All the fuzz about trees

An ordinary office worker boarded the LTR in Manila, found an empty seat and started to doze off to recover sleep lost by waking up early to escape the rush hour in the morning. But he could not, as 4 little kids were running around the half-empty couch, laughing and shrieking to each other's delight. Unable to contain himself, he angrily shouted at their father who was just staring into space, oblivious of the racket. "Can you control your kids?" The man looked at him, gathered his kids and profusely apologized, … "I'm sorry. It's my fault. Their mother just died 2 months ago, and I really don't know how to cope with them ..."

This is just one of the stories I often borrow from Stephen Covey's book, "7 Habits of Highly Effective People." We would understand the sure change in the office worker's reaction. He actually said, "Oh I'm sorry, my condolences. Here, just take some rest, I'll play with your kids for a while." It's what Covey calls a "paradigm shift," looking at the same scenario at a different angle. Covey would later conclude that, "We see the world, not as what it is, but as who we are." I'm tempted to agree, that's how we see trees, too, like those in the City of Naga, Cebu.

It's not even an isolated case - similar cases abound all over the country, not even just similar but almost identical, like that one in Iloilo. All the fuzz about trees, old ones, lining up along the sides of roads for a century or so, their canopies providing shade to people who use the roads, on vehicles or not. Some people want to cut them up, DPWH included, to pave the way for wider roads, while others want to prevent the cutting, DENR included. It's normal for people to have differences of opinion, but it surely looks weird for government agencies to be so, especially if they declare their stands, without first talking to each other.

If you listen to their reasoning, both sides in this debate can sure mount passionate and defensible arguments. I think no one can discount the fact that their arguments can stand scrutiny as to logic and persuasion. Both sides can be right, but being right depends on what one's paradigm is. It is actually surprisingly possible to do a paradigm shift and see the other person's point of view, without actually changing convictions. That might be a better situation - to argue and yet understand why the other side is thinking the other way.

The problem is, sometimes, we become so emphatic we argue our positions to absurdity. No one will deny the sheer heritage value of century-old acacia trees lining up a thoroughfare - we have enough paintings with those themes selling for thousands or even millions of pesos to prove their worth. But for every tree that we are talking about now, there are hundreds of others as old all over the province and millions of other similar trees all over the world. Most of us don't have the latter in our consciousness but we fight for the less-than-twenty that line up a road due for widening down south. With claws bared.

On the other side of the arena stand the do-gooders (in their own opinion), citing development and the need to provide mobility for people. The goal could not be faulted, too, for who will argue against road-widening, which almost everybody is demanding in urban Metro Cebu. Well, almost, primarily the car-owning elite, who believe it's not progress if you don't have multi-lane expressways. As far as they are concerned, it's okay to kill a tree to widen the road, but still dream of tree-lined thoroughfares, forgetting that it might take centuries to turn those dreams to reality.