Look Again, Conservationist, at Remnant Forests (Part 2)

Under DENR Memorandum Circular 2005-005, issued May 26, 2005, forest is defined as an area at least half a hectare (5,000 square meters) in size with a ten percent stocking level, meaning, that at least 500 square meters of which should be shaded by trees with a minimum height of five meters. Private lands meeting the new forestry standard are included, such as private tree plantations and even parks in private subdivisions. Under the old definition, only public lands with a minimum area of one hectare could be called forest.

I should have no quarrel with this official definition except that it will unduly put at risk the forests that do not meet the specific criteria for are and tree stocking. In my case, for instance, when I was young, the first forests I encountered were not the big-size, hazy blue, mysterious and not-so-inviting jungles in the far eastern horizon of our town where my grandfather and other craftsmen in the barrio went to gather rattan or try their luck at trapping deer and wild pigs when there was little farm work to do.

My first forests were instead tiny patches of tree-shrub-bamboo-grass-fern-herb vegetation that were not very far from where we tethered our carabaos to graze. Yes, their areas were often no bigger than a basketball court. And yet, they were power houses in themselves insofar as flora and fauna and ecological let alone utilitarian uses are concerned.

They came in the form of shrubbery beside the road, shady thickets along the river banks, or former bangkag (rainfed vegetable and root-crops farm) left to fallow to let its soil become fertile again. Others were at the far end of our ricefield, beside a former river course turned pond, or in long undisturbed lots adjacent to the elementary school.

They were the forests next-door, as it were, where we often went to play hide and seek or imitate the movies we saw about local people fighting the Japanese invaders. We entered these forests to chase birds as they fed noisily in a tree laden with fruits. The birds, such as the pirruka (bulbul) and the uwak (crow) often presaged the presence of ripe bignay, banana, jackfruit, guava, papaya, or wild pineapple. Sometimes the fruit-laden trees the avian creatures would sing or quarrel about are not edible to humans (such as samak and balete).

Depending on the season, we went to these remnant forests to gather food for the kitchen. Often they were the edible flowers of the alukon, or the young leaves of the panalayapen. Sometimes we had kaburaw, kamiring, kastila, anonas, or the vine ariwat. We would go under them during the rainy season to hunt edible mushrooms and fungi. In summer they would be spots for gathering abuos eggs, and when our elders didn’t beat us to it, smoke beehives for honey.

The forest remnants on the river banks are good places to gather edible fern, along with wild button tomatoes and the young leaves of the wild ampalaya (bitter gourd). At the onset of the rainy season would often have tigi (Amorpophallus campanulatus) and taro in their periphery. Occasionally a prized find would be tubers of the wild singkamas (turnip).

During times of rice shortage (the consequence then of locusts and rats “harvesting” the rice ahead of the farmers), the womenfolk would comb these forest fragments for the wild yam we called karot which was toxic but my grandmother just sliced them thinly, put them on a wicker basket, and soak the pearly white edibles on a flowing part of the river to wash off the itchy component of the yam before letting this dry in the sun and then fry them as substitute for rice as staple food or as afternoon merienda (snacks) for farmers as they take brief respite in their work under the baking the sun.

It was from these forests that I learned my very first lessons on tree identification, bird identification, how to fell trees, how to climb trees, and which trees were favorite perches for certain birds. And even if they bore silent witness to my early tree-killing, bird-murdering, nest-destroying, and banias (monitor lizard)-hunting days, they significantly started me on my nature-appreciation path. Yes, they shaped much of my nature-writing inclinations plus advocacy for native trees, forestry for the birds, and outdoor recreation for families.

Yes, in the barrio where I lived, they contributed enormously to cementing the bonds between children and Mother Nature. Small they might have been, but they had been our ever-ready "department store" for many of our everyday subsistence needs in the barrio -- food for the family, fuelwood, poles for huts, termite globs for feeding the chickens, organic feed for the swine, medicine for boils and other minor ailments, shelter for the carabaos, and playground for kids.

This is why I’m concerned that, if we don’t watch out, the definition of forest that is being proffered by the DENR to conform with international forestry and allied groups may unwittingly cause the demise of such children- and people-nurturing “islands” of hope.

(To be concluded)

Look Again, Conservationist, at Remnant Forests, Now

Years before I came to know there was such a thing called forestry, I was already up to my neck with forests. Well, you could say this privilege comes with the territory. You see, my hometown used to be envied for its forest riches as illustrated by repeated stories of trees in the deep forests with trunks almost as big as the Rural Transit bus, rattan poles so long that it took a big carabao to pull them out of the thicket, and deer and wild boar either so tame or plentiful that hunters caught them with bare hands.

Indeed, aside from getting nurtured as a child by meat from the wilds, I had for lullabies the hourly call of the kalaw (hornbill) or the chatter of birds and monkeys quarreling over some ripe fruit in my grandparents' uma (swidden farm). I also had my juvenile imaginations enriched with such folklore as beklat (pythons) so large they could hardly move and so lumot (moss) grew on their backs while waiting for wild pigs or a starving Japanese straggler to pass by their side of the jungle trail. And to keep hyperactive kids like me from straying too far and too long from home and from our farm chores, I have had generous doses of siesta hour tales from my Ilocos migrant old folks. For instance, they talk of the marmarna (evil spirits) that are said to dwell in the baliti (strangler fig) and other scary-looking geriatric trees. They also have oft-repeated warnings about Ilongot tribals who in summer came down the mountains to collect Christian heads to show as proof of manhood to their betelnut-chewing chieftain and his daughter. It was certainly a big challenge to heed their words at the time, especially when the bulbuls along with their newly flying fledgeling became noisy in the bignay trees, the riyari (cicadas) were busy competing with their songs among the mango trees, and stories were going around about the abal-abal (May beetle) starting to emerge in the sandy-loam banks of the river.

To people of Dupax, Nueva Vizcaya, this umbilical connection to the forest should indeed be a given. It goes back to long before the Spanish friars brought carpenters from Cagayan in the early 1770s to, among other things, build the town's Roman Catholic church complex. This required teaching the locals how to use the axe to convert the then abundant narra, molave, and dipterocarp trees in the hills in the immediate periphery of the town into workable flitches and then haul the squared logs downhill and then to town with the use of carabaos, and then saw the raw materials into planks, posts, or furniture wood as appropriate. Empowered by their ruthless friar-supervisors, the immigrants also passed on the technology of making bricks to the local artisans. Piles and piles of anteng (a resinous local hardwood) were hauled to the furnace near where the church now stands to bake tons and tons of clay into bricks with which to lay the foundations and perimeter walls of the church. Through forced labor also, tons of river clams and shells were also burnt then pulverized for use as lime to hold the bricks together in the absence then of cement.

I think of my boyhood life with forests and of what is left of my hometown's formerly fabulous and bountiful forests now, not without a tinge of guilt and sadness, because my colleagues who are still active in the forestry sector seem to have not lifted a finger or are hard placed to fight the changing of the official definition of forest in the international as well as in the local circle. The definition now includes numbers, percentages, minimum areas, and other such qualifications and criteria that, when taken all together and applied to what I used to call bakir as an Ilocano and guvas as an Isinay, would now definitely take those forests out of the list.

(to be continued)

Stroller at Large

As my very first entry in this blog, this piece should give you a preview of the contents of this web site, and who your sylvan stroller is.

Yes, this is how I look like. This photo was shot by a brother-in-law one sunny day early this year when we went to my farm in Sinagat -- about eight kilometers from central Dupax del Sur, Nueva Vizcaya, the Philippines -- so that, among other things, he and my sister and their only son could enjoy a real farm and discover how it differs from the virtual farms and animals they play with in "Farm Ville" and even the actual ones in Australia.

Aside from showing proof that I have two legs to bring me to tree-rich places (plus a bulging tummy as added reason for doing more strolling), I inserted this picture for two reasons:

First, this photo will serve as memory trigger that I shall go back to in case of writer's block. It was taken near where as a kid my Ilocano maternal grandparents introduced me to the joys of life in the hills, the fields, the river. A kilometer or so downstream was the spot where I speared my first big dalag (mudfish) and where, after work in the fields, my fellow farmkids would go romping by the river often using carabaos as diving board as well as bait for the blood-sucking leeches that we played with. When I was much younger, on a tiny farmhut downriver, I used to be lulled by the song of crickets and cicadas and the gurgling of water as it played with the rice while in the nearby kaingin (swidden) crows, martins, bulbuls and sometimes monkeys would quarrel over some ripe papaya or a bunch of plantain.

Yes, I grew up among rice-growing, upland-farming, and river-using folks when my hometown was still a logger's and hunter's paradise and its rivers were still fish-rich and sylvan. I shall write about the sights, scents, and sounds of those days, including the then feared indigenous forest dwellers that used to people it.

Many of my entries in this website shall be memoirs of my nature-blessed boyhood. But they shall be so written to at least be of help to readers, historians and researchers interested in how life was in that part of Planet Earth ...when deer, hornbills, monkeys and other wildlife were still aplenty ...when lowlanders still avoided going to the hills in summer when the bagbag (Erythrina) tree put forth its fiery blossom signaling the Ilongot braves' head-hunting season ...when native carp and mudfish literally jumped in the then rarely murky nor drying river ...and when it was still normal for barrio kids to have slingshots, bolos, bamboo stilts, and sardine cans for toys; turtles, martins, monkeys, and May beetles for playmates; and the grasshopper-rich hills, dragonfly-abounding streams, cicada-adorn groves, and sun-bathed ricefields for playground.

My second reason for pasting the photo here is to also remind me to look at the days ahead and not merely recollect the bygone days. In other words, to do something positive rather than cry over spilled milk.

Long before I bought this land in 1994, the hills above it and certainly all the other hills across the river and vicinity used to be jungle. The river that serves as its eastern border also used to be merry and full of clear and fish-friendly water from the timber-rich mountains of Carolotan upstream. Today the hills are a paradise of cogon grass that go tinder-dry and prone to wildfire during the sweltering months of March to May, the same time of the year when the river and the mountain springs that feed it run dry.

Efforts have been made by the still few farmers in the area to "reforest" the hills to mango, citrus, and gmelina. In 2005 when I went there to supervise the scraping of the gravel and rocks (some the size of a carabao) that buried a huge part of my ricefield, I also learned that a barangay ordinance was in force prohibiting the use of electronic fisher to catch goby, catfish, mudfish, tilapia, shrimps, crabs and whatever else could be caught in the river for food.

Positive local initiatives at conservation, we might say. But I shall go out on a limb and put all that I learned from my years of "strolling" in academe and in projects run/funded by the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, the ADB, etc. to transform the three-hectare patch into a real-life "farm ville" complete with free-ranging chicken, tethered goats, penned ducks, organic vegetable plots, a "bahay-kubo" (plus a tree version of the crops listed in the song), a series of upland fishponds, and indigenous Philippine forest-trees and fruit-trees all around.

My dream is to walk and work my talk and creative juices as a forester, environmentalist, extension worker, and nature lover and use this patch of land between the barren hills and the drying river as my live canvas as well as community learning site for agroforestry, biodiversity, soil and water conservation, organic farming, and climate-change mitigation and adaptation.

It will not be easy but I shall try, brick by brick, to lay the foundations for this vision -- enough to warrant a blog entry each for the twists and turns that I shall encounter as I stroll towards the fulfillment of that dream.

#88 Amistad, Camp 7, Baguio City
Saturday, July 17, 2010