Environmental Blues

We pay lip service to the environment each time we celebrate World Environment Day on June 5 or World Earth Day on April 23 in the same way that we do to health during World No-Smoking Day. And we get to see ceremonial tree-planting here and there by officials under the glare of news cameras.

In fairness, the seedlings, which officials plant -- even if done for the cameras -- may yet grow to become tall, proud trees on which birds could nest. This is if the seedlings are planted in June, the start of the rainy season. Otherwise, any ceremonial tree planting done during the dry months is just for photo opportunities.

Yes, we need to plant more trees rather than build more and more gasoline stations or concrete pine trees and arches. We need to plant all those seedlings before summer sets in again.

And we need to protect the mountainsides where we planted our seedlings. One irony in this country is that we plant seedlings on our mountainsides during the rainy season but we burn them down during summer. Worse, these tree-planting efforts may have been funded by multi-million-dollar loans from the World Bank.

Given the reported hectares upon hectares of mountainsides reforested through World Bank funding in the 1980s and 1990s, the country must be turning lush green again. But we have yet to see a forest that resurrected through these World Bank loans. In this country, there are ghost forests as there are ghost employees and ghost voters.

But if forests have become ghosts, this is not so with our garbage and the thick smog that we have to wrestle with each day. Our garbage is mounting as our air is becoming thicker and thicker with pollutants. Just expose yourself at the busy streets of Baguio’s heart and belly and your head aches after getting exposed to all those fumes from passenger jeeps and taxis.

We need not be surprised if our city’s garbage is mounting. Much of the central business district’s solid wastes come from the Styrofoam and plastic containers used by fast-food chains. That’s why I still bow my head to all the old-style restaurants, which use porcelain plates and other dishes that need the services of a dishwasher.

Much of the threats and damage to our environment and to Mother Earth as a whole actually comes from a highly consumerist and throw-away lifestyle. The biggest polluter in the world, for instance, is the US because it is the biggest consumer of fossil fuels.

Baguio, especially its central business district, has poor air quality, according to a World Bank study. This is not surprising. Given its small area, Baguio has one of the most numbers of taxis and passenger jeeps in the country.

So how do we reduce our fuel consumption? On a collective and individual level, the less fuel we consume, the better for our community and our planet. From using plastics and Styrofoam to giving out franchises to taxi and passenger jeep applicants in such a small city as Baguio, we can seek the wisdom of the sages who admonish us that “less is more.”

Less is more also means simple living and high thinking and being able to choose the more essential to the gross and vain.