Part IV of the Series on “The ReVOTElution of Hope for Sorsogon”

In the 1980s, I wrote these lines: “In the 1950s when I was an elementary-school student, Sorsogon Province was one of the greenest places on earth. The place had a lot of trees and wildlife. Thousands of magnificent hornbills, owls, monkeys, deer, monitor lizards and other animals and birds thrived in Sorsogon. The prized asset of the province, Sorsogon Bay, teemed with marine life from crustaceans to whale sharks.”

Then I continued my article, The Filipino (and Sorsoganon) "Silent Springs" (With Apologies to Rachel Carson), “In just 30 years or so Sorsogon Province became virtually dead from the ecological viewpoint.” But the way to the rebirth, if not the ecological renaissance, of Sorsogon Province – as the pilot site of the ReVOTElution – can be modeled after Biblical words.

  As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth . . .’ ---Luke 3:4-5

T he answer, therefore, to the problem of combating the effects of Global Warming may lie in simply following the Bible: “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low . . .”

Yes, “every valley shall be filled” with fruit orchards and tree farms, along with irrigation canals, dikes and artificial bodies of water such as man-made lakes and reservoirs. For turning the valleys greener and doing the Green Revolution is the easiest way to combat Global Warming.

And if indeed the sea level is going to go up by 20 or more feet by the end of this century, then “every mountain and hill shall (should) be brought low” and brimming to the top with new ecologically-friendly housing, more tree farms, plantations and Banaue-style rice terraces, so that people can be fed. The mountain tops can be leveled, so that they can be planted to more crops with the use of catch-basins for the abundant rainfall and water-distribution systems that can take care of irrigation and drinking needs.

All the houses at the elevated areas of the countryside can have solar-powered generating units that can be complemented with power derived from windmill farms, so as to have electricity even during the night.

Leveling the mountaintops and converting them into agricultural sites and tree farms has been successfully done in West Virginia and other mountainous regions of the United States. All of these were done after mining has been done in the said mountains. So, if it could be done in North America, why can’t it be duplicated in a Southeast Asian country?

H ow to do the tree-farming cooperatives (TFC) and generate funding for the massive reforestation had been explained before in this article,

Funding Reforestation as a Solution to Global Warming (Part6)

In fact, the suggested reforestation is part of the offered prescription for combating economic depression in the homeland, as argued in this article,

An Overseas-Filipino Political Party’s Rx for the "Great Economic Depression" in the Philippines

And this writer is no longer the “solitary voice crying out in the wilderness.” He has been joined by hundreds of Overseas Sorsoganons and thousands of Overseas-Filipino workers and Overseas Filipinos.

It is only a question of generating the right political will on the part of the people (read, stakeholders), especially the voters, of Sorsogon Province and the country in general. # # #

E ditor’s Note: To read the other articles of this series, please go to:

How the ReVOTElution Will “Reinvent” Education and Life in Sorsogon

A Sorsoganon OFW Appears to Be a Bigger Hero than Manny Pacquiao: How the ReVOTElution Will Protect OFWs and their History (Part II)

A Bigger Danger than an Eruption Lurks in Bulusan Volcano

 (Part III)

How to Make a Biblical-based Real-estate Redevelopment the Answer to Global Warming, Starting in Sorsogon (Part IV)