The dream of a rainforest

By the time i wrote this story the world had changed drastically. Overwhelming landslides swept across Luzon. Then, apocalyptic tsunamis consumed everything along the shores of the Indian Ocean and literally altered the earth’s topography.

But it was a clear day when we left Sikatuna Beach Hotel in San Jose, Occidental Mindoro for Ilin Island. The waters of the South China Sea splashed our faces in the motorized banca, a reality away from Nature’s wrath in the months to follow.

Our host, Joe Reynolds, did not hold back on tales of his adventures. Born to a family of esteemed military men, he was–at various times in his life–a special agent for US intelligence, a diamond miner in South America and an international businessman. When we reached Ilin, it became apparent he was also a dreamer.

Awaiting our arrival was the stark opposite of Joe. Short, dark and shy Adel Declito grew up on the island and–despite an opportunity to migrate to Japan–never craved for city living. The two-term barangay captain of Iling (confusingly an area on Ilin Island) is best known for planting trees. He too is a dreamer.

The two use the word "destiny" to describe their first meeting. Though he speaks Niponggo more fluently than English and has only known Joe for four years, Kapitan Adel has become his best friend. They have different versions of that fateful meeting, both of which sound quite providential. What is clear is that Joe unintentionally landed on Ilin and Adel became his accidental host. Before long, they realized that they had one thing in common: trees. They sealed their unlikely partnership without so much as a handshake the second time they met.

Ilin Value-Added Forestry Management Services Foundation (ivafms) is the result of their collaboration. Simply put, the two dreamers are taking on the incredible task of building a rain forest on Ilin island.

In the beginning, people thought they were crazy. Joe could be in any part of the world doing good business. On the other hand, it would be more practical for Adel to plant vegetables and corn to feed his brood of five. Neighbors laughed when they heard that his passion was planting trees.

Adel was doing just that–minding his own business, planting trees when Joe appeared from out of nowhere. The older gentleman immediately knew he had found a kindred spirit on a little island in the Philippines. Though they were born on two separate continents in completely different cultures and conditions, they have lived parallel lives. Joe and Adel are among the few brave enough to want to change the world.

Now 56, Joseph J. Reynolds was born with an instant legacy of greatness. Joe’s great grandfather was the military governor of Texas during the reconstruction after the Civil War. His grandfather was a colonel in the US Army Air corps assigned to Clark Field in the Philippines under Arthur MacArthur, father of the famous General Douglas MacAthur. It was during that tour of duty that Joe’s father was born on Philippine soil in 1910. He would later become a full colonel of the US Air Force and was base commander of Eglin Air Force Base, the largest air force base in the world.

Of course, his father believed there was no greater calling than to serve the American military. A man’s man, his second love was the outdoors. And because Joe was the youngest, it was with him that the elder Reynolds shared his jungle adventures. Father and son went on their excursions with family friend Thomas White (then chief of staff of the US Air Force), soaking in the wilds of Latin, South and Central America to bathe in the natural sciences.

But Joe hated it; he didn’t like being ordered around. The appreciation for his experiences would come much later in life for these were not simple camping trips. If Indiana Jones had a childhood, this would have been it. The samples they collected on those trips were at times sent to Stanford University for classification. On one occasion, his dad and Tommy White discovered an unknown type of fish in Guyana. Its scientific name ends with the words "Reynolds‚ Eye" in honor of its discoverer.

"My father had retired in a small American town with a population of 7,000. He farmed ornamental plants and tried to sell them but I had more of a marketing capability than he had even if I was only a teenager," he continues.

Unsurprisingly, this young Indiana Jones prototype grew up to have real Indiana Jones adventures. At 19, he borrowed $2,000 from his mom and flew to South America to find diamonds. Years before that, he had learned how to fly a plane and did illegal maneuvers. His favorite prank was scaring fishermen with the sight and sound of a diving airplane. Joe wasn’t even old enough to drive then.

Grand dreams of striking it rich as a diamond miner eventually waned. After that, Joe joined army intelligence. "The reason why I went into intelligence is ‘coz you don’t need to carry a gun. You didn’t have to stand in the rain. You didn’t have to shoot people. I went into intelligence where you had a nice, warm bed, a nice office, a jeep, some respect and life was good."

It was also around that time when he decided to resume his education. Joe wasn’t exactly a good student. In fact, despite his colorful adventures in the jungle, he flunked biology in the nineth grade. That was why he didn’t have high hopes about the college aptitude test given by the military. However, to his surprise, he was exempted from all college biology. That was when it hit him that he did absorb a lot of the wisdom his father taught him. Joe later got his diploma in Criminal Justice plus a master’s degree in Public Policy from University of Central Florida. He even graduated with honors.

Military life was also something he did not quite get out of his system. In the ‘80s, he worked in naval intelligence as a civilian, assistant special agent in charge of Puerto Rico when the regional director gave him an offer to work in the Philippines. The bureau needed a fraud expert and he had the credentials. Joe came in July of 1986 during the turbulent, post EDSA 1 reign of Cory Aquino. He became assistant special agent in charge of Cubi Point.

His shift from military man to entrepreneur was so sudden it was again nothing less than providential. He developed business contacts during his frequent trips abroad. Eventually, he was marketing wooden furniture–an enterprise that brought his boyhood jungle adventures full circle. It also began his fascination for trees.

A world away, Adelardo Declito was living the stereotypical life of a farmer’s son, one of seven kids born to parents who owned eight hectares of land on Iling Island in Occidental Mindoro. Land was arid and farming difficult in this part of the Philippines which has the longest dry season.

A life of poverty and struggle was all he knew. But unlike his siblings, Adel saw education as an escape. His father, a traditional farmer, did not share this belief, but his mother supported his dream of earning a degree. She even set aside a prized pig for his education. When she died, his father and siblings wanted to slaughter the pig. But Adel begged them to let him sell it instead so he could buy fishing equipment. He fished at night to pay for his schooling. After high school in Iling Proper, Adel packed his clothes in a small carton box for a trip to Kalibo, Aklan where a rich relative offered to send him to college. That same carton box, badly battered during travel, accompanied him back to Iling a mere two weeks later.

"I wasn’t treated well by my uncle’s son because he knew I was a poor relation. I understood that I needed to adjust but I could not take that I had to experience physical hardships plus swallow verbal abuse. So I decided to leave," says Adel who turns quite emotional.

Back in Iling, Adel planted vegetables and raised chickens to survive. He resumed his studies a year later in Morta, Occidental Mindoro with the help of another uncle. But this good fortune ended when his benefactor died before he could earn his two-year degree in agriculture.

With no money to pursue a college degree, Adel taught high school practical arts in Iling for eight months. What changed the course of his life was a friend’s invitation to check out the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural, Advancement (oisca) in Santa Cruz, Occidental Mindoro.

oisca sent Adel on a 15-month scholarship to Japan to train in agriculture. Upon his return in 1985, he became a teacher at oisca Mindoro. There that he met his future wife, Liway, who was also an oisca scholar. Adel stayed with oisca until the Santa Cruz office closed in 1990. As severance pay, Adel was given another scholarship. In Japan, he assisted the instructor in teaching the first-time students, staying there for 15 months.

"My Japanese instructor told me: ‘Our world is very old. In human form, it is our grandmother or grandfather. Our world needs to be nurtured. In what way? The first thing we could do to help our world is to plant trees. Our world needs nourishment to survive,’" he says in lyrical Filipino.

"It never crossed my mind that I would earn from my trees," he clarifies. "I knew we could only cut them after 10 to 15 years. My investment was for my children’s future. I always tell people that we should not wait until our forests are denuded before we plant trees. By then, it will be too late."

The two immediately hit it off. Adel invited Joe to build a rest house on his property and be his eternal guest. Over many conversations, the ivafms easily took shape. Joe handled the paperwork while Adel concentrated on construction, recruiting foresters and planting seedlings.

What didn’t come so easily was nurturing trees in a location that did not get much rain. Eventually, they perfected a system of collecting water using the roof and gutters of the rest house to draw water to several water tanks. And to make sure the stagnant waters would not breed mosquitoes, they raised tilapia.

Says Adel: "There were a lot of critics who had a lot to say. What changed their minds was when Mr. Reynolds bought the first batch of trees from a resident. He liked her attitude because she was planting trees even before we started the project. When the trees were nine years old, she asked me if I could offer them to the foundation. That was last year. She was paid P54,000. But you know what? Mr. Reynolds didn’t cut down the trees. He told me that our project was not about cutting trees; our plan was to make Ilin a rain forest."

The project also includes transforming the island into a botanical garden like that of Singapore (where Joe took the Declito couple on a brainstorming trip), holding eco-tours and developing cottage industries for residents. ivafms will buy fruits from residents and sell them to the local market in San Jose; the excess they will process to make various products. This way, everybody wins: People earn a decent living and nature is left to flourish.

Another cause concerning the foundation is the plight of the Philippine teak tree.
Adel blames the depletion on the careless making of charcoal. Not that he blames residents. When the children are hungry and you have so many trees around, the decision is obvious.

ivafms has registered 20,500 trees on Ilin. The same number of seedlings are being cared for in the nursery. Sometime December, Joe happily reported that six teak seedlings were thriving, with a few more having the potential of growth.

"Even before Mr. Reynolds came to Ilin, I was aware that the Philippine teak is quite rare," Adel clarifies. "Someone from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources gave me the information. I remember when I was a boy of 12 standing in a field of fallen trees that were being burned in kaingin. Those trees where so huge that I would not be able to see past the fallen tree right in front of me."

Thankfully, ivafms is making a difference. Last year, Adel noted that the Carpenter Bird, which is indigenous to the area but absent for many years, has returned to Ilin.

Landslides in Luzon reinforced the residents’ new attitude towards the environment. Fear was a good a wake up call. Now, there are more people in Ilin planting than those cutting down trees.

Not harvesting at all though is impractical. The forest needs to be trimmed every now and then to allow the trees to flourish. Of their first trees, only half will be fallen in April. Those logs will be used to build a multi-purpose hall in Iling.

Meanwhile, mahogany won’t be the only trees they’ll plant. Explains Joe: "What we want to do is diversify. We want to grow about 165 species of trees per hectare. We want to introduce fruit trees...plant endemic trees. We want the natural to be there so the wildlife will come back. Unless you’re in the lumber business, which we’re not, you don’t want to grow just one species ’coz it will poison the soil. If you go into a rain forest and you see a mahogany tree, you’re not going to see another mahogany right beside it. You’ll only see one or two mahogany trees per hectare."

Both Joe and Adel know the task will take no less than 50 years. But they are patient men. Change is difficult and tedious. Joe says that he isn’t sure anyone has ever tried building a rain forest. Their research has shown that only one percent of tree projects are sustainable worldwide. Still, he hopes their project will be replicable in other parts of not only the Philippines but also the entire world.

"My love for the Philippines is (based on) the Filipino," Joe says. "I look at the culture and I say there are lots of pluses and lots of minuses. I overlook the minuses and sort of build on the pluses in hopes that I can do my little bit. If I can do that, educate some people, maybe young kids, give them some vision, teach them to look forward, maybe they’ll do their part. Maybe they’ll teach others. And it has to come from the province, not from the city. That is how change can happen."

And how a rain forest can possibly be built.