Fighting for Forests

Sunday, 09 January 2011 03:14

Written by Neric Acosta

The United Nations has named 2011 as the International Year of the Forests, following last year as the International Year of Biodiversity. This should not be seen as coming out of cursory, lip-servicing United Nations declarations. In an age of climate change, there is an increasing global consciousness on the impacts human communities place on fragile ecosystems that provide human civilization as we know it with critical life-support systems – clean air, clean water, arable land for food and agriculture, fisheries and coastal resources.

It is but right to begin this year by returning to the fundamentals – not in the conventional understanding of economic or financial brass tacks – but in the terms of the ecological foundations that provide for the economic growth and the sustaining of human societies. There would not be any economy to speak of when life-support systems break down. When our rivers or bodies of water are contaminated or our air loaded with pollutants, public health is threatened. When our forests are despoiled and logged for rich timber, we deplete vital watersheds upon which food security, human settlements and industries – and thus economic progress -- depend.

The succinct argument holds: no forests, no watersheds, no watersheds, no water, no water, no rice, no rice, no economy. The root word for both economy and ecology, after all, is the same: the old Greek oikos, or home. The household is the basic unit of economic exchange where we produce, appropriate, consume, conserve and distribute resources to sustain families. Ecology, constituting the elemental interactions of population, technology, the environment and social organization/governance, is about the planetary home and its bounties, which sustain the human race.

The predominant economic model, however, since the Industrial Revolution has been about pursuing unlimited growth – increasing production for growing markets, pursuing greater profits and more income. But for the most part, the natural environment and its elements have been ‘externalized,’ that is to say excluded from the overall accounting of costs and benefits. Economic growth and progress, the paradigm dictated, could well proceed without putting a cost – or ‘internalizing’ cost -- to pollutants discharged into the air or the contamination of water, or for that matter, to the impacts or effects on human health caused by pollution, solid wastes or overall environmental damage.

In this regard, the upsetting of a balance of fragile ecosystems ultimately undermines economic viability. When a brewery or food factory, for instance, is unable to derive clean water for its operations because of depleted aquifers or shrunken watersheds, it is not able to sustain its business. Or when workers in general are sickly because of air pollution or persistent environmental hazards, productivity in large part declines, affecting the bottom line altogether. Or when the denuded mountains are unable to hold back floodwaters, economic activity in inundated cities grinds to a halt.

It ought to be clear that it is good business to be green and for businesses to vigorously ‘green’ their value chains because all told a healthier, greener, cleaner planet benefits all. And if we see forests and biodiversity as a linchpin for sustainable development, it becomes everyone’s business to care deeply about the planetary oikos – and save ourselves by saving our last remaining forests.

The rape of the repositories of what are touted as some of the richest pools of biodiversity in the world – our forests -- assaults the senses. Comparative satellite images of the archipelago’s forest cover –from the turn of the 20th century, to the mid-century and on to the last few decades -- will show the stark contrasts of a dramatic whittling of the green patches on maps juxtaposed to each other. From a high green density of 70 plus percent in the early 1900’s to a mere five percent forest cover today, the implications on water availability, biodiversity resilience, soil erosion, health vulnerabilities and deepening poverty cannot be more staggering. In Leyte and the Caraga region of Mindanao this week, landslides have yet again buried communities and laid waste vast tracts of farmland. Of late the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) named four species of endemic fauna of Mindoro – including the beautiful, unique Tamaraw – as critically endangered.

How could we have allowed this catastrophic state of our natural environment to reach this point? The short-term depletion of natural capital and the wanton extraction of our natural wealth have severely compromised the capacities of future generations of Filipinos to meet their economic and social needs. We have mined and logged ourselves to ecological perdition.

It is imperative for the new leadership, awash with a people’s hopes for a corruption-free government, to re-stream and re-think the trajectories of national development along the lines of ecology and sustainable, balanced growth. Ecological destruction, after all, is nothing less than the corruption, the defiling, of the balance of nature. One only has to see our destroyed forests and endangered biodiversity to evince a deeper understanding of this reality.

We have breached the 100-million population mark, making us the 12th most populous country in the world, and our imperiled ecosystems are named some of the ‘hottest biodiversity hotspots’ in the world. We owe it to ourselves -- we owe it to our children and their children -- to take careful stock of our situation and take clear, sustained action.

In this Year of the Forests, plant a tree or two. Save the planetary oikos.

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites