No to cutting of 617 trees on Quirino Avenue!

We could not, we refused to believe that DENR has authorized the cutting of 617 trees, 200 of these decades-old, for the Southern Access Link Expressway project along the Quirino Avenue segment with a span of 3.97 kilometers (2.47 miles) with four elevated lanes.

On May 21, the DENR assured protesters that required permits/environment safeguards have been complied with, with large scale replacement planting required (50,700 seedlings) “within the City of Manila, in line with the Memorandum on Seedling Replacement Uniform Ratio, with planting sites to be determined in coordination with the local government to ensure ecological benefits to the area.”

By Sunday, this FB urgent call- “400 of the 600 trees to be cut down on Quirino Avenue remain. SAVE THEM.”

May 25, Bishop Gerardo Alminaza, Catholic charity Caritas Philippines president, released this Statement on the Mass Tree Cutting in Mnaila: An Act of Ecological Violence.

The mass cutting of decades-old trees along Quirino Avenue is an act of ecological violence against the people of Manila, a direct assault on the poor who have been enduring the daily penance of extreme heat, poisoned air, and sudden floods. This act is not simply a technical or bureaucratic detail.

For generations, the trees of Quirino Avenue stood as silent protectors and as the lungs of this community - offering shades to commuters standing under a scorching sun, providing shelter to exhausted workers waiting for a ride home, and giving breathing space to families increasingly choked by concrete and exhaust.

Now, these trees are being reduced to bleeding stumps to make way for another expressway under the disguise of “progress,” thereby, flattening our urban environment and once again, asking the poor to pay the highest price.

Why must "development" always demand the sacrifice of the vulnerable? Why are our cities designed for vehicles and concrete instead of for children, workers, pedestrians, and the elderly?

We refuse to hide this injustice behind bureaucratic language. What is legal on paper is not automatically moral in the eyes of God.

In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis warns against a cruel "throwaway culture" that treats both nature and vulnerable people as expendable collaterals for corporate expansion. This is not stewardship. This is environmental injustice.

The climate crisis is a present, urgent and unquestionable reality. In Manila, every mature tree destroyed is a moral failure. It is a wound inflicted on our common home.

As Church, we stand firmly against every form of development that destroys creation and deepens the suffering of the people.

Caritas Philippines will not remain silent while our sanctuary is dismantled piece by piece.

We call on our public authorities and contractors to halt this destructive tree-cutting immediately, to review these infrastructure projects through the lens of ecological justice, and to listen consistently to the communities who rely on these trees for survival.

We call on the faithful to stand with us.

Demand to keep and defend the remaining green spaces of our cities.

Demand accountability from our leaders. Demand on a development that gives life, rather than one that leaves us in the shadows of stumps.?

Was compliance with laws/permits more important for the DENR than the problems of “Metro Manila’s rapidly disappearing tree that will result in worsening floods, rising temperatures, dangerous air pollution levels?”

Against urgent alerts vs global warming by 2030, despite research/literature about the valuable positive contribution of trees and the negative impacts for people/our earth of tree cutting, and, despite widespread information/data about alternatives to tree cutting, why did DENR anyway proceed to allow 617 trees to be cut reportedly within 90 days and require replacement planting that cannot immediately replace the important role of trees as “carbon absorbers, protection against urban heat, air pollution and flooding?”

SAVE OUR TREES, STOP TREE CUTTING NOW!!!