That has become a sine qua non to the Duterte regime’s mantra of Build, Build, Build. A perverted sense of progress at the expense of the environment. The climate crisis be damned!
Immediately following World Environment Day on June 5, came this massacre of eight trees along MacArthur Highway in Mabalacat City – in pursuit of the widening of the Manila North Road by the Department of Public Works and Highways – as documented in the Facebook page of the Save the Trees Coalition.
The DPWH – with the acquiescence, if not at the very prodding of the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources – has apparently abandoned its previous protocol of balling trees along road constructions for replanting in some other suitable place. Aye, less effort with the chainsaw than with the backhoe?
Alas, in the face of this murderous rampage, not even a whimper is heard from the Mabalacat City government – in the bitterest irony, the mayor pluming himself as a champion of the environment.
A warning: Revelation 11:18 – “And the nations were enraged, and Your wrath came, and the time came for the dead to be judged, and the time to reward Your bond-servants the prophets and the saints and those who fear Your name, the small and the great, and to destroy those who destroy the earth.”
