'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!

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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

One year before Time: Carbon offsets

Editorial page column, The Evening Paper

Issue of 26 October 1995

A whole year before Time magazine picked up the trend, we in trade journalism already had a growing inkling of how the tradeoff worked, thanks to an international network of industry-focused writers working at ground level to document swiftly changing currents in global trade.

So it was actually in March 1994 that we learned how industrialists and environmentalists were coming together in a shotgun marriage now known internationally as "carbon offsets."

But let me tell you the story from my desk then as editor of one of the internationally circulated trade magazines of a multinational publishing group.

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The special assignment had gone to our Chicago bureau, which coordinated Latin American coverage for all group publications. We had asked for a straightforward spotlight on the Brazil fashion industry. In that sense, it was supposed to be a cut-and-dried trade story.

That is, except for one sentence in the report on one company--a vertically integrated garment manufacturer, with more than 17,000 workers, that has pioneered in residue-free shorts and undershirts woven from its own organically grown cotton and produced with the least environmental impact: dyes from roots and herbs, reduced noise pollution in mills, an intensive industrial sewage-treatment program.

Targeting the picky and meticulous European market and with German technological push, the family-owned Brazilian company had initiated its own voluntary carbon-offset commitment. "It preserves 17 square meters of Atlantic coastal rainforest for every constructed square meter the company owns," was how our Brazil writer described the program.

Following up on this tip took my research all around the Southern hemisphere countries, including Paraguay, Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador. Time magazine reporters in April 1995 would add to the practice of carbon offsets such Asian converts as Malaysia and Indonesia.

But the very first Latin American country to sign up for carbon-offset agreements with US utility firms was Costa Rica.

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In 1994, ecotourism overtook bananas as Costa Rica's main source of foreign exchange. In the next three years, the Costa Rican government would earn anywhere from $600 million to $1 billion in revenues from ecotourism. Before the year 1995 was over, a total of 800,000 tourists would spend their precious dollars in Costa Rica's 28 parks and reserves spread over active volcanoes, cloud forests, tropical parks, and palm-lined beaches.

By its decision to devote one quarter of its national territory to protected biosphere and wildlife reserves, Costa Rica would show the whole world that conserving the country's natural resources could be not only a sustainable but even a more lucrative option to destroying its forests.

So successful has the ecotourism approach been that many local landowners, wanting to share in the largesse, would soon allow their forest lands to grow again in areas that, for decades, had been denuded by logging and agriculture.

At a Pacific Coast rainforest, a Reuters reporter described groups of squirrel monkeys, once near extinction, swinging across the paths of tourists, howler monkeys growling from treetops, capuchin monkeys begging for nuts by the beach, and giant iguanas lying motionless for the tourists' cameras. He saw scarlet macaws, toucans, elusive coatis, resplendent quetzal birds, leather-back turtles, red-eyed leap frogs, and poisonous dart frogs moving around, their routines undisturbed by the tourists.

The whole effort has been a determined preservation of the unique isthmus ecosystem native to the geography and topography of the country. In exchange, the country has won plaudits, even from the most critical and exacting environmentalists.

"Costa Rica has shown that ecotourism is not only competitive with more destructive land uses but can, in fact, be a greater generator of foreign exchange," testified the president of Conservation International, a Washington-based environmental organization.

Aside from carbon-offset programs with US utility firms, the Costa Rican government also pioneered in biodiversity conservation by signing the first bioprospecting tie-up with pharmaceutical giant Merck and Co., which will provide local laboratories with investment and technology for the successful screening of biological compounds.

The presence of tourists has not always been beneficial to Costa Rica's rainforests and reserves. Park managements have now banned camping and limited visitors to 800 a day to reduce their impact on the park's privileged residents--the animals and birds. Of course, entrance fees were also raised tenfold to make up for any income shortfalls.

Urban development is also being monitored closely. While all kinds of hotels, restaurants, bars, and honky-tonks have sprung up, the government is using gentle persuasion on capitalists to make sure they go by one model: studio apartments which, during construction, necessitate the felling of only one tree. Even now, the smell of guavas is said to pervade the grounds around apartments situated in forests, which are still home to sloths, monkeys, iguanas, snakes, and butterflies.

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It was well after the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit that carbon offsets took off. The consensus was reached then that the buildup of carbon-based gases spewed by industry into the atmosphere was turning the planet into a giant greenhouse. The 155 countries at that summit pledged to reduce carbon-gas emissions to 1990 levels by year 2000. The question was: How?

Governments could either crack down on their industries and force them to install high-efficiency machinery, a time-consuming and expensive process. Or, they could opt for the drastic and unacceptable, which is to curb economic growth.

Tradeoff ideas such as international carbon offsets immediately allow "smokestack countries" like the United States to get credits for helping preserve rainforests in, say, Borneo, Cambodia, or Bolivia.

One US utility firm went about its program the whole way, with enthusiasm and verve. It introduced environmentally friendly logging techniques to its partner, a Malaysian timber products company, to reduce unintentional damage, promoted tree replanting and regrowth, monitored the progress of the partnership, and measured the reductions in carbon dioxide emissions on site.

When the accountants took over, their figures proved beyond doubt that the US utility company saved more, with no reduction in efficiency and capacity, with its carbon-offset program half a world away.

Perhaps they will work just as well, if not better, when implemented within a country.

-- NBT