My fellow lowlanders

We are dwellers of plains and riversides, you and I.  Lowlanders.  Our ancient predecessors carved out a life between the lapping (or crashing, at times) waves of the ocean and the impenetrable forest, thriving each year on the heavy rains of the monsoon.  Rivers were born in the highlands and descended towards the sea, creating plains and nurturing life on them, only to take it all away when the heavy rains came again.  We live on little slivers of land really, bargained from river banks and flood plains, beach heads and bays.

Seaside and riverside settlements were able to expand, while in the mountains villages remained relatively small and constrained by the topography – relying on sustenance farming while their lowland brethren expanded into trade.  Quiet villages became towns with marketplaces, and then bustling trading ports.  The lowlanders prospered and their populations swelled, and thus the very beginning of ‘urban sprawl’.  The ancient, once impervious forests that once hemmed in settlements now fed their growth, and conceded territory.  The two could not prosper side by side.

A little more than halfway through the twentieth century this struggle came to an end.  There was no more forested land left, at least not any good for settling on.  The forests clung to high mountain ranges too unstable for development.  The Philippines was declared to have only 35% forest cover, less than the required level for biodiversity and local ecosystems to prosper, or at least survive.  Environmentalists took on the cause and action was taken in the attempt to curb logging and forest degradation due to agriculture and development.  The forest cover continued to drop to about 20% in the 1980s, and between 11-15% at the end of the century.  Even mountains became bare.  Deforestation in the Philippines became an international environmental crisis.

But another crisis was looming, and its root lay in the Southwestern Monsoon – the reason why the forests had thrived as they did over the ages.  The monsoon that brings rain, lots of it.  That sends water down the mountains and swells rivers.  In a previous age much of this water fed multi-tiered forests, whose roots thirstily soaked it up, as well as anchored the soil around it.  Rivers still spilled into flood plains, on which grasses and small shrubs grew.  It was a natural cycle.  The story today however, is different.  There is too much water coming down from the mountains, and there are too many people:

During Ondoy, Angono's roads became rivers.

Rivers have reclaimed land.

Thus where we are today.  Flood control measures are necessary, but without a comprehensive, sustainable plan to reforest the watershed, we lowlanders will be fighting off more and more water each year.

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