A new home for Filipiniana

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has launched a major worldwide tree planting campaign. Under the Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign, people, communities, business and industry, civil society organizations and governments are encouraged to enter tree planting pledges online in their website with the objective of planting at least one billion trees worldwide during the year 2007. As of May, the website registers a total of 13,938,742 trees planted so far and 962,442,145 pledges. UNEP Executive Director, Achim Steiner, raises the alarm that forest cover, in a global context, is at least one-third less than what it once was, hence, he enjoins everyone to act and to reverse the trends.

In the Philippines, a satellite mapping technology done in 2002 estimated the forest area to be only 7.168 million hectares, or 23.9% of total land area. From 21 million hectares in the 1900s, or after a century, our forest area has declined significantly, probably the most rapid and severe in the world, Ruth Condeno of the Haribon Foundation, states in her study. We know that the destruction of these forests were caused by years of illegal logging, conversion of timberlands into marginal upland and commercial agriculture, shifting cultivation by the landless poor, and conversion of forestlands into playgrounds for the rich, resorts or subdivisions. This degradation consequently led to serious biodiversity problems that pushed many endemic species to the brink of extinction. In the last half of the 20th century, 60% of Philippine flora became extinct.

Many studies have shown that the massive Contract Reforestation Project embarked on by the government in the early 1990s to save Philippine forests did not succeed because fast-growing exotic species like Mahogany, Gemelina and Eucalyptus were planted. This produced negative effects on the productivity of the land and on the biodiversity of the area. The proliferation of Mahogany, for one, was found harmful because other native trees found it hard to survive. Reforestation using the same species was found to be more effective.

Hence, tree planting advocacy and campaign must include important lessons from the past so that every nation’s effort will not be in vain, or worse, may even lead to more serious biodiversity loss. The more everyone realizes their actions are fundamentally, and to a significant extent irreversibly, changing the diversity of life on Earth, the better we can take care of the earth we live in.

Remember, the first home of Adam and Eve was a paradise called The Garden of Eden, a delightful place filled with trees of beauty, height and grace, a place of innocence and bliss? Well, that paradise is what we should be enjoying.