Loren Legarda talks dirty and goes green

We all know that politics is dirty. But outside politics, Senator Loren Legarda likes to talk dirty; she doesn’t even mind getting her hands dirty — quite literally. Fact is, the green-minded Loren loves hopping from barangay to barangay, from province to province to promote Luntiang Pilipinas, a nationwide urban forestry program that she founded in 1998. To date, the 10-year-old foundation has established forest parks with more than two million trees planted in some 500 hectares across the country.

Loren longs for the green, green grass of home. She fondly remembers growing up in Malabon amid a garden abloom with assorted flowers — gumamela, sampaguita, rosal, ilang-ilang, bougainvillea — and a backyard teeming with all sorts of fruit trees — mango, guava, coconut, star apple, camachile, duhat, camias, balimbing, mabolo. There, she was in her element, playing with butterflies, dragonflies, and beetles. “My siblings and I would even give our salagubang names like Muhammad Ali,” an amused Loren confesses. “We bore holes in Ladies’ Choice bottles and kept our salagubang there. Ask Nanay Fely, my yaya who’s been with me since I was born. I would catch tutubing karayom (small dragonflies) and butterflies. I grew up with maya birds. I would even sleep with the leaves of the sampaloc tree.”

She heaves a long sigh and says, “That was the Malabon of my childhood. I remember when it got flooded, we would even catch dalag (mudfish). But mind you, the floodwaters were clean then.”

As if to immortalize her pristine childhood when the air was fresh and clean, the water was crystal clear, and the trees were lush green, paintings of trees and seascapes that Loren did herself hang in her Senate office. Since the 1960s, she’s been painting trees in her free time, but time is quite a luxury now for the workaholic lady senator.

“My favorite time of the day is 6 p.m.,” she tells us as we follow her posthaste to her garden in her Forbes Park home to listen to the crickets play their nocturnal symphony. “I’m hardly home, but when I am, I take the opportunity to listen to the crickets, to the chirping of the birds.”

Calling herself an “unprofessional bird-watcher, Loren says, “I have three trees with birdhouses. I just love listening to the birds, it’s so calming.”

The glass windows of her dining room open out into the lush garden. “Instead of turning on the aircon, I open the windows and enjoy the cool breeze,” she tells us as she opens a window. “I don’t sleep with the aircon on. My windows are open, but my night curtains are drawn. As early as 6 a.m., I open the windows. I like the sun. I feel dreary if it’s raining.”

Outside the frenetic political jungle, this is Loren’s lair — simple, quiet, and homey. It’s a haven she shares with the two men in her life: sons Lanz, 18, and Lean, 15.

Even Loren’s diet is green. “I was influenced by my son Lanz who turned vegetarian when he was only 12,” she relates. “In 2004, he saw a PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) film where the chickens were being killed. After that, he said he could not eat these things anymore. He turned vegetarian by himself. But I’m pesco vegetarian, I eat fish.”

Loren usually eats a full breakfast that consists of malunggay soup, boiled malunggay with saluyot, and okra, a piece of pan de sal with kesong puti from Sta. Cruz or Los Baños, Laguna; two saging na saba. Sometimes, she would just have a vegetarian omelet. Loren’s only “vice” perhaps is a cup of coffee. “I take freshly ground coffee, maybe a kapeng barako or whatever I’m in the mood for that day,” she says.

Breakfast is usually at 6:30 or 7 a.m. or earlier, like 3 a.m., if Loren has to catch a 5 a.m. flight to the provinces.

She brings packed lunch to work. “I don’t eat Senate food, I bring my own food,” she asserts. “And I like to eat only one dish so it doesn’t confuse me. My life is already so complicated. It’s all about choices and making decisions so with my food, I keep it simple. Like I’d have only sinigang na ulo ng salmon or sinigang sa miso or pinakbet with brown rice. At night, I only eat soup — misua or corn soup. I just tell my cook no MSG, no salt. And no dessert, no chocolates, no cakes, no soft drinks. I’m a water person. I drink 10 glasses of water a day.”

The malunggay she eats at home is harvested from her garden. “I want each and every household in the rural areas to plant malunggay, to have a malunggay farm,” she stresses.

If it were up to Loren, things would be as they were in her childhood. “Climate change is a real threat,” she reveals as we picture ourselves battling the heat and pollution as we step out of Loren’s private paradise. “A mere 2°C rise in the global temperature will render 30 percent of our flora and fauna extinct or near-extinct. When the temperature rises, the ice caps will melt. When the ice caps melt, sea levels will rise, and low-lying areas will be inundated. Resources for agriculture, education, health, etc. will have to go into adaptation. It’s something so real and the irony of it all is the Philippines is not a major contributor to global warming because we’re not an industrialized country, but we’re one of the most vulnerable and ecologically challenged because we’re poor, we’re an archipelago.”

To dramatize climate change, Loren has produced a docu-drama on how the world should be.

No sex, no violence? Nobody would want to see it, we kid Loren. “The violence here is the violence of nature,” Loren plays along. “Here, we show newsclips of the devastation brought by typhoons, floods, and droughts. It’s nature’s wrath because of man’s violence against nature. I annotate the spiels, but the drama can stand on its own.”

A very low-budget movie, Ulan sa Tag-Araw: Isang Dokumentaryo Ukol sa Pagbabago ng Klima tackles the social, economic, and health impacts of climate change in the Philippines and calls upon Filipinos to learn how they can help in forwarding the environmental cause.

Lending further credence to the movie are its stars: Roy Alvarez and Chin-Chin Gutierrez, both seasoned and down-to-earth actors and committed environmentalists. “They’re a farmer family and their harvest is limited,” Loren relates. “Chin-Chin talks about planting trees, but her neighbors do not understand her. It’s very basic so people would understand. I thought people won’t watch a movie this long, but they would watch a one-and-a-half-hour Regal film. It’s my personal initiative to reach out to people so they would understand how climate change affects our day-to-day life.”

The movie was shot amid the green surroundings of Earth Haven in San Mateo and of Tanay, Binangonan, and Cardona, Rizal. It will be shown next month.

Recently, Senator Legarda was co-convenor with the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction Secretariat and Globe International of the first roundtable consultative meeting for parliamentarians: making disaster risk reduction a tool for climate change adaptation, held at Makati Shangri-La Hotel. Parliamentarians from 15 countries attended.

Loren stoutly declares, “It’s a challenge for me as a communicator, an environmental advocate, and a passionate believer in climate change adaptation and mitigation, that’s why I’m attacking the issue on all fronts. Eventually, I will be doing an animated cartoon on the environment for children to understand.”

A true-blue environmentalist, Loren has authored and sponsored vital legislation geared towards environmental protection. Now on the Senate floor is her Climate Change Act.

Indeed, Loren dreams of “isang luntiang Pilipinas.” A place where green is everybody’s favorite color.