No more black propaganda in era of information - ROSES AND THORNS by Alejandro R. Roces

Passed on third and final reading in the House is House Bill 6697, "An act to establish the Northern Sierra Madre Mountain Range within the province of Isabela as a protected area and its peripheral areas as buffer zones, providing for its management and for other purposes." The Northern Sierra Madre National Park (NSMNP) is about 360,600 hectares composed of three sectors – 287,861 hectares of land; 71,625 hectares of marine area and 272,090 hectares of virgin forest. The NSMNP is the habitat of 70 globally-threatened or near-threatened species of wild life; 13 mammals; 46 birds; seven reptiles and amphibians and four species of shellfish. It is also the home of about a thousand indigenous Aytas who still depend on natural bounties for their existence.

Now, in the words of the bill’s author, Rep. Heherson Alvarez, "small and large-scale logging, kaingin, agricultural development, tenure-related issues, poaching and other activities pose grave threats to the pristine state of the park’s primary forest, mangrove and beach forests, ultramatic forests, forests over limestone, montane and mossy forests, lowland evergreen dipterocarp forests, estuaries, sea grass beds and coral roots."

We hope that President Macapagal-Arroyo will sign this bill into law. It is to Rep. Alvarez’s credit that as former-senator and incumbent congressman, he has authored or sponsored all our existing environmental laws. The irony is that now that he is being considered as Secretary of Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), an individual who is interested in the position is spreading the canard that first, Alvarez is a logger; second, that he has already been a DENR Secretary. Both are outright lies! What surprises us is how much misinformation can spread in our information knowledge.

We are always happy when Senators or Congressmen who have shown great concern for a particular national problem are later placed in a position to implement the very laws that they have passed. We can think of two such possible situations now: Congressman Alvarez being appointed as DENR Secretary , if he will accept, and former-senator Letty Shahani being appointed as head of the National Commission for Culture and Arts to replace Jaime Laya, who has presented his resignation from said post. That would give both Alvarez and Shahani an opportunity to implement the very laws that they passed.