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)