Sula: The Green Aliens
March 11, 2011
THERE’S a monkey on our back that is hard to rid off like stubborn dirt.
Even in our choice of trees, we cannot seem to shake it off, perhaps for lack of trying. It has mocked our science, blurred our common sense and made practical fun of what should pass as authentic theology.
So there we have them, bliss in ignorance, as ubiquitous as some of our own, maybe even more: mahogany, eucalyptus, gemelina and Indian trees. They’re everywhere in our yards – back and front, church, school. You see them line up the edges of our world-class expressways and no-class highways. They are all foreign, and in our eyes, as green, if not greener, than the yakal, apitong, ipil and banaba.
We had owned the native trees before the alien varieties have owned us, or before we have decimated our forests of their native (indigenous and endemic) species.
Colonial mentality, like addiction, continues to give us the big kick.
When I was small, I used to hide myself behind the huge surface roots of giant trees at the foot of Mt. Arayat whenever I joined my uncles for the routine trek. (They were kaingeros). That was close to half a century ago. You needed at least four grown-ups to complete a wrap-around the trunk. If you looked up at the apex, you had to strain your head back to see shafts of light breaking through the foliage like an epiphany. Your eyes didn’t hurt even at noon because of the thick layers of canopy.
The trees of my youth are no longer there. Some of the species that have grown in their place are, in all certainty, aliens. All this time, I thought there was nothing with having foreign trees in our midst. I was wrong — so were those who chose them over our native species.
The awakening came at the launch of the LausGroup corporate green project aptly named “A Native Tree for Every Car.” The project is self-explanatory: you buy a car from the group, you get a native tree for free. It’s the group’s response to the worldwide call to re-green the planet to stop global warming and stave off unprecedented disaster.
During the short lecture, it became clear why the native trees are still the best for our local environment. They were meant to be and, therefore, suited to be here. Native trees do a lot of things, apart from the textbook carbon-oxygen equation. They serve as a natural habitat for other living things which serve as food or shelter, enemies or friends of other livings that, in all, sustain the life cycle. Take out the native tree, and the equilibrium is disturbed, the symbiosis upset and the cycle broken.
Trees, in short, aren’t just about the weather and global warming. They are about life itself. And life isn’t all science. Shortly after the launch, I went back to a familiar page in the Bible, in the book of Genesis. There it was, the trees created by God ahead of any living things. There must be both science and theology in the design even God Himself could not violate without harming His own works.
But man has, and look where or how we are. And it hasn’t yet appeared, for all of Al Gore’s inconvenient truth, how worse it could really get for the race in the foreseeable time.
Now I know why the little living useful things that I used to see in Nature’s fold are no longer there, from fishes to birds to insects (I don’t see fireflies anymore, for one thing) to plants.
When I was a boy, I would often follow my grandma as she navigated a nearby creek to catch stone crabs, shrimps, a little fish called bia and pluck off young ferns along the bank. She would later pick some ripe native guavas. The following lunch would be a feast that I always “taste” in my memory.
That creek is just about dead. The native trees that used to sustain it to support living creatures around are practically gone. Well, piggeries at the mount’s base now dump wastes into it, too.
I’m a bit scandalized that government doesn’t seem to mind that “alien” trees are invading our ecology, if not abetting the invasion itself. The native tree campaign adopted by the LausGroup through San Beda College and Hortica Filipina Foundation Inc. – a nationwide advocacy for the latter, is both timely and commendable – and a must.
My boss, Levy P. Laus, revived an old wise in his launch talk that the earth was borrowed from the future generation, not inherited from the ancient. I remember a noble Greek thought that a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will no longer enjoy.
It’s a good motivating literary piece. If not, poet Robert Frost’s two possible endings for the earth – fire or ice – should scare us enough to plant trees. Of course, our own.
Source: http://www.sunstar.com.ph/pampanga/opinion/sula-green-aliens
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