Accents
No birds and beetles and trees?
“Isko! Isko! Uyugon mo! Uyugon mo!” Shake it! Shake it! The kids at the bottom of the tree were insistent. Isko was nestled on a branch of the datiles, savoring one ripe, juicy datiles fruit he had just picked and gobbled. Still chewing, his left hand circling the trunk for balance, he vigorously shook a branch with his right, and lo! The ripe, red fruits of the datiles fell on the ground for the kids waiting below to scramble for.
It was a Saturday, no school, and the kids farther in the suburbs were out to forage for food to fill the stomach however little this could be. Moreover, play and laughter and a bit of adventure usually mingle in these childhood hunts, and nothing could be happier and pleasanter for the young. Simple joys of simple folks removed from the din of city life. Sometimes, there’s chance encounter with a generous homeowner who’s willing to accommodate the kids to the fruit-laden tree in his front yard. That, indeed, would be “manna from heaven.”
He is Isko to his friends and classmates to whom he acts like the leader of the pack. Pr-r-r-a-a-ncisco-o-o-o, he said, is the way his mother would shout when calling out for him, and Francis is the name he prefers me to call him. Francis is one of the ten-year old boys, some probably younger or older than he is, who frequent the datiles on the park of Florvel Phase II. It’s now fruit season for the datiles that was left to grow on this tiny park of this low-cost subdivision in my hometown, Oton. This is the place where my husband and I had bought a unit to spend our years in retirement after years of kayod, keeping our noses to the grindstone to see three daughters and a son through college—equipped to fend for themselves with the diploma secure in their hands.
Florvel, Phase I and Phase II, is where a mushroom of houses has sprouted in place of the acres and acres of rice land that yielded golden grains, the gintong ani (golden rice harvest) that once made Oton the foremost rice-producing town of Iloilo. Picture this familiar story in many other parts of the country—how subdivisions have replaced productive rice lands to answer the need for housing brought about by population explosion.
The population exploding? The United Nations Population Fund said the Philippine population (at present more than 90 million according to WikiAnswers) may double in the next 25 to 29 years unless the government aggressively supports the use of artificial birth control. (Hi, contraceptives! Hello, Reproductive Health Bill!) Population exploding? Let Popcom, the neat shortcut for the Commission on Population, diffuse the ticking time bomb (but that’s an entirely different story, gargantuan in scope, that Popcom must contend with) so that Francis and the rest of the boys would not be left without their birds and beetles and trees.
They are a rowdy band, the datiles boys. They do not only scour for fruits; they also climb trees for beetles to eat or birds to play with. Catch a bird, play with it a little, then let it fly, just as “titser” (school teacher) has admonished. The beetles that cling to the leaves of the trees are for open-fire roasting or for mother to fry in the home kitchen, Francis recounted one weekend. Crunchy! Yummy, yummy.
I remember my kid brother Ronnie, quick gatherer of the labog-labog or salagubang, the beetles he plucked from the tree leaves to end up sizzling in the pan and make good viand. In 1950, Toto Ronnie could bring home a liter-full which our household help would fry for a crispy snack. That was more than fifty years ago. Where are the beetles now, the trees to climb, and the birds to play with? Francis complains they could hardly gather a can-full of beetles in a morning outing. The birds have become scarcer and the trees fewer. He is the eldest of five in the family, and he wonders what his younger siblings would be gathering when they come of age. As it is, the number of birds flying and the trees standing a-swarm with salagubang are out of proportion to the horde of foraging children. Now rarely do we find trees with birds’ nests perched on their branches. As for the trees that strengthen the corners of rice plantations, they have become fewer than ever before. And of course, the beetles have gone with the trees.
No more beetles? no more birds? no more trees? The Asin singers ask softly with a song: “Ang mga batang ngayon lang isinilang/may hangin pa kayang matitikman/may mga puno pa kayang aakyatan/may mga ilog pa kayang lalanguyan…” (The children born only now/will there be still [pure] air for them to breathe/will there be trees to climb/will there be rivers to swim…”
One afternoon, I made the small space on our side of the road into a vegetable patch with kangkong stalks, the remains of the day’s binago-ongan. (Sauteed in shrimp paste, for those not in the know.) While I was gardening, the manog-uling or charcoal vendor stopped to sell charred firewood for fuel. Sacks of two sizes were piled high on his sikad. I asked where he got his supplies. His answer: from the scorched trees in Tubungan, a town far into Iloilo’s inland. Shades of the earlier times’ kaingin practice that had denuded the forest and contributed to climate change and soil erosion—dire results from the misuse of nature by a growing number of people who must eke out a living by felling trees. Compound the remnants of the kaingin with what we did read in the papers: the criminal deforestation of big business—an imperative for the government to do something about before things get out of hand.
Insightful New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman succinctly analyzes the causes of environmental degradation that eventually boil down to trees bereft of birds and beetles for Francis and company. A Pulitzer Prize winner, Friedman in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded (2008) writes how overcrowding of the world is “driving economic development, commerce, road building, natural resource extraction, overfishing and urban sprawl at a pace that is devouring open lands, coral reefs, and tropical forests, disrupting ecosystems, despoiling rivers, and driving species extinctions across the planet at an unprecedented pace.” In the same book, Friedman quotes James Gustave Speth, dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale and the author of The Bridge at the End of the World. “Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second. About half of the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. An estimated 90% of the large predator fish are gone… Twenty percent of the corals are gone, and another severely threatened. Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal.”
Anything more I would add is surplus.
(Email: lagoc@hargray.com)