Harmonizing our environmental laws and domestic policies

Atty. Gloria Ramos

As children, the month of May held a special significance for baby boomers like this columnist.

The Flores de Mayo celebration would find playmates gathering assorted flowers and plants in the backyard, such as calachuchi, rosal, sampaguita, roses, branches of palmera and cadena de amor.

These were painstakingly crafted into beautiful bouquets and placed in the native basket. No plastic containers in those golden years. These were our daily offerings we brought to the church, amid the prayers and the festive songs.

In those days, almost every household had gardens teeming with abundant flowers and fruits. Ours was not the exception.

Busy as she was as the homemaker, wife, mother to nine children, and a school executive, our Mama Coring would always find time to water the plants herself. It was not a chore for her.

She nurtured the greenery as she did her own family.

The flowers we harvested were a product of her personal care and attention. Most important, her solid values of protecting nature went deep down into her children’s consciousness.

As our cities have been transformed into one big concrete jungle, I wonder where the kids would get their flowers nowadays for the annual Flores de Mayo celebration.

It would be very expensive to buy them as daily offerings.

Flower-bearing trees, plants and shrubs are getting vanquished in the bottomless abyss of the senseless economic development-at-all-cost paradigm.

They are seen as obstructions and are senselessly and easily eradicated from the landscape. At the rate they are destroyed, even by those from the public sector, our voiceless trees, including our mangroves, certainly need more avid defenders.

Despite communities already reeling from the negative effects of climate change such as flash floods, landslides, and the extreme rainfall and unpredictability of the weather, massive decimation of the web of life, also known as our natural – life-support system, continues.

Is there any one connecting the ecological dots of destruction of nature, climate change, food security and the effects to our way of life?

It is never the smartest option to destroy the precious habitats that nurture life and shield us from calamities and from our uncaring selves.

The Cebu City government’s announcement of destroying 2000 plus trees to give way to a Bus Rapid Transit system project is a big setback to sustainability and needs to be reexamined.

I am sure our urban planners and architects can provide options that are sustainable and will not require destruction of the already-vanishing trees and the resources they support in our urban cities.

Under the Local Government Code, each local government unit (LGU), from the barangays, municipalities to the cities and provinces, are given and entrusted the devolved mandate of environmental protection as a service to be delivered to the constituents and our planet.

Can the city and for that matter, each LGU, provide us with an assessment as to the total number of trees and their species, as well as the total tree cover under their respective jurisdiction?

Are they of such a healthy cover that cutting the trees will not create an imbalance in the natural systems? Do they even have the updated comprehensive land use plan which under our laws and regulations should already integrate climate change impacts.

Have our decision-makers forgotten the free, indispensable and irreplaceable ecological services and environmental benefits that the trees have given us? Have they estimated the value of these services? Is there even a sound management of our urban trees?

Among a host of other services, such as enhanced health and well-being, impacts on water cycle, and reducing the intensity of heat islands, the benefits that our trees provide us include “energy savings and avoided air pollutant emissions due to shadings of buildings, sequestration (storage) of carbon dioxide, the principal atmospheric greenhouse gas, absorption of air pollutants, reduction in storm water runoff and required infrastructure, increases in private estate real estate values.”

(https://www.itreetools.org/resources/reports/Corvallis_Urban_Tree_Assessment_Tech_Report.pdf)

It is high time to harmonize our laws and our domestic policies.

Our Constitution, no less, guarantees “that the State shall protect and advance the right of the people to a balanced and healthful ecology in accord with the rhythm and harmony of nature.”

It embeds the duty upon the LGUs, acting as the agent of the State at the local level, and national government agencies, not to destroy the environment as interpreted under the landmark Oposa ruling, and to ensure that each of the constituents is assured of said right to a balanced and healthful ecology, at all times.

Destroying 2000 trees may be considered as tantamount to an abdication of such a grave responsibility.