IT IS THROUGH the power of words that we could describe concepts that the mind could not fathom otherwise.
It was a pleasant surprise for me and my daughter Olen to talk to the national artist Mr. F. Sionil Jose when we visited his La Solidaridad book store a few years ago. Mr. Jose told my daughter that if she wanted to be a writer, she needed to have a huge vocabulary. He said that she may not be able to use all of the words in her vocabulary, but it was good for her to know the exact words that she could use to describe exactly what she meant.
I have always tried to have a huge vocabulary myself, but until now, I have not come across the concept of the so called “natural heritage”.
I understand what “national patrimony” means, and I do know that our natural environment is part of our patrimony. However, I have never looked at our environment as part of our cultural heritage, and much higher than that, our natural heritage. It was Ms. Gina Barte, a frien,d who led me towards this new enlightenment.
I met Ms. Barte in the course of a project to preserve and restore our cultural heritage in the form of indigenous costumes and old films about our native dances and other art forms. The preservation and the restoration of our cultural heritage has not been part of my advocacies, but recently, I realized that not unless we discover or rediscover our cultural roots, we will not have the necessary foundation to move on with our economic, social and political goals as a people.
In many countries, it has become common practice for private foundations to buy bits and pieces of their natural heritage in order to preserve and restore these at their own expense, for the sake of the environment in particular, and for the sake of national patrimony in general. More often than not, this is done in cooperation with the government, and not in competition with the same.
For example, the Sierra Club of the United States has been buying rivers for the purpose of preserving and restoring them. The club raises its own funds through various commercial activities, including the issuance of their own Visa card, wherein they would get a share each time the cards are used. I understand that many other foundations are buying mountains, watersheds and the like.
As an alternative to buying parts of the natural heritage, private foundations could enter into property management agreements with the government, along the public-private partnership strategy. This could work here in the Philippines, where there are still huge tracks of public lands that could be managed under these agreements, many locations with mountains or rivers within these properties.
Here in the Philippines, the Integrated Forest Management Agreement (IFMA) strategy of the government could easily be modified in order to become part of the PPP strategy, with the slight difference that the applicants will be nonprofit private foundations, instead of commercial companies. Needless to say, the foundations will become the employers of the farmers who will be working in these projects.
The idea of issuing Visa loyalty cards could work here in the Philippines also, of course assuming that existing Visa card holders would agree to shift to new cards that would enable them to help the environment simply by using their cards to make purchases as they normally do anyway. Of course, this could also be used to raise funds for the preservation and restoration of our cultural heritage.
If private foundations will embrace the IFMA cum PPP model, they could in effect function like the big companies that are now buying farm products from contract growers near and around their processing plants, similar to what Dole Philippines and San Miguel Corp. are doing. Considered to be good employers, these companies are also providing basic services such as health and education./PN
