Requiem For A Rainforest

A word from the Editor Fr. Niall O’ Brien mssc

Recently I read a very beautiful book called Vanishing Treasures of the Philippines. In 1907 we had a rainforest cover of 70%.  By 1992 it was down to 8%. And the sound of chainsaws still goes on. There are also maps of the island of Negros, equally depressing, showing a few tiny green spots in the north and in the far nothing else. Sad, sad. And still they chop with government approval. A future generation will surely weep over this and wonder what was wrong with us.

Hope from ordinary people

But there is hope and the hope, I’m sorry to say, is not coming from the government which still allows loggings and only has a selective log ban which is quiet incapable of stopping the cutting. The hope comes from ordinary people.

I had a visit the other day from Sr. Xavier Marie Bual, who is a nurse working in the community health apostolate of the Diocese of Malaybalay, based in Maramag with the St. Paul Sisters working at St. Joseph Hospital. She explained to me how the people in the area, using their Basic Ecclesial Communities, have risen up and tried to stop logging in Lanao del Sur. Now you know the forest in Lanao del Sur, one of the last forests in the Philippines, is absolutely essential for holding the water in Lake Lanao which feeds the Maria Cristina falls and thus supplies mot of the electricity for Mindanao. But it will immediately affect the area if it gets logged and, of course, it is being logged.

For over a year now, the people have been putting up barricades and stopping the logs going through. But what can they do when the big logging companies go to the leading politicians and get him to go to police and stop them? One bit of hope was when Defense Secretary Orly Mercado visited the barricade set up outside the hospital in Maramag on the main road, the Sayre Highway, from Davao to Cagayan de Oro. Mercado encouraged the men on the barricade to continue their struggle and to keep up the barricades.

Priest and Sister behind

The Bishop and the priests have been completely behind this specially since Fr. Neri Satur was assassinated by pro-logging agents. Many of the priests and sister have joined the lay people at the barricade throughout the year – ordinary people rising up and saying, “We’ve had enough, do not destroy our life.” “How can it be,” they say, “that a company owned in faraway Manila or Australia, is able to come in, destroy the environment on the basis of some legal document from Manila?” and then Manila rings its hand when mudslides kill hundreds like what happened in Ormoc and other places precisely because of the unabated logging. While we sit back and enjoy our cable TV and watch the horrors in other lands, meantime in our own land of the Philippines similar horrors are taking place.

Sayre Highway

One of the many barricades which the people put up was as I said, along the Sayre Highway. Not many hours after Secretary Orly Mercado had encouraged the people, the police arrived at 3:00 o’ clock in the morning and removed the barricaded letting 22 trucks of immature logs go through. One of the priests, Fr. Benancio Balansag Jr. Lay down on the road in his sutana until four policemen lifted him bodily away. It was a symbolic and dramatic gesture and well worth it in my opinion. Because we’re not talking about trees, we’re talking about lives. The trucks rolled on the peace vigilantes who were taken by surprise stood there in dismay seeing failure written across the sky.

But not so. On their “over, over” handset they managed to contact some towns along the way and again and again the trucks were stopped. Again and again the politician intervened to try and facilitate the logging companies and get those trucks out but eventually they came to a halt a Barangay Kalabungay, Malaybalay City and in fact that’s where they remain to this day, awaiting a court decision because so much of the wood was cut from the wrong places and is under age (and that is going to happen always with selective logging because if there is one industry that is thriving, it is the industry of fake documents. How can an ordinary policeman along the road tell the difference between a fake and a genuine documents?)

Millennium Mass at the Barricade

At New Year’s Eve the parish priest of Maramag held the Midnight Mass at the place of the barricade, right out in the open and reminded the people that if they wanted a new millennium of hope then they must continue their nonviolent struggle to stop the forest of Lanao being destroyed by huge local and foreign logging companies, assisted by venal lawmakers in Manila. So many people attended the Mass that you could hardly see the end of the crowd. When the sun rose on the New Millennium in Maramag, it shed beams on simple people determined to save their land nonviolently. Meantime you will be glad to hear that those logs, the 22 trucks, stand still silently in the City of Malaybalay as they await a court decision.

Spare a thought

For those of us lolling on our soft chairs, watching cable TV, spare a thought of the simple people of Bukidnon sleeping out at night on dirt floor and cement in the hope of stopping the on-going destruction of their forest, of their life.

P.S. The name of the book again is Vanishing Treasures of the Philippines Rainforest by Lawrence R. Heaney and Jacinto Regalado Jr., produced by the Chicago Field Museum, Roosevelt Road, Chicago Illinois, USA.