Next week is the inauguration of US President-elect Barack Obama. Americans expect him to bring change to America. Their collective “audacity of hope,” shown by the largest turnout for the elections there, has brought this university professor with a funny name to the highest office of the United Sates of America.
Obama’s administration has to address the most pressing problems on two fronts — Iraq and the battle for the economy. Pulling out from Iraq and putting in billions for bailouts and government spending seem to be the strategies. Building infrastructure, in fact, is the advice to most countries affected by the global economic depression.
The Philippines needs to heed this advice, too, for it to quickly recover. This can only be good, of course, if all the billions allocated are used on the projects they were intended for, instead of golf memberships or trips to Las Vegas. Hoping that corruption can be mitigated, part of these funds should be spent on literally building a new landscape for our towns, cities, and countryside.
America in the depression years of the 1930s built its famous national parks system. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed men were recruited for the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The CCC built roads, bridges, parks, dams, and other projects that today still contribute considerably to America’s tourism and general economy. The CCC also started the first groups to battle forest fires and also planted five billion new trees. The depression left a greener, more ecologically balanced, and more picturesque America than when it started.
The Philippines could do the same for its provinces, towns, and cities. We could replant all our forests, build roads from farms to market for local sustenance, and from ports and airports to white sandy beaches for tourism. If there is any doubt about the importance of landscape aesthetics, let me quote from a paper presented by National Artist for Landscape Architecture Ildefonso P. Santos. The paper “Aesthetics in Landscape Architecture as Applied within the Context of a Developing Country” was read at the 1988 International Federation of Landscape Architects World Congress in Athens.
IP stated: “Before the feasibility of aesthetics in landscape architecture can be discussed within the framework of economic constraint in a developing country, the overriding consideration must be its justification. Is landscape architecture a luxury or a necessity? At first glance, it seems fairly obvious that, in a starving society where it is not uncommon to hear the dismal sobbing of hungry children, the subject of landscape beautification may be hard to justify. And why not? How could anyone even think of providing food for the eyes when there is not enough for the stomach? Why then must a developing country that is desperately fighting for its very survival concern itself with aesthetics in the first place when it cannot even afford to sustain the basic necessities of life? Unless, of course, aesthetics plays such an important role in a man’s physical environment, without which his senses and his whole spiritual being are adversely affected and he is reduced to no more than a zombie.”
Santos continues, “The problems attendant to a depressed society are complex and multifaceted. Life is not only miserable, it is also cheap. It is a daily constant struggle for survival…In Metro Manila, for example, hunger stalks the less fortunate of the urban poor (living in squatter colonies)…squatting is a way of life that breeds ghettos reeking with applying squalor and filth…(squatters) clog waterways and street gutters with their trash and plastic bags and wrappers, causing constant scummy floods during the rainy season. Aprodicio Laquian, a political scientist, best described the problem when he observed that “these poorest of the urban poor live in dilapidated settlements that cling precariously to hillsides, line smelly canals, block roadsides or crowd inner city alleys. In their tattered misery, they mock the aspirations of all those who yearn to make their cities sophisticated and modern.
“In the late ‘70s, the government undertook a slum improvement program designed to mask eyesores that mar and malign the beauty of the urban landscape and adversely impinge on the environment. This came in the form of superficial and palliative solutions that were nothing more than cosmetic applications aimed at hiding the blighted areas from public view, either by caging the slums behind whitewashed fences or by improving the facade of buildings to hide the unsightly structures within. However, government ineptitude and kid-glove handling of this social malady — whether out of humanitarian concern or for reasons of political expediency — have abetted and encouraged (uncontrolled urban development) that keep pushing the fragile urban environment into unmitigated deterioration.
“Concerned environmentalists are confused and in a quandary on how to effectively tackle the mounting ecological problems. To be sure, there are more than enough laws on environmental protection and conservation. The main stumbling block to the enforcement of these environmental laws is the government’s seeming partiality to economic progress over ecological concern. A quick tour of the metropolis will invariably reveal that the city air is thick with noxious gas and soot spewed from ill-situated factories. Compounding the pollution problem are more than one million vehicles, half of which would not pass gas emission tests. In a very real sense, Metro Manilans are killing themselves and their city…
“It is obvious that there is an argument against a do-nothing attitude towards the abomination of the environment, notwithstanding the need to quiet down the growling empty stomachs. Surely, there must be more to life than mere physical needs of flesh and blood. We can only draw inspiration and wisdom from this oft-repeated and meaningful phrase: ‘Man does not live by bread alone,’ while his body is nourished by food, his soul is enriched by beauty. To the hungry poor and, unfortunately, even to some of the more affluent segment of society this phrase may mean little or nothing at all, for the food of the spirit is not something tangible. It is not something that one can assuage his hunger with or put a price tag on its value. And yet little do people realize that this phrase carries a message of sublime importance.
“Psychologists have long understood and accepted the importance of aesthetics to our physical environment because of its indelible effect on human behavior. The visual effects of beauty result positively in the stimulation and gratification of the mind and the senses — eliciting pleasurable feelings of satisfaction and happiness, delight, ecstasy, rapture and joy to the beholder.
“Studies have shown that the work of the mind is best done in surroundings of peace and beauty. On the other hand, it is generally accepted that ugliness and discord of any sort are offensive to the sight and cause visual pain, disturb the nervous system, create tension and leave an uncontrollable depressing effect on the individual, usually without his being aware of it, for the environment has a unique preponderance over man; it molds, shapes, and leaves indelible marks on him. That is why it is so important to surround ourselves and our children with the greatest possible beauty. As Eric Newton so fittingly wrote in the Essentials of Beauty, ‘If my eye sends me nothing but reports of visual chaos in the outer world, the part of my brain that receives vital messages will be in a permanent condition of distress. Imagine the effects, then, of a depressed environment upon a society that is already flooded with feelings of hopelessness, low self-esteem, and frustration. It could be devastating!
“Both the physical and mental activity of people already troubled and given to brooding and lack of patience, irritable and short-tempered, can be adversely affected to such a point of despair and apathy as to render them unproductive. This would lodge them deeper into the precursory, squalid, hand-to-mouth existence they lead — an inescapable vicious cycle. Thus, it becomes imperative that in such a developing nation saddled with heavy debts and in a state of economic crisis, aesthetics plays a very important role and needs to be introduced as a matter of urgency, if only to buoy up sagging spirits and offer hope for the future.”
IP Santos wrote these lines 20 years ago. Metro Manila and the rest of the country have since deteriorated in terms of its urban areas and once-pristine countryside. Boracay is the best example of the abandonment of both aesthetics and natural resources in the name of profit. Informal settlements now house half of all our urban population, which has increased without any new city parks or recreational amenities provided in the last 50 years.
Our national parks were provided funds for the establishment of a National Integrated Protected Areas System, but this is a joke considering the miniscule number of park rangers and the overwhelming presence of rapacious private interests. Those areas that are still untouched and undiscovered stay so because ports, highways, and airports have never been built or improved (despite the billions in funds released every year).
Maybe it’s time we just took over government’s job and organize our own Civilian Conservation Corps. Our new CCC can take off from already successful models of GK and Habitat but for a wider range of infrastructure and civic improvement. The audacity of beauty, as an essential equal to all these functional improvements, is necessary, too, as Santos proffers. One is a mirror that reflects the other.
The beauty of our cityscape and countryside cannot be sustained unless real change happens and nothing, we now know, will happen unless we do it ourselves. We must find new leaders with unbridled audacity and conviction, not the convicts and thieves that make most of our current government. We must abandon these old trapos and the politics of corruption to embrace, as the Americans have, a politics of hope.
Hopelessness must be reversed by building a political aesthetic based not on short-term goals but, like any large garden or park, should be based on a long-drawn-out master plan, the provision of constant nurturing, and the realization that it will take more than one generation to fully blossom. The seeds for change must be planted now or we reap nothing but the fruits of despair.
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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.