City of Lost Pines

Summer is fully upon us – the heat, the humidity, the dust and low water pressure in the taps.

Like many other Filipinos, our family used to escape Manila’s blistering summer heat by going to Baguio. We stayed in a relative’s summerhouse nestled on a cliff, with a terraced garden full of flowers. The spacious cabin-type house had a real fireplace where burning pinewood provided some warmth in the living room.

Baguio in those days was truly the City of Pines. We always knew when we were close to the city because the air became redolent with pine and wild sunflowers lined the winding road. This was followed by the unforgettable scents of flowers that I will always associate with the Baguio of my youth: dahlias, hydrangeas, roses, gladiolus, strawflowers or “everlasting,” marigolds, and at night, the haunting dama de noche. Houses were adorned with creepers – the bleeding heart vine, the orange trumpet.

At daybreak when the dew was still on the grass and the flowers that came out at night had not yet faded away, the air was unforgettable.

Even the drive to Baguio was memorable. The old highway through Bulacan, Pampanga and Tarlac was tree-lined. We could pick up rocks speckled with silver along the “zigzag” or Kennon Road. In those days, getting there was truly half the fun.

Once we started spotting the pine trees and sunflowers, we would roll down the car windows and breathe in the bracing air. Sometimes I would stick my head out the window, close my eyes and let the cool wind caress my face.

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Today if you do that, your head might get torn off by a wayward bus that has lost its brakes, or you might wonder if you’re on EDSA. Baguio reeks of urban blight. Its slopes, now chockfull of houses instead of pine trees, are a disaster waiting to happen. Session Road looks like a nondescript Manila tiangge or flea market; the narrow streets of Quiapo have more character.

During summer, there’s little water in Baguio when it’s most crowded. The expressway extension all the way to Pangasinan has drastically cut travel time and made Baguio more accessible to even more visitors.

I was born in Manila, but two weeks after my birth, my parents brought me back to our home in Baguio where we lived when I was a baby. Even when we had moved back to Manila, we always visited Baguio at least once a year. Among my favorite destinations was the city market, where I always enjoyed sampling fresh strawberries – until sometime in my early 20s, when I was downed by amoebiasis and had to be rushed back to Manila for severe dehydration.

That was around the time that overcrowding and pollution were starting to become serious problems in Baguio. I suspected that the water used to wash strawberries in the market had become contaminated and given me the amoeba.

If President Duterte had been a regular Baguio visitor in those days, he would realize how much has been lost today. Together with the pine trees and much of the flowers, the view has disappeared in Mines View Park.

Then perhaps he might also do something about the urban blight that has destroyed the country’s summer capital. It’s not just to save the environment but also to prevent a potential horrific loss of lives in case another powerful earthquake strikes, dislodging all those houses that now cover the slopes.

Duterte can extend his environmental cleanup all the way to Bontoc, which is rapidly going the way of Baguio. The last time I was in Bontoc, about five years ago, farmers were hunched manually over terraced rice paddies, wearing wide-brimmed native hats. Scarecrows dotted the paddies. It was like a scene straight out of a 19th century painting.

Bontoc’s city center was another story. It was shaping up to be another model of anything-goes, unsustainable development.

A president cannot micromanage every province. That’s what devolution is supposed to be all about: local leaders should know enough to preserve and enhance their own natural and cultural heritage.

Unfortunately, in many parts of the country, local officials easily cast aside that heritage in exchange for political support and the foundations of family fortunes. If sustainability is considered at all, it’s in connection with sustaining personal wealth and power.

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The result is not just the destruction of travel destinations but also – as in most cases of environmental damage – public endangerment. Denuded mountain slopes mean killer landslides and torrential floods.

Around Laguna de Bay, now heavily silted by the fish pens owned mostly by local politicians, there is massive reclamation of the natural floodplain for mixed-use development.

Duterte should tell some of his political allies to moderate their greed, for their own good. A disappearing floodplain means horrendous flooding, as places such as Muntinlupa have already found out; in recent years, the lakeside communities of Alabang have had to endure floods that take up to three months to completely subside.

Now politicians and business interests are competing to reclaim more of Manila Bay, which will surely aggravate flooding in Metro Manila. They should just reclaim the entire bay and move the shipping port to the open sea, but China might shoo away the port developers or demand rent for use of the South China Sea.

The temptation for local officials to lease or sell public land illegally or indiscriminately will become greater as the elections approach and fund-raising starts. From what’s happening in places such as Tagaytay, local officials don’t even bother looking at construction plans to see if proposed projects would turn out to be eyesores or pose hazards to public safety.

An upside to the extreme measures now being employed in Boracay ostensibly to clean up the island is that local governments with jurisdiction over certain coastal communities are also cracking down on violators of environmental and zoning laws.

So far, no other popular destination is being completely shut down for an unprecedented six months. But establishments are being shuttered for a short period and illegal structures are being torn down.

People are hoping that this is an honest-to-goodness cleanup that will be sustained and won’t be tainted by shakedown, harassment and corruption, especially with the campaign period approaching.

This effort can be turned into something more coordinated, expanding to the highlands such as those in Bukidnon, Misamis and Leyte, and of course Baguio and the Cordilleras.

Baguio became Paradise Lost years ago. If it’s beyond redemption, we can at least prevent other places from suffering the same fate.