May the forest be with you

What are the elements of a successful reforestation program?

It is a question that I have been asking myself since I got involved in a project that sought to restore degraded forests several years ago. Sadly, the project never took off but my dream to restore Philippine rainforests remains.

I suppose that dream has been with me since I read a book about Johnny Appleseed in grade school. He planted apple trees all over the United States. I must have been eight years old when I decided that I wanted to be his Filipino equivalent. Influenced by my grandparents’ mango business, I imagined myself planting mango trees all over the Philippines. I wanted to line all roads with mango trees. Anyone who wanted to eat a mango could pick fruits from the trees I planted. No one would get hungry.

Almost thirty years later, I have a similar, if much grander, version of the dream. I still want to plant mango trees all over the Philippines but only in agricultural land. I have since learned that mango trees are not indigenous to the Philippines and that we need to plant indigenous and native tree species to restore biodiversity.

My vision is grander in that I also want to restore our forests to what they were in the 1900’s. I found an electronic version of H.N. Whitford’s 1911 work entitled “The Forests of the Philippines.” A publication of the Bureau of Forestry, it was intended to inform our American colonizers about the forest resources that they could exploit in the Philippines. Over a hundred years later, we can use it as a peg for our national forest restoration goal.

The wonderful thing about having an unanswered question is the opportunity to meet like-minded people who are asking the same thing. Last week, I found myself in a room at the Institute of Biology in UP Diliman listening to a talk by a representative of the Foundation for the Philippine Environment. The talk was organized by the Rain Forest Restoration Initiative and the topic was community-based rainforestation establishment. Rainforestation farming was pioneered by Dr. Paciencia  Millan  of the Visayas State University. It is described as  “a sustainable farming system used a strategy for forest restoration using native or indigenous tree species in combination with agricultural crops.”

Everyone in the room seemed to want to know the same thing: how successful are your projects? I appreciated the candor of the speakers who said that it was too early to tell and that they could claim only fifty (50) hectares of forests as successfully restored.

Since I started asking the question in 2009, I have become convinced that all restoration projects need to be community-based to be successful. Unlike Jack’s magic beans, trees do not grow overnight and need care over a period of years before they can take care of themselves. And the people who live where the trees are located are in the best position to care for these seedlings (as well as to cut them for charcoal).

Grand dreams require more resources to make them come true. I have given up on getting the mutant or superhero power of being in several places at the same time so I can plant all the trees I want. I can only work on getting people who love trees and forests as much (or more) than I do to help me make this dream come true. And everyday I am discovering that there are more than I imagined. Speak up if you are one of them.

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Email me at [email protected].