Forest fires prevalent during the dry season creep into the edges of the mossy forest," the Bayyo project noted.

The regeneration of pine stands within areas formerly covered by oak and other species contributes to mossy forest and biodiversity reduction.

This has something to do with allelopathy, the nature of pine to exude resin toxic to other species, enabling it to spread and dominate areas earlier cleared by fires or for swidden farms.

This is evident along the mountainsides above the Talubin River towards Bayyo where pine has taken over mountaintops and areas once mossy.

Some surviving oaks and mossy species are limited to the waterway gullies or even below the invasive conifer stands.

For generations, traditional village forest management systems, rather than state policies that sometimes clash with time-tested tribal laws, protected the integrity of the pine and the dwarf oak forests. Like the mossy forest, however, these indigenous practices - the original models of community-based resource management - are also vanishing.

It appears that the rate of mossy forest denudation is directly proportional to the rate of erosion of the traditional "muyong," "tayan" and other tribal natural resource management systems.

The two projects, therefore, were anchored on the revival and documentation of these traditional practices, together with folk wisdom on use of medicinal species still found in the mossy forests.

In one of the Bayyo nurseries, Diana Peta-ul and Alicia Wayasen showed visitors several types of mountain tea, which they claim possess therapeutic properties.

They talked of a tree locally called "dumranoh," the bark of which is usually dried into "humang," grated and drank as a cure for fever and bum stomach.

While doing site visits for the projects, Pogeyed heard more revealing insights, among them a common observation of hunters and village elders about their coming across snakes battling forest rats.

"They noticed that each time the rat is bitten, it runs to a certain tree, digs its teeth into the bark and returns to continue the fight." (To be continued. E-mail:rdacawi@yahoo.com for comments.)