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| "Carcasses" of diseased pine trees felled by city government lumberjacks from all around Baguio City await wood processing at an improvised lumberyard in Dominican Hill. Many of these were teetering precariously or leaning over power lines they needed to be cut for public safety considerations. |
think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
very time I read this poem by Joyce Kilmer, which first appeared in the August 1913 issue of Verse Magazine, there is this unexplainable feeling of melancholy that I get, The best way to describe it is to associate it with the color magenta. And just as I only copied Joyce Kilmer's poem here, I'm also only borrowing the description of the color magenta from a dialogue by Blanche Deve
reaux from the hit 1980s television series The Golden Girls (played by actress Rue McClanahan).
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| This old pine tree was marked for axing by the government because some of its branches interfere with power lines. Local artists pleaded to be allowed to carve it into a giant totem pole, after pruning off the offending branches. |
When you "feel magenta" it's a feeling you can never describe: you're not sad so you're not blue; you're not mad so you're not red; you're not afraid, so you're not yellow; you're not jealous or envious so you're not green; you're not dead or grieving so you're not black. But you feel an anxious combination of all of these colors. You are feeling "magenta."
Magenta can be disquieting but it doesn't move you, and it doesn't afflict you with any sense of guilt for not moving. You end up doing nothing, and doing nothing changes nothing.
I have been writing about Baguio's pine trees for twenty years now, since the 1980s as a writer for The Gold Ore. It might even be longer than that, if I count the years from high school, the name of the school paper I edited was the Pine Tree in Baguio City High School. My message is always the same: we have to save and protect this precious dwindling resource before it's all gone.
The usual reaction I get from official circles and ordinary folk is always magenta--all empathy but nothing more. People feel the loss, but not the urgency. They sense that something is not right, but they are not outraged enough to lift a finger and do anything about it. Most of all they think I'm writing about an old and tired subject that, in the words of Macbeth, is just "a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
It's not difficult to see why. Although there are notable exceptions, the decimation of the pine trees is not usually done by a massive assault on the treeline in a full-scale logging operation. The poaching is usually sporadic and widely-scattered--one tree here, another one a few kilometers away--not enough to attract attention and invite opposition. But the math is cumulative. If only one tree a day were surreptitiously cut, 365 trees a year becomes a combined denuded area equivalent to one half hectare.
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| The Tower of Peace park beside the Baguio Lions Clubhouse was supposed to be the new outdoor "Pine Trees of the World Museum" but after all the hoopla of the opening ceremonies, the place quickly deteriorated into a vandals paradise, instead. |
Tighter regulation and even stiffer penalties are not the answer, either. One can make all the arguments but at the end of the day, cutting a tree with a government permit makes no difference to the tree. Whether you cut a pine tree with criminal intent or with legal sanction and tender loving care, the tree is just as dead.
However, as rampant as illegal tree cutting (is there really another kind?) has been, the stubborn and hardy Benguet pine tree is not in any endangered species list. If it was, it might even be a bit of good because that would finally sound the death knell for these trees urgenty enough to trigger a proactive response. But why wait for the peril to become intractable when it's possible to preempt the response?
There is no mystery about this. In any conservation program to protect an endangered species, the scientific response is to increase its population, not just prevent that population from dwindling. The Philippine Eagle Conservation Program, although still a work in progress, has nevertheless succeeded in pulling the Philippine eagle from the brink of extinction through its captive breeding program. Today, instead of spending time trying to capture wild eagles for relocation into confined bird sanctuaries, they have been going out to the forest to release captive-bred eagles back into the wild. Coupled with widespread public education, and an aggressive program to protect the eagles natural habitat, the program has seen the raptor redeem its lost position as the apex predator in the forest food chain. The moral lesson is this: to protect a species, the key is making sure the birth rate outpaces the mortality rate.
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| Forcing the Benguet pine tree to gr.ow alongside non- native species has the effect of thinning its crown. This park was more verdant and lush with pine trees when it was all the species allowed to grow there |
To preserve the proud heritage of Baguio City's iconic pine tree, there must be an effort to produce more new trees and not just a vigilant watch over old existing ones. Here is where the pine tree conservation program--so far a nonexistent program yet--could do better. Without letting up on the effort to catch and penalize illegal treecutters, there must be a seedling process to produce pine tree saplings en masse and a year-round mechanism to disperse them throughout the city for planting. As simple as that sounds, the sad reality is Baguio City doesn't even have a seedling program, or a seedling farm. You cannot count the handful of private seedling plots at the City Orchidarium because those are oriented to fill a limited commercial market for ornamental greenery.
In 1993, the government launched an ambitious project that renamed the old Tower of Peace Park along Governor Pack Road as the "Pine Trees of the World Park." The idea was to honor the one species of subtropical flora--the Benguet pine tree--that has brought fame, honor an instant recognition to Baguio City. It would be a living outdoor museum showcasing the Benguet pine tree, and to give it company other species of pine tree would be imported from all over the world and be resodded beside the local variety: ponderosa pines from the upper latitudes of North America and Canada, Norwegian folk pines from northern Europe, etc. To herald the project, a marker was unveiled by the entrance beside the Lions Clubhouse. It is all that stands for the whole project ever since.
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| The lushest growths of pine trees can be found around the hilly suburbs of Baguio where the species is allowed to thrive by its own kind. Unfortunately, it is also in these places where they are most vulnerable to the weekend chainsaw gangs. |
In the first place, such an ambitious project was unnecessary, There is already a place that fits the purpose called the Baguio Botanical and Zoological Garden along Leonard Wood Rd. But even that facility has no decent tree seedling program dedicated especially to propagating the Benguet pine tree.
In the second place, introducing a foreign species of any flora or fauna into a locality not its natural habitat is always frowned upon by scientists. To this day, Ifugao upland farmers ares till livid about the introduction of the golden kohol into their rice terraces by overeager agricultural technologists in the mid-80s. Promising a second source of income to farmers, the golden kohol was envisioned to provide bountiful harvests of highly-marketable crustacea during the fallow period between rice croppings. Instead the voracious shells consumed hectare upon hectare of rice farms all year round, while proving intractably resistant to any effort to exterminate them.
In places where the Benguet pine tree is allowed to grow alone without any neighboring species, it seems to thrive well. But forced to grow side by side with other plant genuses, an inexplicable phenomenon called "crown spacing" seems to impair the outward spread of the tree's upper limbs and branches.
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| Time is running out on Baguio's iconic pine tree. Unless efforts are redoubled to increase their number, and not just to arrest their decline, soon it will be just another souvenir from the past, and begin to slowly disappear like the marapait (local sunflower). |
This phenomenon could still be observed today happening in Camp John Hay.
After the defeat of the RP-US Military Bases Agreement in the Senate on September 16, 1991, Baguio City prepared for the American departure from Camp John Hay. What would happen to the best-preserved nature enclave in Baguio now that the Americans are leaving? The question is not born of colonial mentality but of practical observation. Back in the day, when you entered Camp John Hay you saw a glimpse of what Baguio must have looked like at the turn of the century: verdant and fresh with thick stands of towering Benguet pine trees hemming in and around eighteen links of a world-class golf course. The golfing is new, but the trees are hundred year-old straightbolds that have become extremely rare elsewhere in the city.
When martial law was declared in September 1972, US military bases including Camp John Hay took heavy security precautions, and entering Camp John Hay became a limited privilege. Becoming this "forbidden fruit" destination wrapped Camp John Hay in a veil of mystique for tourists and locals alike. As a young Baguio boy in gradeschool I would hear urban legends of how going inside Camp John Hay was like going outside of the Philippines.
What bolstered that feeling of "like being in America" when you entered Camp John Hay was the fact throughout the entire camp, there was only one species of tree visible everywhere--the Benguet pine tree. Somebody compared it to pine forests in Minnesota to Maine, or southward to Georgia.
Then came the conversion of Camp John Hay into a private golf course and residential subdivision in the years following 1992. One of the development parameters introduced by the private developer that won the lease over it was the diversification of foliage. They said having nothing but pine trees growing in Camp John Hay made the place boring and visually monotonous. They endeavored to introduce more lowland color to the treeline, theorizing that it made the place more welcoming to the lowland crowd, seeing familiar species of trees,
Maybe so, but it robbed Camp John Hay--and ultimately Baguio City as a whole--of character and identity. More ominously, it signaled the decline of the pine tree as the icon of Baguio's landscape. Replacing it were several deciduous varities of broad-leafed trees. Incredible fast growers, a sapling today could be a fullly-grown 20-foot tall tree with a full crown in less than five years. It would take a Benguet pine tree 35 to 40 years to achieve the same growth.
A Delicate Species to Culture
The Benguet pine tree is a very challenging species to culture. The only time an individual plant can tolerate being lose to another is when they are both saplings up to about a foot high, and only while their tender root systems are enclosed in individual plastic pouches. Sown into the ground at close quarters, saplings do not fare well sharing common soil if their radiuses are less than two meters apart. In the natural environment, thicker stands of pine tree naturally thin out as the trees soar towards the sky. By natural selection, weaker trees in between sturdier ones gradually die out, allowing mature trees greater airspace to expand their crowns.
The Benguet pine is not a symmetrical tree, in the sense that its branches do not grow outward from the main trunk in a balanced way. It's a common sight to see pine trees asymmetrically favoring one side, with larger branches generally sweeping towards the windward side. Strangely, however, cluster of trees tend to exhibit the same growth pattern, sometimes creating the impression that a group of trees were dancing in some cosmically-coordinated choreography.
This peculiar growth behavior has helped to protect the species, too. Unlike the conventional ponderosa pine or Douglas fir which exhibit greater radial balance, growing in a cone shape with increasing height, the Benguet pine tree is not an ideal "Christmas tree" and is rarely harvested for that purpose. Also, because its main trunk seldom attains a "straightbold" consistency, the pine tree is not an ideal lumber stock. When quartersawn at a lumber sawmill, the tree yields only very short lengths of wideboard most useful only for furniture woodwork rather than as structural elements in carpentry. When you talk of a house being "constructed of pine wood" you really mean that pine wood was used mostly for cladding.
This makes it a greater challenge to undertake a massive pine tree planting program. The sapling mortality rate is exceedingly high--by most estimates only two to three saplings achieve maturity out of a hundred. The best chances of success is when reforesting wider swaths of land, such as an entire hillside. Saturating the
soil's bearing capacity by planting seedlings 2 to 3 meters apart, the rewards is five to ten years into the future when the planted area would be a new growth forest of pine trees 5 to 8 inches in diameter and about 12 feet tall. In the urban setting this can be a tough challenge. A lot of changes in land use can happen in five years, let alone ten. Many tree-cutting permits sought by housing developers are, in fact, aimed at cutting pine trees that have just entered their first phase of forest growth being planted less than ten years ago.
NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:
Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON
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