A TreeVolutionists reflection on #TreeVolution :) Raymond Esperat: Much can be accomplished if people come together for a cause. At the beginning, many believed it could not be done. That it was just too big, too ambitious, that it was just for show. They were wrong. If thats how many people think about our environment, that regenerating it is just too ambitious, too big, then we are screwed as a people. Fortunately, theres still a handful of us who believe otherwise. And that handful of Mindanawons, with respect to the total population of Mindanao, went out today and accomplished much. The hard part was getting people to believe in this cause--that it wasnt just for show, that it could be done if and only if everybody pitched in. The harder part was getting people, Mindanawons, to see that ultimately it wasnt just one person or agency who stood to benefit from this, but rather the whole Island of Mindanao and its inhabitants. The hardest part of all this, I think, is getting people to realize that caring for the environment is and should be a cause that transcends boundaries, religion, language and ethnicity, and even political affiliation and aspirations. We have shown that it is possible to get people to mobilize en masse for an environmental cause with tangible and measurable outputs, albeit with long-term outcomes instead of immediate gratification. What was done was just a start. Moving forward, the challenge would then be for everybody else in the sidelines to pitch in and contribute. To bite the bullet and accept that this isnt going to be a walk in the park, that its going to be tedious and inconvenient, that its not just the job of a single government agency, that the environment is a shared resource and therefore a shared responsibility, and at the end of the day, it still must be done anyway. After #TreeVolution, I can see that there is hope after all--for us and for our environment.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 01:32:07 +0000
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