'Clean and green'

I love going to the countryside. To me, the country is home to the two coolest hues in the spectrum of color: blue and green.

The blue of the skies, at times clear and brilliant, at other times greyish and forbidding. The blue-green of water, burbling in brooks and streams, singing in rivers, lapping against sand, impenetrable in lakes, frothing angry or playful from beaches overlooking the infinite. The blue-green of mountains, majestic in the distance, a reminder of scenes and sights of my past, now permanently alive only in my mind's eye, sentimental places and memories already beyond revisiting. The green of forests and trees, of meadows and gardens, of potted plants and tiny leaves.

Since the end of my journalistic career allowed me to encourage my creative ambitions, I traveled the nooks and crannies of the serene towns and barrios of the provinces to the south of Metro Manila--Quezon, Batangas, Laguna.

As I drove away from the towns to the rural areas and wildernesses of this region, I would imprint in my mind the images of idyllic country life: old-style farmhouses ringed by mango and coconut trees, with the occasional carabao or horse or even free-range chickens lazing about, smoke billowing from outhouses; huge plantations protected by stone walls from the streets, with only their rooftops visible through heavy canopies of trees; unprofessionally but heartily landscaped gardens surrounding schoolhouses lying motionless in the sun. And always--always!--water in rivers and streams, flowing down from hills and mountains through irrigation canals to join up with the lake and the sea beyond.

In these places, "cool and green" continues to be an appropriate description. But no longer in Metro Manila or in other highly urbanized localities, where buildings eat up parks, centuries-old trees are cut, and squatters gleefully pollute waterways with the wastes of their miserable existence--and all with government approval!

____________________

Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 14 November 1995

The giggles from youngsters watching the television coverage of a recently concluded beauty contest, held in a mountain resort up north, were all too audible when one contestant came up with her "clean and green" impression of the Philippines. She must have picked up the phrase, quite automatically, from intermittent posters on zigzagging routes to the resort, or along the mountain city's roadways, totally unaware of the fact that the Philippines, whether on the ground or from the air, has long ceased to be clean and green. In fact, even the mountain resort where the beauty contest was held had long ago turned into pathetic brown.

Nor is Metro Manila looking any younger and crisper. It looks, to be kind about it, decidedly old and faded. A tourist traveling down Metro Manila streets is bound to bring home with him contrasting images of the Filipino people's respect, or lack of, for his environment.

On the one hand, you can look out from Makati's high-rise buildings and see stretches of green parks and tree-shaded thoroughfares, including parts of Gil Puyat Avenue and Paseo de Roxas. Outside Makati, one can still find tree-shaded streets in older communities like San Juan and Mandaluyong. Nor should we forget the welcome canopy of age-old trees, their branches joined, over the streets of New Manila.

On the other hand, the concrete ribbons in the Cubao commercial district are not only gray and ugly, but also dirty and smelly. Even the celebrated flyovers, at their birth sprouting fully landscaped crawl and pedestrian spaces at EDSA level, have already lost much of their green to dust, smog and human neglect.

And the center island of Pasig's Ortigas Avenue Extension from near the Meralco Building to E. Rodriguez Avenue, which had gone to weed but was still home to fully grown though scraggly trees, has now been torn out--with the approval of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, we were adequately warned--and is being cemented to provide more road space for cars. What is being constructed right at the center is a very narrow ledge made of hollow blocks. Can we at least look forward to a future glimpse of green somewhere along this perennially traffic-clogged stretch?

Only last week, certain comments of the controversial, newly installed congressional representative from the first district of Leyte were played up in the newspapers, including her quip about Mrs. Amelita Ramos's clean and green program. We can say all things about the former first lady (Imelda Marcos), but one thing we must acknowledge is the fact that when she did, she went into the cleaning and greening of Metro Manila as if it were her life's mission--to the point of being ridiculed for creating Potemkin villages to hide the ugliness and poverty of real life.

There must be a middle ground somewhere--and a person who can lead us in mining the rich deposit of ecological concern and aesthetic commitment among the residents of Metro Manila. Sometimes, all it needs is somebody to concentrate on the job instead of taking it on as one more adjunct to an already long string of official duties and responsibilities.

Who does not dream of a really clean and green Metro Manila?

-- NBT