Mindanao’s lost glory

As we flew low over the blue skies of Bukidnon and Davao, the emerald green forest down below seemed dark and impenetrable, stretching as far as the eye could see into the horizon. “If this plane crashes,” I remember my mother saying as we looked down in awe and wonder, “they will never find us. It will be like looking for needles in a haystack.”

Mom had a way with words. She introduced me to reading and got me hooked on crossword puzzles at a very young age. The phrase “needles in a haystack” seemed the perfect metaphor for how people would look in all their puniness amid the vastness and physical grandeur of our home island of Mindanao.

Back in the mid-1950s on the first plane trip of my life, this stark imagery of beauty and terror would become indelible in my mind. There was something indestructible, even fearsome, about Mother Nature, which so completely dominated the whole island and enthralled its people, as if she would swallow us at any time and there would be no trace that we had ever existed at all.

Like most immigrants of the period, our nuclear family unit left the security and comforts of Manila to try our luck in what had been romanticized since the 1930s as the Philippines’ “Land of Promise.” From the Quezon era to the Magsaysay years, the assumption was that anybody who wanted land and was willing to take chances would somehow make it in Mindanao. Dad chose the frontier province of Bukidnon, the “heart of Mindanao” — mountainous, forested, landlocked, and thinly populated by peaceful and hard-working people, truly God’s country.

Dad and Mom fell for the government’s irresistible “Go South, Young Man” exhortations. He was a newly minted dentist with a deep interest in politics; she was an independent-minded woman who gave up a career of her own to serve as his assistant and to help raise their five children.

Those were the days when Mindanao was the Filipino Africa: so remote and forbidding from civilized Manila that it took three days and three nights to get there by boat or almost a whole day of flying southward with an obligatory transit stop in Cebu. Such was the slow-but-sure state of technology of the day.

Hitting the northern Mindanao port of Cagayan de Oro either way, we faced a full day’s rugged trip up the dolorous and serpentine Sayre Highway to Malaybalay, the pine-shrouded capital town of Bukidnon. Buses were no more than rolling coffins and private cars were few. Often, we hitched on military 6X6 trucks. What passed for roads were gravel or dirt trails that were either blindingly dusty or hopelessly muddy because the torrid tropical sun ruled by day and heavy thunderstorms came by late afternoon.

We sometimes skipped this backbreaking ordeal by taking PAL’s expensive thrice-weekly DC-3 Cagayan to Davao flight with a stopover in Malaybalay. Our leg took only 25 minutes but the air pockets over the deep and impassible canyons were vomit-inducing and turned you into a human wreck by touchdown. Often, low cloud formations and sudden rain would prevent landings at the last minute and you could end up marooned in Davao, the final stop, for days on end. This was the reason we read newspapers sometimes five days late and all at once. For breaking news, we were at the mercy of cryptic bulletins carried on faint radio signals from Manila. Television was nonexistent until the 1980s. 

Although we had to endure torrential rain practically year-round, the danger of inundation or floods was unthinkable. Like Denver, Colorado, we were one mile up in the skies, almost touching the clouds. We were ringed by deep forests which absorbed downpours and kept fertile farm soil on the plateau from being washed down to the lowlands. Rainwater either flowed south into the Rio Grande, Manupali and the Pulangi Rivers into Cotabato’s gigantic Liguasan Marsh and on to Lianga Bay or spilled northward to the Agusan and Cagayan Rivers which emptied into the Bohol Sea.

Mindanao as a whole was regarded as typhoon-free. Ferocious storms originating from the South Pacific generally made landfall way up north in the Bicol Peninsula; if they ever strayed southward to Mindanao, they merely nicked, not ravaged, Surigao on the east coast and then swung sharply to the north. In any case, the formidable mountains of Agusan stood guard against the strongest assaults of rain and wind and kept the rest of the island well out of harm’s way.

Before the disastrous climate change of the early 21st century, we were truly blessed by nature. Little did we know then that our blessings would turn into a cruel curse. Within a decade or by the early 1960s, there were already distressing signs that the island was headed down the path of self-destruction.

By the end of the 20th century, nobody would even dare talk of the island’s once-radiant promise; instead its present and future would be painted in gruesome terms involving irreversible ecological damage. A further complication after 1968 was an interminable Muslim insurgency constantly botched by the Manila government and dangerously meddled in by foreign powers.

I remember getting a grim premonition of disaster as a first-year high school student on a long road trip that, incidentally, covered most of the island in 1961. Our Bukidnon Boy Scouts delegation to the national jamboree in Zamboanga City spent almost a month of rugged adventure and awareness of our environment.

Unfazed by the horrors of overland travel, we took military trucks from Malaybalay to Zamboanga City, passing through Misamis Oriental, Lanao del Norte, and down the Zamboanga peninsula. On the roundabout way back, we took a slow boat that made stops in Cotabato City and Dadiangas (now Gensan) before arriving in Davao City. From Davao, we again took military trucks through then-vast and undivided Cotabato before getting home to Malaybalay from the unknown south instead of the usual north.

Nothing could have been more shocking to me as we drove into the Zamboanga Peninsula than the sight of whole mountains, once inviolate forests, stripped bare of trees. It was a vision straight from hell — an ugly landscape of unevenly-cut tree stumps, some ablaze with fire, with foul-smelling smoke blanketing whole stretches of road like fog as thick as pea soup.

In later years, I would form a more complete picture of what was then happening not only in Zamboanga, but all over the island: after the loggers’ heavy equipment had felled and hauled down the trees, the kaingeros or swidden (slash-and-burn) farmers came to complete the destruction and claim the deforested land as their own. You can imagine a steady stream of immigrants from Luzon and the Visayas and the resulting population explosion in the island (from about one million in 1900 to 25 million by 2010) somehow being responsible for mowing down countless hectares of virgin forests forever.

According to world forestry experts, Mindanao’s forest cover rapidly declined from 70 percent to just 20 percent from 1900 to the end of the 20th century. A 1991 University of Chicago study showed that from 1950 to 1987, Mindanao alone lost 35,979 square kilometers of forest, about 44.71 percent of the national total. Luzon came in second with 26,652 square kilometers or 34.36 percent. Palawan and other islands accounted for the rest.

This wanton deforestation — equivalent to wiping out two Central American countries in just 37 years — transformed what was once hailed as among the world’s most lushly forested nation into a pitiful ecological disaster zone. As the devastation wrought by Typhoon Pablo recently indicated, Mindanao continues to lose its remaining forest despite repeated logging bans imposed by the government. 

I would get a most disturbing picture of what was actually behind Mindanao’s tragic fate: post-World War II Japan’s relentless drive for economic recovery and its fatal linkage to the untrammeled greed and power of key sectors of the Filipino elite. Japan, after all, was the principal destination of log and iron ore shipments, and also the chief provider of reparation goods like ships, textile mills, cement plants and other factories that were supposed to jumpstart industrialization of the Philippines.

Japan more than achieved its goal, becoming by the early 1970s Asia’s economic colossus, only to be overtaken by resurgent China beginning in 2008. The Philippines languished in unexplained underdevelopment, partly because of its chronic culture of corruption which offered fabulous wealth to the rapacious elite and all the reasons to abdicate its responsibilities to the nation.

With their business in increasing disrepute and logging bans invoked from time to time, the old logging dynasties have long moved on to power generation, real estate, banking, and more lucrative pursuits. If you read today’s newspapers closely enough, their descendants continue to be active and influential in politics, their impact on the environment just as lethal.

During my college days in March 1970, as a delegate to a student conference in Tokyo, I noted the bald hills along the Tomei Expressway going south to Osaka being reforested at a fast pace with young trees. On subsequent visits, I saw the same hills turning into thick woods and parks that eliminated all memories of wartime devastation. This was at the time when Mindanao was being rapidly deforested to ship all our logs to Japan.

What happened to all those untold exported millions of logs? I read a shocking American research paper about how these were mainly used as plywood or construction trusses to build thousands of skyscrapers and concrete buildings in Tokyo and other cities; later these were discarded as waste products. A smaller proportion went to newsprint, book paper and chopsticks used in sushi joints.

We lost our magnificent first-growth forests for such banal purposes and undertakings?

On my 1987 visit to Taipei, I stayed at the Asia World Hotel and was surprised to see glorious mahogany panels all over the place, the mute reminders of how the vanished forests of Isabela and Cagayan had been used to boost the vanity of one of the original Filipino taipans, now deceased and forgotten. Barely 10 years later during another trip, I noticed that the once-conspicuous panels were gone, perhaps thrown away as scrap wood.

In 1992, one of Robert F. Kennedy’s daughters went to Palawan and was taken to the modernist Ramon Mitra house on a hillside with a dazzling view of the sea. It was a celebrated showcase of Philippine hardwood that was deemed second to none in the country. A passionate green activist, the American heiress was so mortified by what she saw that she wrote a blistering expose of Mitra’s role in raping Palawan’s virgin forests. Picked up by the wire services, this tirade helped sink the latter’s moral reputation and doomed his presidential candidacy.

About this time in one of Makati’s gilded ghettoes, I was invited to the home of one of the youngest and richest tycoons of the post-Marcos period. Designed in the minimalist Japanese-Balinese style, what gave the mansion its crowning glory was the jaw-dropping array of the widest, well-aged mahogany panels I’ve ever seen in my life. From floor to ceiling to staircases and walls, there was nothing but the rich golden-red glow of the finest narra hardwood that money can buy.

“Between Asia World and this house,” I couldn’t help exclaiming to the embarrassment of my hosts, “that’s half the mahogany forests that once stood in this country.”

The other guests — Spanish and Chinese heirs to the biggest real estate and shopping mall fortunes — could only grin politely and let out nervous laughter. I suspected they, too, had the same “pride” in our forests or wished that they could have built their own drop-dead wooden treasure houses to crow about.

At the very least, I sighed with relief, the young tycoon and poor Monching Mitra had put their personal hoards of the best Philippine hardwood into more enduring monuments than ephemeral construction trusses or throwaway chopsticks. 

For all my fears of Bukidnon becoming hopelessly denuded of its forests, I am amazed that what remains of its green cover today still impresses a lot of people. Those who are aware that I grew up there openly rhapsodize about the place. “It’s so lovely, the best in the land,” they invariably declare with a tinge of envy.

I don’t have the heart to say that the unspoiled Bukidnon of my youth was infinitely awesome but now impossible to conjure even in my wildest dreams.

During my exile years in America, I would write to Dad (Mom had passed in 1974) that I kept seeing uncanny glimpses of our beloved home province everywhere I went — the Adirondocks and Catskills, the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mt. Desert Island, the Poconos, the Berkshires, etc. These were wild and inspiring places, untold millions of acres of nature protected by law and tradition for the benefit of future generations.

In December 1994, when Dad first set foot in Seattle at age 70, he was stunned by the unbelievable charms of a city set against dense forests and surrounded by mountains, sea and lake from all sides. We drove down to California and all the way to the Grand Canyon mesmerized by long stretches — in between teeming cities and suburbs — of America the Beautiful. He couldn’t help but bemoan his lost Bukidnon. Later, he would venture out to Montana farther east near the Canadian border just to soak up the spirit of adventure that had once lured him and Mom to risk everything and go south and make their home in Mindanao.

Montana, he loves to say, translates to Bukidnon in Anglicized Spanish. But President Theodore Roosevelt and the national parks system got to Montana ahead of the loggers and the ecologically challenged hordes. Bukidnon, indeed Mindanao itself, was not as lucky.

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E-mail the author at noslen7491@gmail.com