Baguio must revisit its climate science commitments

ven under the best circumstances, hardly anyone is still paying any attention to climate issues in Baguio City. The campaign fever in the runup to the May 2022 election seems to NOT have changed that situation.

To me, it shows two things: (1) elections have remained personality contests rather than a battle for the soundest policy agenda, and (2) government at all levels is still failing to communicate the relevance of climate science and the urgency of what it is compelling us to do.

The Philippines is a signatory to the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. We signed it on April 22, 2016, ratified by our Senate a year later on March 23, 2017. It binds us to reduce our greenhouse gas emission levels by a humble 0.34%--that’s less than one percent—as our contribution to keep global temperature increase to below 2-degrees Celsius above pre-industrial level by the end of THIS century, with a further objective to reduce it to 1.5 degrees.

Talk to anyone on the street today and NOBODY knows about this—and nobody should. How could they? Nobody is telling them anything.

Despite numerous studies showing the direct causal relationship between global warming and severe weather events, reinforced by our actually experiencing those weather events, many people in Baguio still demonstrate a pitiful lack of, if not outright hostility, towards climate science.

Someone has to spell out in explicit terms how global warming is affecting the lives of Baguio people—and it’s very difficult to do that on cold mornings of 10 or 11 degrees Celsius.

So let me say it: the effect of global warming is NOT something you can feel on your skin. It’s something you can feel on your wallet.

An increase in global temperature by just ONE-HALF degree Celsius melts about 2.5% of all the world’s sea ice. That’s about six trillion gallons of water added back to the ocean, raising sea levels by as much as EIGHTEEN INCHES—a foot and a half—above the high water mark at LOW TIDE.

Multiply that five times during high tide and you’ll understand why the government is bracing for the need to permanently evacuate around eight coastal barangays in Cavite alone, six in Bulacan, four in Zambales and Bataan and three in Pangasinan.

Where will people living in these places go? Remember, in coastal communities if you lose your house you lose your livelihood too. You can’t fish from too far inland. So where will these suddenly-jobless people go?

Why, to the CITIES, of course, where else. There you can find jobs that are not affected by sea level rises, mostly in the manpower sector, some in trading or maybe the support industries around tourism. When the sea turns menacing and the temperature gets unbearable, guess where tourists run to: BAGUIO.

Ergo you have traffic jams, a housing boom, accelerated urbanization (read, massive tree-cutting and land-clearing), congestion, pollution, solid waste glut, faltering water supply, strained availability and coverage of utility services (Baguio has one of the slowest internet speeds in the country)—all of which translates to higher costs in order to compensate or counter these effects.

But that’s not all. Complaints of “Why is it raining jn December?!” are not as innocent as they sound. Changing climates is radically altering seasonal patterns, something EVERYBODY have begun to notice in recent years: there is no clearly delineated “rainy season” or “summers” anymore.

Have you ever tried sleeping regularly in the daytime? Your circadian cycle fights it. The disruption of seasons is nothing to ignore. PLANTS are fighting it. The unpredictable rain pattern has eliminated the bio-agricultural difference between planting, growing and harvesting seasons. That's why crops have been consistently failing, resulting in plummeting farm yields. Don’t look know, but were importing RICE again, something the Philippines has never done since 1980 “just” 40 years ago. Not only rice, but now were beginning to import garlic, onions, potatoes, tomatoes--all upland crops growing in Cordilleran farms increasingly affected by severe weather on both ends: dessicating droughts and leaf-bursting frosts.

But what is Baguio’s response—to traffic, for example? We widened our roads, increasing our capacity to accomodate higher vehicular loads, inviting more cars into the city—and generally contributing to increased car-buying sentiment among consumers.

In short, instead of raising our sights and gunning for net-zero emission levels within our lifetime, we are violating our commitment under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement! We are working hard to INCREASE greenhouse emission levels in Baguio. I have not seen a single electric car in Baguio—not counting golf carts—not even one. Why would there be, there’s not a single charging station, nor any plan or even a mere forward-looking study to prepare for an electric future.

It’s the OPPOSITE, in fact.

There’s an active effort to grab BENECO, Baguio and Benguet’s one and only electric utility—the one that will play the most crucial role in securing Baguio’s clean energy future.

But besides passing a non-binding resolution declaring the purveyors of the failed invasion persona non grata, the political leadership has NOT regarded the issue enough as nothing short of what it is: an EXISTENTIAL THREAT to the very existence and welfare of future generations of Baguio City residents.

They have not directly and officially castigated NEA. They have not summoned leaders of the banking sector to demand for valid answers why they are enabling the active sabotage effort against BENECO. These banks are all doing business under the tolerance, regulation and permission of the local government. If they act as enablers to an effort that is subversive of the public interest, shouldn't they be held accountable? Some of these banks PREVENT your electric cooperative from accessing the money YOU paid and you do NOTHING?

Climate affects the environment, affecting economic activity, motivating greed, breeding corruption--the dots are NOT that hard to connect, really.

The problem is all on the mentality Climate issue? Sigh. It’s too complicated to understand, let alone translate into an action plan.

“So let’s just sweep it under the rug for now, shall we?”

I'm advocating for the planting of more PINE TREES only

llow me to clarify.

I am not advocating the planting of trees all over Baguio.

I am advocating the planting of PINE TREES all over Baguio.

No offense to all other tree lovers. But I’m not trying to attain food self-sufficiency. I am not motivated by biodiversity. And I am not trying to produce lumber. Like I said, almost ANY tree can grow in Baguio. I don’t want to plant almost any tree, not even the ones that grow fast and easy. I want to plant—and I do plant—pine trees. Only.

You will eat guavas from your own guava tree three times in a year, or maybe even less. For the most part, you will just want to LOOK at your guava tree. For some, especially those tracing their roots from the lowlands, it reminds them of “home.” Well, then, you shouldn’t have any problem understanding why I want to plant pine trees—for that very same reason.

If I ever moved to the lowlands, I will plant pine trees there too. Of course, they will keep dying and i'll keep trying--and people will wonder why I persist. They will mock me, for the same reason I wonder why they insist on transforming their part of Baguio into their own little “pocket lowlands.”

When I was editor of the Gold Ore in the 1990s, Fil-Estate developers boasted at a press conference, after they bagged the contract to “re-develop” Camp John Hay, that they would “add more color” to Camp John Hay. They would introduce other tree species to “break the monotony of an all-pine tree landscape.”

Without creating a scene or any commotion, I quietly slipped out of that press conference. I grabbed a taxicab to the Main Gate of Camp John Hay—the one across Hotel Nevada which was still in ruins then. I walked up along Sheridan Drive (you won’t even remember that road if you’re not from Baguio) and based on the “development schematics” that I saw at that press conference, I sat before a thick stand of tall pine trees that I knew for sure would not survive the impending makeover.

I spent a few moments with them, touching their rough barks, sniffing the sweet-smelling resin that oozed out of them. One of them dropped me a small perfect pine cone which I picked up. I was glad those trees couldn’t talk because if they could I know they would have asked, “isn’t there anything you can do to save us?” There was none—nothing that could be said, nothing that could be done. So finally I just softly said goodbye and cried.

All those trees are no longer there today.

In fact if you go to Camp John Hay today, it’s no longer there. They just keep calling that place Camp John Hay.

Fil-Estate was successful in introducing “more color” to the landscape. But they were not--they will never succeed in preserving those pine trees—they will all eventually die.

They don’t understand pine trees. Pine trees don’t like other trees. There are no mixed pine tree forests anywhere in the world. There are only pine forests, period.

Benguet pine trees know their identity. More than some iBenguets themselves, even.

That’s what makes it so difficult to grow pine trees “in captivity.” Haven’t you noticed you can only grow pine trees in clusters, but not individually? The reason is “bio-social”—clusters of pine trees protect one another. If you want to grow a single pine tree, you must be willing to guard it with same amount of protection it would have gotten from a forest. So you can grow one, but it’s a mission.

Pine trees live long and will build a lifetime relationship with you where both of you must stick around. You just don’t plant a pine tree and run. They will not go for a one-night stand. You must be committed to it. A pine tree is not cheap.

That’s why I plant pine trees. I’m not going to eat my pine tree, and I will not feel bad that I can’t. I will not begrudge the fact that these pine trees don’t bring me any economic benefit. I want these pine trees to grow for themselves, not for me. I want them to grow for Baguio.

So I am not looking to join a peer society of plantitos and plantitas. I don’t want to build a Japanese garden or my own private little ecopark. I just want to rekindle the comeback of this species that attracted me, and many others, to come to Baguio in the first place, and made me swear to never ever leave this city--except horizontally in a pinebox.

BAGUIO CENTRAL SCHOOL MEMORIES 5

hat is this “cancel culture” thing?

Stand-up comedian Dave Chappelle (he played Kevin Jackson, bookstore manager of FOX Books in the 1998 love story movie “You’ve Got Mail”) is in trouble today because he joked that cancel culture has gotten so bad in America that “you can get away with murdering a black guy but, ooh don’t you dare hurt a gay person’s feelings!”

If you got offended just reading that line, then save some time and don’t bother reading the rest of this piece. Miss a great story.

First let me lay out my credentials. I started wearing eyeglasses at age three. I’m still wearing them now. I went to public elementary school where I earned such aliases as “Four Eyes”, “Kuwago”and “Telescope.”

Wearing glasses told playground bullies you were “fragile” and can be pushed around. So I got pushed around plenty in countless confrontations between me and some hefty uppergrader that resembled a matchup between Mike Tyson and Mr. Bean. I always stood up against all bullies and, man, did I show them how. They’ve never seen a boy bounce off the wall and ricochet around the classroom so much and still stay alive to try and fix his broken glasses.

Have I ever been mistreated, discriminated against, minoritized, marginalized and victimized? You don’t know the half of it. And that just in elementary school.

There were three boys in my class who were gay. For some reason, gays in my generation were always scions of wealthy families. And even if they were average, their doting parents (especially moms) pampered and spoiled them rotten. They dressed well—in boy attire, mind you, nobody crossdressed yet then—and their pocketmoney always consisted of paper bills. Mine was coins. Always coins.

We, “normal boys” watched these gay boys mingle with, laugh with, casually kiss and put their arms around the prettiest girls that we often wondered if it was possible to fake it—to “play gay.”

I honestly don’t remember if I tried. Just as well, because psychologists would later prove that gay was NOT a choice. People don’t choose to be gay. They just are.

What Dave Chapelle touched bad was not the raw nerve of being gay per se. It’s the insinuation that gay people are fragile—even if he only meant emotionally oversensitive. Dave Chapelle is my generation, but we belong to different cultures and societies.

Back in the 1970s in Baguio Central School, gay boys cried (but who didn’t at that age?). But I wouldn’t say they were vulnerable. In fact, one of them could rough up any of the bullies anytime.

Rather, it seemed to me it was those macho ruffians in my day who couldn’t handle the least dose of embarrassment or adversity, if we talk about emotional fragility. One bully was yelling the Tarzan yodel while swinging on a rope in gym class when the rope snapped. Everybody laughed hard but Mr. Bully chose ME to vent his frustration on. Holding me by the scruff of the neck, he gave me a couple of loving smacks to the face then introduced his elbow to my nose before walking away.

Everybody scampered away, which is what you did if there was a raging bull in a china shop. So I lay on the ground alone bleeding when another classmate Jimmy Patacsil happened by. “What happened?” In between mumbles, I told him what Mr. Bully did. Jimmy took out his handkerchief and started wiping the blood in my nose. When I screamed that it was broken, I saw a look of urgency in his eyes.

He picked me up, slung me over his shoulders and sprinted the fifty yards to the school clinic. The school nurse, Mrs. Warren, was aghast, “What happened?” Jimmy had to retell the story I told him. Because the nurse was working alone, it was Jimmy who had to rummage through cabinets, handing over the cotton, bandages, alcohol and such to Mrs. Warren who was fixing my nose. Then Jimmy ran back to retrieve pieces of my broken glasses, and gathered my books and notebooks that were strewn all over.

While I was slung over Jimmy’s shoulder and he was running to the clinic, carrying me, I remember thinking, “how can any boy be so strong?”

To be more specific, how can any boy WEARING NAIL POLISH be so strong?

Jimmy was gay.

And wherever you are today, Jimmy, God bless your golden heart. I pray that somebody forwards this to you.

To Dave Chappelle, shove it.

Coming of age as Martial Law was imposed in 1972

was in Grade 2 when martial law was declared in 1972. At age 8, I had no idea what it meant. What little I could glean about politics, I got from observing what the adults did and listening to what they talked about.

These are mainly my parents and substitute parents, teachers, community elders and such. Our ‘capitan del barrio’ in Barangay Upper Rock Quarry and Lower Lourdes then was ‘Ka Vidal’ Fonseca. He was a kind old man who spoke puritanical Tagalog and served as a deacon for the Iglesia ni Kristo, lokal ng Magsaysay Avenue.

He was all praises for President Ferdinand Marcos. Because of his moral ascendancy, others in the barangay who didn’t really have any opinion about Marcos and martial law were content enough to just copy his.

He had a son, Moises, who was my contemporary and street playmate. He and I soon learned the lyrics of the martial law theme song “Bagong Lipunan” and took pride in that we had memorized the song, and could sing it in any key, even in two-part harmony that we made up ourselves as toothy 8-year-olds.

In school, we were systematically indoctrinated to regard Marcos as a national hero--at par with Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, Apolinario Mabini, Gregorio del Pilar and all the other ‘Avengers’ circa 1898.

In fact, we were taught that the Marcos gene was uniquely adapted to embody Filipino greatness: his mother Josefa Edralin was like a fairy-godmother of some kind, his father Mariano was the precursor of Obi Wan Kenobi, his brother and sister—they were all gods and goddesses in the pantheon of superheroes headquartered somewhere in Sarrat, Laoag, Ilocos Norte. And his wife Imelda—ooooh, she was like the Philippines’ answer to Cleopatra, or the counterpart of America’s Jacqueline Kennedy. We memorized all these details to get a perfect score in a daily “know the Philippines” quiz during Social Studies, which was the subject immediately preceding recess.

In short, we were literally martial law babies, spoon-fed a daily diet of Marcos greatness, force-inoculated with mega-calories of Imeldific megalomania. Winning over the hearts and minds of generations raised this way is going to take a whole lot more than just insulting them and calling them all manner of morons.

I’m always in awe and great envy of people who are just my age today who act and talk like they always knew the horror martial law was right from Day One. Either they were REALLY mature eight-year-olds, or went from Grade 2 to graduating from UP Diliman in the same year.

I had to do it the ‘hard way’--living a childhood framed in “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan” and bathed by the fake glow of the ‘golden age’ that the Philippines supposedly lived through. It was probably just out of laziness to explain, but when we asked adults what it meant to be “anti-Marcos” they simply pointed to the long-haired, smelly and unkempt marijuana-smoking hippies of the 70s and said, “THAT is what lack of discipline will make you to be if you’re stubborn and disobedient.”

The Philippine Constabulary (PC) was raiding “pot sessions” being held in houses all over the city every night and hauling these hippies in their platform shoes and bell-bottomed pants by the truckload. So we thought of being “anti-Marcos” as criminal and decadent.

Whatever ultimate truths I know about Marcos and martial law today, l had to spend the latter half of my life discovering and re-learning by myself. So all my conclusions about the true draconian character of the Marcoses, and the profound social, cultural and economic damage that was wrought upon Philippine society by martial law no one can disabuse me of, or even challenge on the grounds of “You don’t know what you’re talking about” or “You should also know the other half of the martial law story.”

No, no, no—I LIVED that “other half of the story” that you’re talking about. In fact, it’s what completes the big picture for me. The Marcoses were only able to rob this country blind BECAUSE they conditioned us blindly first to look away as they did the robbing in broad daylight.

Marcos stole 98 centavos out of every one peso—and with all those unstolen two centavos put together, he built the Philippine Heart Center, the Cultural Center of the Philippines for the rich and well-heeled elite, the Folks Arts Theater for the slipper-clad masses, the Manila International Film Center for the families of the construction workers buried underneath it who can’t afford to have a mausoleum built in their honor so the Center just had to be IT, the Manila International Airport, the National Kidney Institute so we now have ONE kidney dialysis machine for every SEVEN MILLION Filipinos, and the San Juanico Bridge that cannot take trucks with a gross vehicular weight above five tons. We celebrate these infrastructure milestones because we were conditioned to focus on those two unstolen centavos, and to forget the 98 stolen ones.

The only real Marcos legacy there is that even long after Marcos is gone, that is STILL how our present elected officials steal our money and throw us back some crumbs.

If there’s any Marcos legacy there, it’s that we now accept as totally normal our duty to venerate our congressmen and senators—whose job it is NOT to build infrastructures—for all the “public works projects” they build, funded with our own unstolen two centavos.

If there’s any Marcos legacy he left behind, it’s how we now toast to the success of political dynasties and political families, and regularly check our checklist for each political family: are all the children in office already? How about the wife? The son-in-law? Not yet? What’s wrong with these people??

I cannot “un-live” what I lived through and experienced under martial law. I cannot renounce all the little things I did, from childhood through even much of adulthood before reaching the age of reason, to unwittingly participate in the making of the environment that made martial law tolerable, even benign.

I know the truth now, as do millions of others who will honestly admit with me of knowing only much too late.

I don’t want to lambast any morons out there for not knowing any better. I was a moron like them.

No one can undo what Marcos did. Marcos did not just do an act. He planted a mentality. His ultimate strategy was inception. That mentality still drives many people today who were NOT even martial law babies. They just picked up and read Marcos' textbook on thievery from cover to cover. They even know how to condemn Marcos convincingly--at least at some point in their life of lofty principles before they served as press secretary and such other positions.

Not everybody is Marcos. Most everybody just wants to be and, in true Marcos tradition, without making the unsuspecting people make out anything.

I don't trust any of them. We cannot have a fresh start with old bread. We must go back to a national tabbularazza. I don’t want anything from the past to despoil anything in the future of my country.

That’s why I want LENI ROBREDO to be the next President.

If you believe as I do, I’m happy for you, and I hope you don’t allow anybody to steal that joy. Don’t talk to any Leni Robredo campaigner, they have a job to do and they’re busy enough. Don’t let anyone have to convince you.

Forget that you are a martial law baby. You don't have to renounce that, you don't have to do anything. You are a good person in and of yourself no matter what president you grew up with. You don't have to convince anyone that you have seen the light and repented and such other crap.

You can make the decision to vote for Leni Robredo ALL BY YOURSELF. 

Hoping that CECAP keeps its film archives safe

y political definition, I am a Cordilleran having spent 55 of my 58 years in Baguio City. But I’m still a city mouse.

I’ve made it a point to see as much of “my Cordilleran homeland” as possible, vainly hoping it would make me “more Cordilleran.” Being a journalist and photographer in a previous life (before I became a lawyer) often gave me that opportunity.

For instance in 1988, I did some slide film photodocumentary work for the Central Cordillera Agricultural Project (CECAP) under Director Tom Gimenez. The job called for me to shoot about 100 rolls of Kodachrome, documenting traditional farming practices in Mountain Province and Ifugao.

That’s when I learned the painful lesson to never believe a true native Cordilleran who gives you a verbal descriptive estimate of DISTANCE.

“Bernie, adayo ba diay papanan tayo?” (is it far where we’re going) I asked my local guide Bernard Foryasen who was from Natonin, Mountain Province.

He said, “dita laeng asideg” (right around there not too far).

We hiked for five hours.

After five days, I was able to put together a rough “description-to-travel-time” conversion table, based on Bernard’s descriptions to me. Something like “dita laeng”- 5 hours hiking time; “idta bangir” – 8 hours; “idiay” – 1 full day; “idiaaaaaaaayyy!”- bring food and drinks for 1 week.

I was lugging a big camera bag that held 3 Nikon bodies (back then SLR’s were all-metal, no plastic) and 6 lenses, including a heavy 500mm “catadioptric” or mirror reflex lens. Whenever we settled down for the night, I was aching in parts of my body I never knew I had.

I looked at our itinerary and guide map for the next day’s shoot. The names of the places were Sagada, Barlig, Paracelis, Natonin, Banawe, Hapaw, Hungduan, Guinihon, Batad….

I called Tom Gimenez. He called the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) who operated off Bagabag Airport in Nueva Vizcaya. They sent over a helicopter to pick us up and I completed the rest of the job photo-mapping all these farming communities from the air.

If you haven’t flown over the Cordilleras yet in a helicopter, one that can cruise slow enough and just high enough, and even hover over one spot, you have not seen the place from a critical perspective.

Up in the air, the Cordilleras look so awesomely picturesque, unbelievably beautiful, virginally pristine and—the best word I could think of—so FRAGILE.

I felt the same way Meryl Streep felt flying over the savanna in “Out of Africa” that as soon as we landed all I wanted to do was grab the first native Cordilleran I could find by the scruff of the neck, shake him up and say, “Don’t you ever, ever, ever, EVER give this land away to anybody, you hear me??!”

All the slides I took are still with CECAP today (I hope).

The thing about slides—especially Kodachromes—is you only ever get ONE COPY of it. It cannot be faithfully reproduced. Unlike color negatives that allow you to produce as many positive prints as you want. When you shoot slides, the roll of film that you loaded into the camera, after it is processed, IS the final product itself. The processed roll is just chopped up into individual frames and mounted onto these little square plastic frames that you load into a carousel tray. Each frame is a color POSITIVE, so you can project it to a screen and watch the whole slide show like a movie.

I did the photoshoot totally from a "National Geographic" approach. I photographed Ifugao farmers repairing rice terrace walls, women whipping rice pannicles to separate the chaff before pounding, men hoisting a carabao up the next level of a rice terrace, glorious sunsets framing silhouettes of thatched roofed huts, and many more. I count it as one of my best works--that I never got to keep.

That was 33 years ago. So much may have changed since 1988. Even I am curious to know—what did I capture on film 33 years ago that are no longer there now? I don’t know anybody in CECAP now, I don’t even know if that World Bank-funded project still exists and how well they take care of their film archives.

I may be subjective, even biased. But if I were to rank the six Cordillera provinces, I think Mountain Province has done the best job of protecting and preserving the land. And I don’t mean this just in the narrow sense that they have kept out the “outsider” better. They have shown to me a deeper affectation for their place and culture in a manner I haven’t witnessed in Benguet, for example. When I was doing the shooting from the ground in Natonin, Bernard spent most of his time explaining to village folk and fending off some people who wanted to interfere with my work.

They said something to me I will never forget. When I told them I was doing no harm and was just capturing images in this little black box called a “camera” they said, no, I was capturing the soul of the place. Don’t be ridiculous, I said. That is just superstition.

Looking back now 33 years later, I take it back. They were right and I was wrong. I DID capture the soul of the place, I did capture the spirit of the land. They are locked up in those slides. And the only good news is, those slides never left the Cordilleras.

I just don’t know where they are.