Plastic and paper towns
It’s so easy to make (and break) a city. The price of development? Trees. Life. Us.
In John Greene’s Paper Towns, protagonist Margo calls her neighborhood “fake” and “not even hard enough to be made of plastic.” Her city is built on paper, easily destroyed, easily discarded.
Metro Manila is a paper town, too. All around us, things are disappearing right before our very eyes. We are boxed in a city of condo conversions and pop-ups. Green fields are sold (sometimes dirt cheap) to make way for concrete jungles. What’s the price tag of development? Nature. Life. Us.
Trees are cut down. Old historic houses are replaced with sad monoliths. The urban life is crumbling, turning into a paper (and plastic) town—again, easily destroyed, easily discarded.
“The Number 1 cutter who likes to cut trees because of road widening and transmission line projects is the government,” said Department of Environment and Natural Resource (DENR) Secretary Ramon Paje at Sofitel’s Bulong Pulungan forum last Tuesday.
The Philippines has 197 illegal logging hotspots, says Paje. But since the government has signed for a total log ban, Paje says the hotspots are down to 31. Isabela, Surigao, Agusan, and Davao Oriental among others are the top provinces where illegal logging is rampant.
But Metro Manila and its neighbors are cutter towns, too. In Pangasinan, more than 1,000 trees are cut down for road widening projects. The sight of hundreds of centuries-old trees, now lifeless, now unable to give life, is depressing. Under the Executive Order 23 issued in 2011, the cutting of trees is banned and illegal but it spares the clearing of “road right-of-way by the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).” DENR requires 100 new trees to be planted for every tree that is cut down. Unlike in European countries with four seasons, the Philippines and its climate offer a good opportunity for seedlings to grow as trees in a span of at least 10 years, says Paje. To date, however, the country is number four worldwide in vulnerability because of climate change. This means bigger and stronger typhoons (the “new normal” says Paje) are going to wash out our paper towns, including trees and other greens. In defense, says Paje, the government is eyeing 1.5 millon hectares of land to plant trees, and trees, and more trees in.
We cannot stop progress—we’re building here and there—but what we need is more of Julie Baker (Jullie Yap Daza counts, too!), the champion of trees. Julie is the protagonist in Flipped, the movie. She climbed up the sycamore tree of an abandoned neighborhood to stop home developers in making more pop-ups. Paje takes UP Diliman as an example. Its trees and streets and citizens are in harmony. It is a haven for joggers and pedestrians—and poets, too. The canopies give respite and even inspire them to create poems and soliloquies and stories. Alas life isn’t a fiction (or is it?). The problem is here, glaring right before our plastic and paper towns.
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