Trees planted beside or in the center of the road are there for important reasons.
They are more than green decor.
As taught in grade 1, plants absorb carbon dioxide in the air and produce life-giving oxygen.
These powerful carbon traps, when nurtured as forests or mangroves, are the earth’s protection from a thinning ozone layer being destroyed by greenhouse gases.
Trees also provide shade and cool the ambient air around us.
For urban dwellers, Nature provides a respite from the concrete jungle.
With growing public awareness on climate change, it is appalling to see the cavalier treatment of the contractor of the S. Osmeña Road concreting in the North Reclamation Area.
The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) ,which supervises WT Construction, is in hurry to scrape off the road and cover it with another layer of concrete and asphalt.
They don’t give a damn about saving any greenery on it.
This is obvious in the clever way they dodged requirements of the law.
The agency went through the motions of applying for a permit from the Dept. of Environment and Natural Resouces (DENR) to remove the trees by “earth-balling”.
A few days after being given the permit, which had conditions on how to go about carefully transferring the trees, roots and all, to specified government sites, magic happend.
Or call it “black magic” because the surreptitious uprooting of over 100 remaining trees in the center island of Serging Osmena Road took place under cover of darkness.
Security cameras recorded the contractor’s heavy equipment doing the deed between 10 p.m. and dawn.
To rub it in, the extraction took place on March 29, the international celebration of Earth Day.
No wonder Cebu City Councilor Nida Cabrera was fuming.
As the council’s environment champion, she was at SM City that evening with Vice Mayor Edgar Labella presiding over the ceremonial power switch-off of Earth Day.
Her call for an investigation should be matched with an offer of the Cebu CIty government of a reward for anyone who can trace the whereabouts of the yanked-out trees.
The trees were supposed to be replanted in Plaza Independencia and a park for senior citizens near City Hall.
The value of over 100 fire trees, whose red flowers which bloom in the heat of summer make them prized ornamaental trees for landscapers, cannot be underestimated. Could they be resting somewhere in someone’s commercial garden? Or mansion?
The DENR and City Hall should leave no stone in investigating who were responsible for the theft of government-planted trees.