Free the trees
The other night, I came across a striking installation at an exhibition by the Spanish artist Joan Punyet Miró at Leon Gallery International. Across a white wall jutted out naked branches—twigs, really—with the odd leaf here and there. The effect was dramatic, eerie, and yet somehow childlike, conjuring an arid desertscape of stunted trees that Antoine de St. Exupéry’s Little Prince might have encountered on Asteroid B612—an alien planet much like the pulley the author compared to “an old weathervane which the wind has long since forgotten.”
I suppose the optimist could look at the installation and regard the barren trees as signs of life, however tentative, sprouting from the earth. The realist, on the other hand, might look upon the rows of branches as a stark warning about the dangers of climate change—as well as the unabated greed of corporations that have ravaged the planet, perhaps irrevocably.
Completely stumped
Punyet Miró’s ghostly twigs made me think of the stumps that remained along Quirino Avenue after the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) bafflingly allowed row upon row of stately, decades-old narra trees to be cut.
So much that has been done in the name of progress has been at the expense of the environment.
A new expressway is to be built, connecting the Skyway to Roxas Boulevard. On paper, it’s enticing: a much-needed new artery that would ease traffic congestion, link communities more efficiently, and hopefully signal that we have shed all that third-world pathos that’s dogged us all these years.
But what is left of the trees tells a different story. A story of nature sacrificed, of nature discarded, of nature weeping. In some photos, a red cast seems to have appeared on the stumps, as if the trees were bleeding, in pain at being cut down so thoughtlessly.
One wonders if the surveyors, engineers, and urban planners involved in the project, alongside the DENR’s own experts, had even considered for a second designing the new highway with the least amount of damage to the environment.
Cutting down 600 or so trees to make way for elevated concrete thoroughfares is not merely lamentable—it’s downright criminal.
The tree of life
As it is, Metro Manila is desperate for more green spaces. In a country constantly beset by searing heat and furious rains, trees are more than shelter; they are life. As every grade school student knows—or should know, given the sorry state of public education—trees give off the very oxygen we breathe in, while absorbing the carbon dioxide we breathe out. It’s quite literally the breath that sustains us.
And there is the canopy that trees provide. The presence of trees has a cooling effect; those trees along Quirino Avenue offered shade, a welcome respite on days of relentless sunshine. When typhoons lash at us, trees are a bulwark against flooding.
So why do we continue to denude our forests, not to mention the paltry assortments of tree-lined lanes along our urban metropolises? Is a highway worth starving our lungs of oxygen?
Who really has the last laugh?
Lest we forget, trees nourish the soul. The sight of greenery is both visually pleasing and psychologically satisfying. In the roots of every tree, in each trunk and stem and leaf, are tales of history and heritage.
There is a reason why the Israeli settlers in the West Bank—who claim to be indigenous to the land—deliberately chop down ancient olive trees that Palestinians have been tending to for millennia. Every uprooted tree—the settlers delude themselves into believing—disconnects the Palestinians from their homeland and destroys a much-relied-upon source of livelihood.
It is yet another act of violence against the Palestinian people, who have always instinctively known that they are stewards of the land and not its masters.
But the land knows who lovingly cares for its soil and whispers to its trees. And nature has a deliciously ironic sense of humor. For the very same usurpers who claim the land is theirs according to their god, the apparently all-knowing real estate agent, are, it turns out, allergic to the pollen of the very same indigenous olive trees.
Nature always has the last laugh—as long as we don’t destroy it first.
