december-2011

Investing in their future: forest builders
include kids as young as three,
elementary students and the elders.
PLANT A
TREE, LEAVE
A LEGACY
The Forest Builders, under the
Cordillera Conservation Trust,
organize several forest-building
activities throughout the year.
Score one (or two) for the planet
and join in the tree-planting.
Visit www.facebook.com/
Cordillera.Conservation.Trust
and sign up for a meaningful,
and life-saving, vacation.
R EFORESTING THE CORDILLERA
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patterns, and this change has deeply
affected this remote mountain village.
Here, the rice fi elds very often run
dry from the lack of water, and are
no longer kept to the soil by the bald
mountains. Tublay’s roads are often
blocked by giant slides whose earth,
devoid of forests, could no longer stand
the weight of the rain. Repopulating the
mountains with trees was the cheapest
and most effective way to protect a way
of living that they have practiced for
centuries.
The green army
The forest in Tublay is to be the last
forest we would help build this season
as the rainy months come to an end.
I watch as three-year-old Arvi, the
youngest member of our newest Forest
Builders, gently holds the roots of a