Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.
LADIES and gentlemen, I hereby announce the wanton damage and perversion of a green area of Manila, the Arroceros Forest Park. Feverish construction has descended on it with a plan that is not for a forest but for what seems at close scrutiny to be an attempt at an ornamental garden. Though even that plan has its egregious mistakes. All ponds in the area have been covered. In the value of things as they now stand in a time of climate change, a forest with trees and natural pathways and ponds is a much more important asset than an ornamental garden that for its existence has had trees cut down, natural paths substituted with cement pathways. That is what is wantonly happening, a very clear act of vandalism.
It will perhaps still be called Arroceros Forest Park, but it will not be that. It will no longer be a mini forest in the midst of hot, arid and ungreen Manila, but a misbegotten attempt at a garden with lots of cement, less trees, no birds and an identity of inconclusive character. As it will be neither a forest nor garden, it will be some kind of cement labyrinth among the trees that were not cut, a poor shadow of what it once was.
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