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Sunday, February 23, 2003
Mercado: Missing hawks and kaingins
By Juan L. Mercado
A rare break in pressroom deadlines reminded us of things that today’s youngsters, especially in crammed cities, no longer see. One is that of circling hawks. The other is of kaingins, torched by slash-and-burners farmers, blazing in the twilight.
Does that memory date me? “If you were dragged into in a hostage mess” a friend jokes, “you’d be among the first to be released because of age.”
My grandchildren—Camille, Adrian and Alexia—have never seen what fascinated me, along with other kids in short pants: hawks diving to snatch chicks from frantic hens in outlying Cebu barrios.
They’re poorer for this loss, I wryly muttered. On a windswept steppe outside Ulaan-Baatar, I was then watching hawks soaring in the cold, clear Mongolian skies.
The Master from Galilee, in fact, used the searing image of a hen sheltering her chicks to illustrate, in Dante’s words: L’amour che move il sole e l’altre stelle. (“The love that moves the sun and other stars.”)
Flames of kaingins, on the nearby hills of Cebu would flicker in the early dusk. That was when we’d trudge home, as the Angelus rang from the nearby belfry.
Not anymore. Hills that circle Cebu, as in most Philippine cities, have long been stripped bare. Instead, stark ridges flag deforestation’s ugly twin: soil erosion.
“To reverse soil erosion makes fighting insurgency seem like child’s play,” the late National Scientist Dioscoro Umali never tired of warning. Given the Moro Islamic Liberation Front’s recent assaults, that caution seems even more relevant today.
There’s little left to burn here. Is anything more pathetic than to hear Cebu officials debate whether remaining forest here is two or three percent. For all practical purposes, it’s zero. And that’s way below the 30 percent minimum safety benchmark.
Gov. Pablo Garcia could not be bothered with a reforestation program. And Mayor Tomas Osmeña lacks a “green lung” program for the city. Ironically, the recent El Niño years saw the most intense forest fires, in memory, erupt from Kalimantan to California.
The 1997/98 fires in Indonesia, for example, incinerated US$9 billion of timber stands. It also sent grey smaze – spliced from “smoke” and “haze”—swirling to Singapore, Brunei and Southern Thailand. Poor visibility socked in airports at Puerto Princesa and General Santos.
A few notable forested exceptions here remain. One is in the severely depleted timber stands in Mindanao’s Mount Kalindong. Another is in the Cordilleras.
In the Mountain Province, for example, dipterocarp stands still flourish along creeks and rivers. But even these are shrinking. Today, they’re concentrated, mostly in the east, particularly the towns of Paracelis and Natonin.
At last count, 53,767 hectares of pines provided the major forest cover. Mossy forests extend over 37,200 hectares. “The pine forest with its open crown and grassy understorey provides high fuel loads during the dry season,” the Food and Agriculture Organization notes.
A lady editor, attending a community press seminar, recalled that her journalism class read our reports, among others, on the first data emerging on frenzied devastation of forests. Then senator Emmanuel Pelaez and Forester Nicolas Lansigan were among those who raised the first outcry.
The Philippines, at that time, strutted then among four prima donnas of world exporters of timber. “That was 40 or so years back,” she recalled. “Now, we all have gray hair. What do you see?”
“The soaring hawks and kaingins on nearby hills are no longer there,” I replied. “Outside this room, I see power and telephone poles imported from Sabah and New Zealand. They no longer come from Mindanao. And your municipal fish catches, which peaked in 1983, have slumped by more than half. ”
These changes are subtle and rarely noticed. “The market has no alarm that sounds when the carrying capacity of a biological system is breached, “ the Worldwatch Institute notes.
But vanished hawks, slumping water tables and harvests of trash fish are warning signals of disaster ahead—inevitable results of relentless deforestation, soil erosion, over-fishing, coral reef blasting, water wastage over the years.
Exploitation has breached thresholds of sustainability. It is now consuming much of a once-abundant resource base itself. Collapse of fisheries, for example, merely dumps unmet need for protein, by a growing population, on to over-stressed farms.
“Those who use up these resources rashly assume there is more where it came from,” notes Mindanao Center for Policy Studies’ Edmundo Prantilla. “Well, there’s none.”
We’ve long crossed the outer edge of God-given abundance into start of an era of man-made shortages. The plunder cannot continue. Ecological decay is self-reinforcing. Failure to institute reforms greases the slide toward irreversible damage. Yet, Governor Garcia sneers at green groups here: “Go live in Africa.”
Costs for remedial policies, long postponed, become exorbitant. “Overall, the costs from environmental degradation in the region range from one to nine percent of each county’s annual GNP,” the Asian Development Bank and United Nations note in “State of Environment in Asia and the Pacific.”
Lack of time to ward off the inevitable emergencies merely becomes another surcharge where officials settle for “grow-now-clean-up-later” approaches—advocated by the governor.
“No generation has a freehold on the earth,” Margaret Thatcher once said “ All we have is a is a life tenancy with a full-repairing lease.”
(e-mail: juan_mercado @ pacific.net .ph)
(February 23, 2003 issue)
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