Hands off the trees

Will this be another case of unthinking planners paving paradise—to paraphrase singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell’s 1970 hit “Big Yellow Taxi”—to put up a parking lot?

More than 300 trees in Cebu City’s north district will be affected if the Environment Department gives Fifth Avenue Development Corp. clearance to complete the provincial government’s Ciudad development project.

Rep. Tomas Osmeña of the city’s south district in a rare moment of heightened ecological consciousness rang the alarm bells on the looming cutting of mahoganies, Gmelinas and other tree species.

(How we wish Osmeña would also raise a howl about the hills and mountains balding at the hands of developers and constituents in his very own district.)

The Environmental Management Bureau returned Fifth Avenue’s application for an environmental compliance certificate for Ciudad. It would have been better if it did without counting as justification the suspicion that it is conspiring with the company. Genuine concern for Mother Earth should trump obsession over a bureau’s image.

Company officials first need to tell the Department of Environment and Natural Resources what happened to their promise not cut down the tree lining Governor M. Cuenco Avenue or where they will plant trees when in fact they plan to convert 2.4 hectares of the project site into a basement parking area.

The firm, without providing details, assured that they will ball and replant the affected trees.

Fifth Avenue will not be able to blame environment advocates and the public who are wary of their assurances.

In the first place, the company has yet to name a transfer site for the trees and the survival rate of balled and replanted trees does not glow. (Hence the citizens’ outcry in Baguio City in the country’s north, where a mall has been cutting and balling hundreds of pine trees on a hill to give way to a parking lot.)
In addition, Fifth Avenue pointed out, quoting Provincial Agriculturist Necias Vicoy, that most of the 332 trees in the Ciudad project site have short lives, non-premium and non-endemic.

Poor trees; due to a government agriculturist’s description of them, a private company insinuated that people should not mind if they will be felled.

Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama and officials of Fifth Avenue and the Province of Cebu should wake up and shun duplicity.

Trees are precious trees, all the more when there are 332 of them, whether or not they are relatively ephemeral, prized and native.

They deserve better treatment especially from officials of a city that sorely needs them for shade, flood control, air cleanup and beautification.

Our leaders would be ruthless to force us to make that ruinous choice between livelihood-generating development and life-giving trees when lush forests and ample greenery thrive in many of the world’s most industrialized cities.