By Eva C. Visperas

 

WHILE on sickbed for one week at the height of super typhoon ‘Egay’, I got the chance to browse news online websites and one caught my attention: the Green Canopy project of the provincial government of Pangasinan.

It broke my heart the past recent years seeing trees along the highways that served as canopy, especially in this time of intense summer heat, being cut to pave the way for road clearing or road expansion.

Recently, one day, not long ago, as I was going home driving along Binmaley-Dagupan road line, several decades-old trees, most older than me for sure, were fallen, cut into pieces and  scattered along road shoulders.

It was like a massacre of trees. I asked myself,  why…why…why?!

Then came the road stretch in Sta. Barbara, and in other areas, too. The same scene. These were cut with permit, the signage read.

Back then, I wondered, where have all the environmentalists gone? Why was everybody silent?

Years back, I remember then Fifth district Congressman Mark Cojuangco, now the representative of Second District, strongly advocating that roads must be free from trees. Simple reason was to avoid road accidents as they pose risks to motorists. If one was not familiar with the terrain and would overtake, an accident was waiting to happen.

While I cannot claim to be an environmentalist, I fully understood the congressman’s point of view.

Politics was so intense then. Some even laughed at the congressman and would call him names. Yet, he was right. Trees are our friends and lifesavers but they must be planted at the right places. Trees are gift to humankind, a very powerful carbon conversion ‘technology,’ built by nature. Trees are our powerful defense against global warming.

For every tree cut, there must be a corresponding number to be replanted in exchange for it. I don’t know if this is even followed for public works projects in our province. I hope they do.

I read a report at 8billiontrees.com that in the United States, approximately 900 million trees are harvested annually, while 2.5 billion are replanted. These statistics equate to a ratio of 2 ½ trees for each felled tree.

In one section of the news feature written by Georgette Kilgore and released on April 4, 2023, it presented a table that shows the approximate number of trees some major countries plant around the world. It ranks these countries from those that plant the most to the least.

Part of the data was under the sub-title “How Many Trees Are Being Planted Each Year in the World? Is It Enough?”.

Number one was China with 2,407,149,493; United States was at 10^th place with 315,586,982 trees while our beloved Philippines was number 14 with 187,393,371 trees planted. It stated that these figures are estimates derived from various non-governmental and independent-sponsored research.

It’s a heartening to know that in Pangasinan, there’s this good news happening, aside of course, from the efforts of countless individuals and groups doing tree planting activities around the province.

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