Sen. Cynthia Villar. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines—“Don’t step on them,” Sen. Cynthia Villar gently reminded the gaggle of students, residents, policemen and Coast Guard personnel who had joined her to plant mangrove seedlings in a protected area by the Manila Bay.
It was the morning after Congress adjourned for the holidays, and Villar, ditching her flats for a pair of rubber boots, wandered inside a thicket of mangroves, and spent time gingerly sticking greenish, stick-like seedlings into the muddy ground.
After several minutes of crouching under a tangle of branches with the crowd of volunteers, she rose and turned to leave. And addressing no one in particular, she said: “I hope we’ve planted just enough. Otherwise, we will step on them.”
For the Senate-based photographers who took snapshots of her inside the Las Piñas-Parañaque Critical Habitat and Ecotourism Area along the Coastal Road, it could have been just another photo-op.
But not unknown to some, Villar is dead serious about protecting the sprawling 175-hectare habitat by the bay.
And she isn’t just trying to do her bit of greening the habitat, now home to 82 species of mostly migratory birds from Siberia and nearby countries that have lured bird watchers, and 70 species of plants, including mangroves; ponds, and lagoons.
Backed by thousands of residents, she has petitioned the Supreme Court to protect the habitat from potential developers seeking to expand the “entertainment city’’ in Manila and Pasay cities to these parts of the bay.
She has suffered an initial setback, but she’s not backing down.
This January, she’s set to open an inquiry into the impact of the reclamation of 38,000 hectares of land across the country, including 26,234 hectares along Manila Bay alone, approved by the Philippine Reclamation Authority (PRA).
“They’re building another Metro Manila in Manila Bay,’’ she said in a speech on the Senate floor in late October.
She sensed that proponents of the junked 1995 project between the Public Estates Authority and the Amari Coastal Bay Development Corp., known as the PEA-Amari deal, were making a comeback through this project.
If the reclamation project around the habitat would prosper, it would cause the slow death of the ecosystem, and worse, turn Las Piñas, Parañaque and Cavite into catch basins of floodwaters, she said.
The lady lawmaker and her husband, former Senate President Manuel Villar Jr., began driving here from their home in Las Piñas City over two decades ago to plant mangroves.
Her husband saw early on the wisdom of planting mangroves to keep developers at bay, she said.
“He had foreseen the reclamation projects. He said they can’t touch the mangroves. It’s against the law to kill mangroves,’’ the senator said.
So every year, the couple would come here to help personnel of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to plant mangroves, which include the specie Nilad.
“It has never been this lush before. Now, it’s such a beauty,’’ she said, pointing to the protected area’s dense mangrove cover of 30 hectares that has served as a spawning ground for fish, and buffer against storm surges.
Over the past several years, the habitat has become the pit stop for birds flying the bitter winter in Siberia, Russia, Japan and China toward Australia. Some move on, but others stay on until winter passes.
It’s not uncommon to see Chinese Egrets prancing in the bay close to shore, floating in lagoons, or perched in tree branches.
Given its rich biodiversity, it was declared a protected area by then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and included in the Ramsar list of Wetlands of International Importance.
Also on the list are the Olango Island Wildlife Sanctuary, Nauhan Lake National Park, Agusan Marsh Wildlife Sanctuary, Tubbataha Reefs National Marine Park, and the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park.
And then in February 2011, the PRA approved a National Reclamation Plan covering 38,272 hectares of coastal areas in the metropolis, other parts of Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao.
According to Villar, those narrow strips of land and sea crucial to an island’s food production, are now threatened by a new paradigm: reclamation.
PRA, the successor of the Public Estates Authority, had no budget from the government, and hence, had to earn from reclamation.
But why even reclaim a public domain and a protected area at that, and why not develop “blighted areas’’ instead, she wondered.
Soon enough, local governments, including Las Piñas that is headed by Villar’s brother, the Environmental Management Bureau and other agencies green-lighted the proposed Alltech Coastal Bay reclamation project.
According to reports, Alltech Contractors Inc. is not registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“It’s nothing personal. It’s just an advocacy,’’ the senator said of tangling with her brother, Mayor Nene Aguilar, over the project in the court.
Tellingly, the local governments’ move to act as proponents was designed to go around the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision that struck down the PEA-Amari deal as unconstitutional, she said.
Under the 1995 deal, the government sought to acquire three reclaimed islands in Manila Bay for P1.8 billion, but the high court ruled that these lands, being part of the public domain, could not be sold.
And not surprisingly, the proposed reclamation area of the PEA-Amari deal has become the subject of reclamation by Alltech, she said.
“They came back in another form,’’ she said of the proponents of the PEA-Amari deal.
Villar gathered the signatures of 315,849 city residents in opposition to the reclamation project, and petitioned the high court to issue a Writ of Kalikasan against it in March this year.
The P14-billion project seeks to reclaim 635.14 hectares of submerged land along the coast of the two cities and Bacoor town in Cavite, which would destroy the ecosystem and inundate villages with more than five meters of floodwater.
“It will destroy the natural flow of water,’’ she said in the interview. “This is an ecosystem that should be preserved. This kind of place will not survive without the ecosystem.’’
In April, the high tribunal required the respondents to answer the petition, remanding the case to the Court of Appeals for hearing. The appellate court, however, junked her petition, citing the lack of link between the project and her fear of environmental degradation. Last October, she filed a petition for review with the Supreme Court.
“There’s no more choice,’’ she said of her decision to go to court, indicating that she would go all the way.
Nowadays, Villar advocates the planting of mangroves as a buffer against storm surges, as shown by some mangrove-covered seaside villages in eastern Visayas that survived the Nov. 8 onslaught of supertyphoon “Yolanda.’’
If all goes well in the courts, she hopes to see the protected area turned into something like the Singapore Botanic Gardens, where families could stroll and go on picnics, and this should come with a marine museum, kayaking and sports-related facilities. But of course, the bird sanctuary would be off-limits to the public.
“It’s about time we encouraged families to enjoy nature,’’ she said.