Pining for home

Driving up Kennon Road, one can’t help but notice the number of sections that are under construction due to landslides. Let’s just say that this route was never this bad, and it isn’t hard to figure out why. The degradation of the forests, coupled with the rains, is a dangerous combination that can lead to massive soil erosion. Even if millions upon millions of pesos are spent on rehabilitating the roads, you can be sure that they will eventually be washed away if the cutting of trees doesn’t stop. Numerous houses have been built on the roadsides — areas that were generally thought to be public land, watersheds, or forest reserves. Even worse is a growing indifference towards nature.

Give it a few more years and it will be a joke to call Baguio the "City of Pines." Century old trees are literally being cut down to make way for subdivisions, golf courses, and malls. Trees are being taken for granted now more than ever, and despite the claims of non-local developers that they are only cutting down a limited number, week after week stories abound in the local dailies about their reneged promises. There is also an ensuing water problem in some areas around Baguio, blamed on a new golf course that sucks up the city’s supply.

And what happened to John Hay? It was once a little town in harmony with the natural terrain, but now it is anything but. Landmarks like the Main Club were torn down to make way for a hotel, and there are endless diggings that pockmark the once stunning compound. For someone who has nothing but good memories of the place, the destruction is unbearable. Even worse are the signs put up by the developers around John Hay telling the public to take care of the trees when they themselves are the ones to blame for the devastation. It doesn’t stop here. On the top of Session road where the old Pines Hotel used to be is a little patch forest that offers the only shade of green in the heart of the city. Well, that little patch is soon to disappear to make way for a mall.

Baguio seems to be taking a different direction nowadays. The environment has taken a back seat to "progress." The definition of this term gets murky when trees are killed and familiar sights bulldozed to make way for something new. I hate to say this but it seems that my beloved city is metamorphosing into a Manila, complete with the malls, traffic, air pollution, and garbage problems. Baguio residents and officials should ask themselves if this is what real "progress" is about.

I’m not mistaken when I say that there are still countless who don’t have an appreciation for the environment. I see more and more garbage turning up in places where the sight of these seems almost sacrilegious. Imagine going on hike and coming across a heap of plastic bags, courtesy of our favorite fast food establishments (with franchises all over the Philippines and Southeast Asia), Styrofoam cups, containers and other non-biodegradable pollutants along the trail. Either the culprits didn’t care about the earth’s natural beauty, consciously tainting it with their filthy garbage, or they just weren’t thinking.

Even though I was away for college in Manila I still managed to find my way up to Baguio during the breaks and long weekends, but it wasn’t until I moved back home did I finally start noticing changes. Don’t be mistaken though. I’m not one to think that things will always stay the same, and the city that I know is a far cry from what it was say, 30 years ago. I was only gone for four years though, a relatively short period of time, but so much has happened since.

The "mall culture" as I would call is a growing trend. It is debatable whether these establishments help the local economy or not but that is beside the point. It is painfully obvious that our culture as we know it seems to be driven by commercialism more than anything else nowadays. But looking back into the distant past, before the advent of industrialization, culture had its roots in nature. The environment was once sacred. This shouldn’t be forgotten.