december-2011

Trees of life
High in the remote northern mountains of Benguet,
a team of forest builders are fighting the adverse
effects of climate change by taking matters into
their own hands. Story and photos by JP Alipio
WHEN I WAS young, one of the
fi rst songs I learned in school was
the classic countryside ditty called
Magtanim ay di Biro, which directly
translates to “planting is not a joke.”
At the time, the song painted for me a
picture of the back-breaking hard work
involved in rice farming; or any kind
of work with the earth, for that matter.
The song’s writers may have been
describing the hardships of life as they
knew it, but I always had the feeling
that my teacher was giving the class a
not-so-subtle hint: don’t farm or plant
for a living when you grow up. Those
back-breaking jobs, after all, are among
the hardest there are.
Many years later, somewhere in the
mountainous region of the Cordillera,
the north end of which is two hours’
drive from Cauayan, Isabela, I sit at the
top of a mountain slope. I’ve come to
work and suddenly remembered the
song from my childhood. Amazingly
enough, I have become exactly what I’d
seemed to be warned against becoming
— a farmer and a tree-planter.
As part of my job for The Forest
Builders, a group that three of my
friends and I formed three years ago, I
lead the day’s tree-planting project to
help reforest the area. It’s an important
forest that provides water for a nearby
village and protects it from storms and
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landslides. The group — 50 elementary
students, just as many high school kids,
the adults and elders of the community,
and a pair of siblings age three and four
— plant a total of 2,000 seedlings for
the day, and build a solid foundation for
the future.
What began as an effort to preserve
the places in which we played as kids
— trekking mist-covered ridges, biking
across mountain streams and verdant
forests, and walking through villages
where the people lived as close to
nature as one possibly could — has
evolved into something much bigger: to
preserve entire communities by caring
for the land that feeds them.