Lobotomized mindsets
Lobotomized mindsets
Updated 10:33pm (Mla time) Nov 15, 2004
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 15, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
IS lobotomy of mindsets both the cause and effect of the unremitting depletion of our natural resource systems?
Only 30 percent of reforestation projects succeeded, Environment Secretary Michael Defensor candidly told a meeting in the Subic Bay Freeport Zone. "People hardly recognize economic benefits from protecting the environment." Connivance sabotaged the program.
In 1575, forests blanketed 92 percent of the country. Abundance foisted the attitude that "there was more where it came from," Mindanao Center for Policy Studies' Edmundo Prantilla noted. "Well, there's none."
By 2001, accessible timber stands had been chain-sawed. Forest cover had dwindled to only 18 percent, when the Southern Leyte flashflood buried hundreds in mud. (Remember Ormoc's 8,000 fatalities?)
Centuries of plunder gave rise to anguished proverbs. "Do not cut the trees to get the fruit," Ilocanos and Tausugs counsel. "A sturdy tree resists the winds," Boholanos note.
"Most of the country's once rich forests are now gone," says the 2003 Food and Agriculture Organization update of the forestry master plan. Out of 500,000 mangrove hectares in 1900, for example, only 109,000 hectares still stand. "Forest recovery, through natural and artificial means, never coped with the destruction rate," the FAO found.
University of the Philippines students launched in 1910 the first formal reforestation program at Los Baños. President Sergio Osmeña later opened Cebu's Camp 7 reforestation project. It still exists in a province where forest cover is almost zero.
By the mid-1970s, the government operated 91 reforestation sites. From top-down diktat, the projects sought wider people participation, using various tenurial instruments, including contract replanting.
Under "social/community forestry" approaches, Paper Industries Corp. sowed tree plantations within its concession. It pioneered smallholder tree farms.
International agencies supported these efforts. The Asian Development Bank and Japan's OECF, for example, loaned $240 million for today's "Forestry Sector Project."
"You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself," insider-trading convict Ivan Boesky once said.
That mind-set is reflected in logging money squirreled abroad, spent on flashy cars, etc. In the process, the Philippines skid from "prima donna" of timber exporters to today's wood-pauper. We now buy logs from countries that reforested: New Zealand, Malaysia and Australia.
We also become, in the process, a mismanagement "case study." The Philippine experience "provides a poignant lesson for (still forest-rich countries) like Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, the UN's Asia-Pacific Forestry Towards 2010 points out.
Timber money's refusal to invest left the country without wood, factories or technicians, plus "a legacy of problems and no revenues to alleviate them," the FAO notes. Explosion of demand in North America and the region for wood-based panels, paper and paperboard bypassed a sunset industry.
Time has not been an ally. Migrants streaming into northeastern Mindanao from denuded Cebu "ruined their first homesteads," Dr. Karl Pelzer noted in a 1972 issue of Journal of Asian Studies. By then, some migrants were moving into Mindanao's interior, repeating the destructive cycle there.
In three or four generations, large parts of Mindanao will replicate Cebu, Pelzer predicted. "Where will Cebuanos go after they've destroyed the forest soils of Mindanao?"
But Pelzer's estimates were off, we told Mindanao journalists, in their late 20s, attending a Philippine Press Institute seminar. "He made that forecast about the time when you were born. Only a generation later, you file dispatches on Mindanao's denudation and flash floods."
Depletion of forests also denudes the mind. A Negros and Panay survey discovered most schoolchildren have no concept of natural forests. When asked to draw, they depicted neat rows of plantation trees. Some "baby-boomers think Philippine mahogany or molave is a street sign," a forester explained.
"Today, our legendary forests are just that-legend," the late National Scientist Dioscoro Umali told a graduating class of the University of the Philippines. "For your children, the rich texture of Philippine mahogany will be, at best, a quaint story ... We stripped the land of its beauty. And the victims are our grandchildren-bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh."
When lobotomy of the mind occurs, policy is skewed by widely differing accounting, Foreign Affairs' Steven Anderson warns. One exclusively adds pesos and centavos. Another tallies "extinction deficits" -- the drawdown on biological capital and the threats to survival they unleash.
Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia exemplifies this dilemma. "We have a budget surplus and no debts," she asserts. This is understandable. She was an infant when some Cebuano migrants were razing northern Mindanao.
Her programs gloss over staggering ecological IOUs, from 70-percent soil erosion, skimpy fish catches to a nightmare: potential contamination of water tables and food chains from toxic chemical sludge in the abandoned Atlas copper mines. That could replay the Marinduque tragedy.
"After you've felled the last tree, caught the lash fish, and polluted the last well, can you eat money?" No. But if lobotomized minds exclude concern for conservation, the Foreign Affairs analysis cautions, "then the ecological systems that make human life possible will be increasingly put at risk."
Updated 10:33pm (Mla time) Nov 15, 2004
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 15, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
IS lobotomy of mindsets both the cause and effect of the unremitting depletion of our natural resource systems?
Only 30 percent of reforestation projects succeeded, Environment Secretary Michael Defensor candidly told a meeting in the Subic Bay Freeport Zone. "People hardly recognize economic benefits from protecting the environment." Connivance sabotaged the program.
In 1575, forests blanketed 92 percent of the country. Abundance foisted the attitude that "there was more where it came from," Mindanao Center for Policy Studies' Edmundo Prantilla noted. "Well, there's none."
By 2001, accessible timber stands had been chain-sawed. Forest cover had dwindled to only 18 percent, when the Southern Leyte flashflood buried hundreds in mud. (Remember Ormoc's 8,000 fatalities?)
Centuries of plunder gave rise to anguished proverbs. "Do not cut the trees to get the fruit," Ilocanos and Tausugs counsel. "A sturdy tree resists the winds," Boholanos note.
"Most of the country's once rich forests are now gone," says the 2003 Food and Agriculture Organization update of the forestry master plan. Out of 500,000 mangrove hectares in 1900, for example, only 109,000 hectares still stand. "Forest recovery, through natural and artificial means, never coped with the destruction rate," the FAO found.
University of the Philippines students launched in 1910 the first formal reforestation program at Los Baños. President Sergio Osmeña later opened Cebu's Camp 7 reforestation project. It still exists in a province where forest cover is almost zero.
By the mid-1970s, the government operated 91 reforestation sites. From top-down diktat, the projects sought wider people participation, using various tenurial instruments, including contract replanting.
Under "social/community forestry" approaches, Paper Industries Corp. sowed tree plantations within its concession. It pioneered smallholder tree farms.
International agencies supported these efforts. The Asian Development Bank and Japan's OECF, for example, loaned $240 million for today's "Forestry Sector Project."
"You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself," insider-trading convict Ivan Boesky once said.
That mind-set is reflected in logging money squirreled abroad, spent on flashy cars, etc. In the process, the Philippines skid from "prima donna" of timber exporters to today's wood-pauper. We now buy logs from countries that reforested: New Zealand, Malaysia and Australia.
We also become, in the process, a mismanagement "case study." The Philippine experience "provides a poignant lesson for (still forest-rich countries) like Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, the UN's Asia-Pacific Forestry Towards 2010 points out.
Timber money's refusal to invest left the country without wood, factories or technicians, plus "a legacy of problems and no revenues to alleviate them," the FAO notes. Explosion of demand in North America and the region for wood-based panels, paper and paperboard bypassed a sunset industry.
Time has not been an ally. Migrants streaming into northeastern Mindanao from denuded Cebu "ruined their first homesteads," Dr. Karl Pelzer noted in a 1972 issue of Journal of Asian Studies. By then, some migrants were moving into Mindanao's interior, repeating the destructive cycle there.
In three or four generations, large parts of Mindanao will replicate Cebu, Pelzer predicted. "Where will Cebuanos go after they've destroyed the forest soils of Mindanao?"
But Pelzer's estimates were off, we told Mindanao journalists, in their late 20s, attending a Philippine Press Institute seminar. "He made that forecast about the time when you were born. Only a generation later, you file dispatches on Mindanao's denudation and flash floods."
Depletion of forests also denudes the mind. A Negros and Panay survey discovered most schoolchildren have no concept of natural forests. When asked to draw, they depicted neat rows of plantation trees. Some "baby-boomers think Philippine mahogany or molave is a street sign," a forester explained.
"Today, our legendary forests are just that-legend," the late National Scientist Dioscoro Umali told a graduating class of the University of the Philippines. "For your children, the rich texture of Philippine mahogany will be, at best, a quaint story ... We stripped the land of its beauty. And the victims are our grandchildren-bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh."
When lobotomy of the mind occurs, policy is skewed by widely differing accounting, Foreign Affairs' Steven Anderson warns. One exclusively adds pesos and centavos. Another tallies "extinction deficits" -- the drawdown on biological capital and the threats to survival they unleash.
Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia exemplifies this dilemma. "We have a budget surplus and no debts," she asserts. This is understandable. She was an infant when some Cebuano migrants were razing northern Mindanao.
Her programs gloss over staggering ecological IOUs, from 70-percent soil erosion, skimpy fish catches to a nightmare: potential contamination of water tables and food chains from toxic chemical sludge in the abandoned Atlas copper mines. That could replay the Marinduque tragedy.
"After you've felled the last tree, caught the lash fish, and polluted the last well, can you eat money?" No. But if lobotomized minds exclude concern for conservation, the Foreign Affairs analysis cautions, "then the ecological systems that make human life possible will be increasingly put at risk."
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