After tree planting, what?

I was still in my elementary years when our grade five teacher, the late Mrs. Decula Abrea, led us to memorize a poem. While she herself was not a gifted singer, she wove the poem as lyrics to a melody. To her credit, I continue to hum the music until today. I did not know that the line “I think that I shall never see, a poem so lovely as a tree” is even more relevant today than when we first murmurized (sorry for the murder of the word) it half a century ago.

It is perhaps a belated reaction of government to the disaster in Infanta, Quezon few years ago, or to those catastrophes in the cities of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan last year that our officialdom brings up the importance of a tree “whose hungry mouth is pressed against the earth’s sweeting flowing breast” or specifically, the matter of planting trees. To recall, Infanta was devastated when raging floods cascaded from way up in the mountains to the valleys with thousands of logs riding on the brutal crest of the waters. The scene was no different when houses in some parts of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan Cities were crushed to utter destruction more by the logs that rammed against them than by the force of the flood.

From these and similar horrific incidents, our officials have, thank God, regained their focus. It seems to be a bitter lesson, on their part, learned from unimaginable environmental aberration. If they conclude that disaster follows each time heavy rains fall on bald mountains, we just can only agree. True indeed, when there are no more trees to detain the rains, waters flow as rampaging floods. That is why, our officials now talk of making the planting of trees a priority requirement for everybody with the business sector being targeted the key implementing arm. Great.

But, there were several tree planting programs in the past. If my failing memory still correctly recalls it, even the late Pres. Ferdinand Marcos decreed that for almost all human undertakings, planting a tree was a condition. To my mind, if there was a system to attend to and care for all of the seedlings that were planted, our mountains would have already been thickly forested areas.

Yes, in the past, our tree planting activities were mostly for documentary compliance. I do not want to write in detail what I mean “for documentary compliance” only because it is going to be an accusation against our collective fraud. We did not mean to plant a tree and make it grow. We showed that we planted a tree without intending to care for it till it grew because its certification of the fact of such planting was all that mattered. Never mind if the next few days, the plant withered.

But, I want to tell you that in my small garden at a mountain barangay, I have grown few trees like Mabolo, Tugas, Caimito and Chico. Each week since I planted them until today, I care for these trees that the ones that did not survive, constituted a negligible two percent. In other words, for every 100 trees I planted, 98 have survived such that some are ten feel tall now.

It is reported that the city, by way of an ordinance, adopts, for two years going, the position of requiring the planting trees as the best way to help mother earth. Whoever authored it, either Team Rama or BOPK deserves a pat on his back. This ordinance seems to task DENR to implement it. Scientific papers have shown that it is even late to do it now but, while late it is still the best, if not the only, time to do it. A delay is catastrophic. 

As we saw in the past similar undertakings, we need to be more serious this time. It has become very important for the DENR to draw a viable system of making sure that in the next four years from the time a seedling is planted, it is cared for until grows to a robust tree. Without such system, the ordinance is useless and all our efforts in this direction are bound to fail.