Missing the forest for the trees

There has been of late cyber-chatter on the cutting down of shrubs and trees at the Talamban Campus of the University of San Carlos (USC). The administration has seen fit to begin widening the streets and expand the width of sidewalks and perhaps add bike lanes as more and more students are moving towards that campus.

Not that the Main or what is now called the Downtown Campus is for sale or owned by another university—a rumor continuously foisted by non-USC people since the 1980s. This story has, in fact, taken a life all its own with taxi drivers the very ones to pass the word around that USC must not really own the Main Campus after they see the magnificent spread of the Talamban Campus where so much development is going on. This is, after all, the only university campus that can truly be called one: complete with classroom and laboratory buildings per college with a humongous five-story library, a stadium under construction and a new and larger engineering building soon to rise if funds are raised soon enough.

This brings to the fore the problem of the cyberprotest on the cutting of trees. It is funny that the ones starting this whole brouhaha are not social scientists whose lives have always been ingrained with the need to protest the status quo. Neither did it start from the natural scientists, like biologists and chemists who are the best people to say whether the cutting of those trees is tantamount to the death of an entire species or a large carbon footprint for Cebu or that those are dipterocarps, hardwood trees like narra and molave, which take decades of nurturing. Neither did we hear of this from engineers, civil engineers to be more precise, who would be more knowledgeable about the steep terrains at the campus and the impact of such minimal tree cutting along the perimeter of existing university campus streets.

As luck would have it, the petition came from some architects who have much sentimentality I suppose when it comes to the trendy green movement that has overwhelmed the globe of late. Alas, as a good friend of mine quipped when he heard about it: “Are those mahogany trees? They should cut them all. They are fatal to birds and even to humans!” This coming from someone who is no stranger to green things, involved in his own way in biodiversity projects. I am not sure what those trees are or how many of them have been cut. And therein also lies the rub: apparently and even without asking botanists on campus to assess what was happening, there went this protest, even if the administration had promised to plant a number of trees for every one that had to go.

The final rub of it all is that the College of Engineering is now busy sitting down with architects at the College of Architecture and Fine Arts (CAFA), the very college where someone with a bright and inspired mind had the temerity to send out this protest. A new engineering building, to the tune of about P500 million to P700 million is set to rise near if not connected to CAFA. And, boy, I bet you there will be plenty of trees that will have to go just as many trees also fell when the huge CAFA building rose in 2004! Where was this protest inside the very hall of that building now, when CAFA building was still under construction? Will we now see these architects design a stilt building high up that will allow existing trees to grow with the sun still shining down on them to ensure unmolested photosynthesis? The cost of such a new engineering building, which would have to follow the sharply angled terrain and ensure that each and every living plant that grows on that spot right now, will be tremendous, running beyond a billion pesos! Botanists would have to be part of the construction team together with zoologists and a host of other specialists in insects and snakes. All construction workers must dispose of their waste and have it recycled. The contractor must set up a waste treatment plant nearby while the building rises steadily. And after the building is done, we might as well establish a biological field laboratory with all kinds of specializations to check constantly on the growth patterns of the trees and the insects and other living beings in them. That is what green construction should be. But can we afford it?

I may sound sarcastic but that is only because USC is met with such an idiotic protest that does not look beyond its simplicity—losing the entire forest for a bunch of trees. Shall USC then give up on the safety and well-being of its clients, the students, simply because it cannot cut trees two to three meters from existing roads for the noble purpose of widening the sidewalks? These are not even of the caliber of century-old trees magnificently lining the highway from Naga to Carcar and even in Sibonga, trees that cannot be easily replaced, trees with a long history. Nay, those at USC are even barely noticed 20 to 30-year old trees, some of them, like the eucalyptus, not even endemic to Cebu. And why end there? Why not protest the hundreds of cars parked inside campus running on dirty fossil fuels? Why not stop USC from using energy from coal-fired power plants in Naga to light up its classrooms and run the machines in laboratories? Why be so selective? Why be so naïve?

Writ large, however, this protest also gives one an inkling of the difficulties facing a growing and developing country. USC is but a microcosm, as we in our younger years always said. On the one hand, you have people with a narrow vision of how a university should develop, people who drive cars, smoke cigarettes, live in houses and tinker on laptops that run on coal-fired power plants, people who do not even segregate their waste, whose septic tanks go straight down the ground, leaching the soil. On the other are pragmatists, who see that the world cannot be reduced into a myopic landscape copying First World models without living up to it, pretending to be green without living a green life 24/7. Such hypocrisy knows no bounds.

At the end of the day, this is a good lesson for all. Let us not pretend that we are Germany today who can afford green living and campaign to the rest of the world to follow its lead. Let us not forget, that behind the success story that is the United Kingdom or Germany and even the United States is a long history of 300 years of rapid economic development riding pleasantly on the backbone of dirty fossil fuel energy. These countries can afford to tell us to follow them because they have reached a level of development where they can do away with dirty energy, something that we can only dream of unless we too exact so much of cheap fossil fuels or mine Mindanao for its huge gold, copper and nickel ores to the detriment of tribal communities.

We need new models beyond tree hugging if we want a better world. Otherwise, we lose the forest for a bunch of trees. But then again, we can also simply stop developing and go back to the caves and live out simpler lives with no laptops to write down our protests.