BAGUIO CITY - AN AMERICAN living
in the city spent the whole of Friday morning tying green ribbons on the sleeves
of people he met on the street on which stands a concrete pine tree.
Tom Ewing,
a mathematics professor who is a faculty advisor at one of the universities in
Baguio, said the ribbons were part of his campaign to "reawaken the community's
consciousness to the city's dwindling pine tree cover."
Most of the pedestrians
Ewing pinned the ribbons on, however, were oblivious to his personal crusade.
Since
April, Ewing has been at the forefront of a petition to stop a local university
from chopping down a large pine tree standing in the way of a future day care
center on campus.
Ewing said he and three Filipino volunteers distributed the
ribbons as a show of commitment to "all pine trees," hoping to generate
the same outrage that compelled Baguio residents to stop the privatization plan
of Camp John Hay by a Taiwanese firm in the 1990s.
He calls his group "The
Sea of Green Movement," to inspire residents "to wear green clothes
to symbolize the principle that trees belong to the people and not private owners."
Ewing
said he faces a daunting task now that he has demanded the preservation of the
pine tree that straddles two universities and a hospital along Assumption Road
here.
In the letter he distributes to pedestrians, Ewing says the pine tree
has marked with the number "1" in yellow paint.
The city had marked
most of the trees growing along major thoroughfares for inventory purposes. "It
is the Number 1 large old tree in Baguio," Ewing said.
He said university
officials who refuse to heed his protest should be equated with United States
President George W. Bush, whom he criticized for refusing to sign the 1997 Kyoto
Protocol on Global Warming.
"On this issue, [Bush] is a solitary, isolated
president. The American people are shocked and ashamed of him. He is an anti-environmentalist.,"
he said.
"[The university president] refuses to save the large old tree…On
this issue, he ia also a solitary, isolated president," Ewing said.
The
issue of protecting Baguio's pine trees always strongly resonates politically
here, according to the city environment office.
Baguio has a law penalizing
people who harm pine trees.
Civic groups and Baguio's old families marched
on the streets on at least three occasions between 1993 and 2000 to protest government-led
projects that threatened the city's remaining forest cover.
Remaining
forest
Camp John Hay and a section of residential area on South Drive here
are the remaining forested spots of the summer capital.
The local government
is also vigilant against land claimers who stake ancestral properties in a city
watershed.
But government foresters admitted that no one has been prosecuted
for harming pne trees from the time the ordinance became law in 1990.
In fact,
none of the candidates in the May 14 elections was reprimanded or fined for nailing
or gluing campaign posters to trees.
Ewing said he had no legal argument to
elevate his crusade to the courts, after discovering that the university had started
building around the tree.
He said local officials had assured him that Mayor
Reinaldo Bautista Jr. was not onclined to issue a permit allowing the university
work crews to cut down the tree.
Local government policy justifies a cutting
permit only for dead trees or trees that had become a hazard to houses or buildings.
Embolden
others
Ewing, who has been in the country for two years, said he launched
his crusade because he feared the loss of the pine tree would embolden others
to cut down trees.
"They start with one, then they go to two, then they
go to three. It doesn't matter when it starts. It only matters when it finishes.
So you have to take a strong stand," he said.
Focus Point
"[This
pine tree] is a focus point. The city of Baguio must realize it owns he trees.
It's a platform to make a philosophical change [in the city]," he said.
"I'm
[currently] living in the Buddhist Temple [near the university]…It's the
last large tree on the street [where] I live. [The university] acquired tunnel
vision…for that reason, it has to be a dogfight [between my group and the
university]," he said.
He said the day care center project itself was
ill-conceived.
Ewing said the center building would be too small to accommodate
the children of the university's employees.
It is also too close to the hospital
and would become an even bigger obstruction.
"Think about this, if they
build that day care center and they have 300 children, then twice a day there
would be 300 taxi cabs and private vehicles picking up the kids. And that is a
turning point. It's very narrow," he said.
The INQUIRER asked university
officials to comment but they begged off.
Ewing said he would pursue his crusade
to its logical end.