With the celebration of both Environment Month and Environment Day this week, it falls to us to remember the value of that which we have slowly grown accustomed to losing. The greenery retreats away from the city centers, from urban sprawl.
Such is the nature of what we can view as development – the concrete spreads, the skyline grays, and the green dulls.
Naturally, in the face of such shrinkage of the green blood that keeps us intact, we scramble to reverse that which is nearly irreversible. We look forward to the ways of the new world to preserve the old. Advanced technology, the latest in cutting-edge science to squeeze out the last bit of environment, to preserve it as much as it can be preserved while still making way for development.
It is important, then, to keep in mind that for all our advances, for all the forward-thinking we perform, it was those who came before us who had achieved the closest state to harmony and coexistence with nature, not us. The moritoi, those warriors and heroes of a distant age, whose wisdom have been left to us, entrusted with their descendants.
80 percent – a full four-fifths of all biodiversity is found in the domains of the ancestral and indigenous. These domains are also where the environment is healthiest on average; the small communities living in harmony with the land may exploit it to fit their needs, but ancestral wisdom and the means of sustainability cannot ever match the damage done by the industrial complex, whose acts leave vast scars and barren land on the face of the earth.
Easy as it may be to think of the ancestral and the indigenous as “that which we have moved beyond,” it is a matter of fact that the old ways, with regards to the preservation of the environment, are more effective. Set to cater to the needs of a different time and a different life, the ways of the indigenous are not always one-to-one compatible with the modern era, but the process of progress and learning has always been to retain that which is beneficial, and discard that which has become harmful or obsolete.
More than anything, it is important that in our looking back, in our bid to learn from our forebears, that we take away not just their ways and techniques, but the mindset in opposition to the modern “line goes up” train of thought – sometimes there is value that is intangible, that is not monetary; sometimes what the moritoi can teach us is that there is something to the simple freshness of air and coolness of tree-shade that far exceeds the peso value of development.
