Raymund L. Fernandez
published August 10, 2014 in Kinutil / Cebu Daily News
The question is as simple as it is sad. Is it or is it not right to cut down trees to make way for road widening projects? There can be no easy answer. Often the question is reduced to rhetoric leading nowhere. The best arguments go either way.
The protestor asks: Why are you cutting down trees? The tree cutter retorts: Because we have to and we can. As if there were no other options besides to cut down these trees. Which leads the former to ask: Are there really no other options besides to cut down these trees?
The tree cutter replies: Of course, there are no other options. Even if we build the road elsewhere other trees will still get in its way. And then the road would be so expensive it would be impossible to build. The environmental impact of building roads on the shoreline would be even worse than cutting down trees near the road. The tree cutter concludes somewhat rhetorically: Tell us where to put this road so that no trees will fall. To which, the environmentalist can only ask: But why do we need this road widened at all?
There are many reasons of course. There is the economy, road safety, traffic, but really, in one word: progress. So then, the issue becomes subjective and therefore logically irresolvable if the resolution we want comes close to being universally correct. Those who are best served by the road will most likely see the road widening as necessary. Those who don't will most likely argue in favor of the trees.
Why do you cut down trees? The tree cutter returns back to the core assertion: Because we can! And then he might even add: We can always plant more trees. We can even plant one hundred for every one that we cut. Doesn't this balance the equation? Doesn't this seem to be right?
The environmentalist will always insist: Save the trees no matter what.
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| Gnarled Mass / May 25, 2014 / Estela Ocampo-Fernandez |
Does it help to assume the viewpoint of the trees themselves? These trees have lived for hundreds of years. They have seen history pass through these roads. They are beautiful. They have been placed where they are through no fault of their own. Those who planted them there had no inkling at all we would ever need this road to be wider than what they needed at that time. And so now these trees will have to die.
And even so, the question for humans redounds to: What truly is the value of the life of trees? For what value of human reward may the life of a tree be sacrificed? This argument would seem to favor the trees. But in practice not. Humans have a long history of sacrificing the lives of trees for human reward and gain. Trees give us homes, and paper, and so forth. The traditional view has always been that these gains far outweight the value of the life of a tree. We have cut them in the millions over millennia. We kill and eat animals all the time. So why stop now?
At this point the disinterested viewer might conclude how far down the road to confusion this argument has reduced itself. And then, the same viewer might begin to correctly see how this can only be resolved as a contest of power, because that is really how it is. The tree cutter cuts the trees because he can. The environmentalist might in turn decide to stop the cutting of the trees by bodily putting themselves there, in front of the chainsaws. They can do so because they can. And then the argument would have to be brought before a court of law. Even so, the end result seems already academic.
It is the exotic moralist who should be given the last word: May all of you who cut these trees be reborn as trees in your next lives! Then at least, one day soon, hopefully not too long from now, certainly within the next one hundred years, you might see what life looks like from the other side of the road.
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