SAVING LIVES BEFORE TREES

by Bernie Lopez

 

If we kill people in order to save trees, we are more anti-heroes than heroes. We become inhuman environmentalists. We must save both people and trees all at once. And if there is a conflict, we must save people first.

 

If we are to fight environmental crimes, we have to begin with alternative livelihood, otherwise all our efforts are for naught. Food and survival for marginals is the sine qua non of a successful environmental advocacy which should not dislocate them.

 

Although it has tapered somewhat recently, there are about 60 ten-wheeler trucks leaving Dingalan per month, two per day, carrying 900 20-kilo sacks of wood coal per truck . This is a total of about P1.08 million per month. This translates theoretically to a staggering three hectares of forest destroyed per month, the value of which is immeasurable. What Mother Nature has built in a millennium Man, in his hunger and poverty, can wipe out in the blink of an eye.

 

When inventor Jun Catan gave a talk about his revolutionary 'green charcoal', people from the Ugnayan ng mga Mamayan sa Lungsod at Nayon (UMALUN) in Dingalan in Aurora who attended sought him out, seeing the potential to veer away from destructive wood coal-making through Catan's innovative technology. They the invited him and this author to Dingalan to help form a strategy around the green charcoal phenomenon. UMALUN has 727 farmer members, most of whom do wood coal-making off and on.

 

Catan's green charcoal is nothing but garden and agricultural waste made into organic coal, using a microbe to speed up composting. In his demo, Dingalan folks were surprised that Catan first dipped in water the dark-greenish elongated finger-thick coal. The magic of green charcoal is in drawing the energy not just from organic coal but also from the hydrogen from water through a catalyst, which doubles its energy content. I call it 'wet organic coal'.

 

Surprisingly, I discovered, wood coal-making is not a 'crime' in Dingalan legally, although it is environmentally. It is allowed by the DENR. UMALUN has permission to clear forests under DENR's Certificate of Land Ownership Agreement (CLOA) assigning three hectares per member. They have been cutting the forest for coal for eleven years now and the members say they will run out of alloted forest in about six years.

 

UMALUN clarifies that wood coal-making is a terribly hard task and they do it only when they are extremely hungry. More important to them is planting fruit trees, coconut interspersed with coffee or cacao or papaya, for cash crops in the forest cleared after coal-making. Ownership under the CLOA is the key. A farmer will clear the forest only if he knows he will own it as his future tree farm. Replacing the forest with fruit trees thus becomes less of a crime by responding to poverty alleviation. Of course, the die hards will say, the coal is fossil fuel that catalyzes global warming and climate change. But this is a tiny fraction of the massive fossil fuel being burnt by cars and LPG stoves all over the country, which is ten times in the US.

 

In the UMALUN-Catan scheme, trees are pruned rather than cut, composted and fed into the green charcoal making machine, a Hi-Ace motor running on green charcoal itself. The product is an organic hydrogen-driven coal rather than wood coal. You do not have to destroy the trees. When I saw the ample plant waste in the coconut fields near the people's backyards, I told them that they do not have to go to the forest to make green charcoal. Right there a stone's throw away is the gold. There is money in agricultural waste.

 

A woman said it was unfortunate that they have been burning these coconut fronds and cacao and coffee husks in their backyards since they were small kids. When I told them they have been burning money when they are so poor, they all laughed. But they knew what I was saying was true and not a joke. Dingalan is one of the poorest places in Luzon due to its remoteness.

 

UMALUN, with the help of Catan, have a lot of hurdles, but they are not impossible to overcome - collection, complex logistics, cooperative labor. Marketing is no problem. Catan is their ready market who will buy everything, whether under option 1, the agri-wastes in trucks transported to Catan's green charcoal plant in Alaminos, or option 2, Catan builds a new plant in Dingalan. UMALUN must be tightly organized into people in total cooperation, both farmers and wives, in order to make the dream a reality. Financing may be a critical hurdle. I told the UMALUN people the Land Bank has ample of agricultural loans to give to such pioneering ventures. In the scheme, UMALUN and Catan will form a corporate partnership.

 

Catan believes the demand for green charcoal will increase rapidly due to spiralling cost of oil and LPG. Green charcoal-fed stoves at home or boilers in small chicken-dressing plants reduce energy cost by half. Presently, Catan gets agri-waste of Robina's C-2 plant as input for his Alaminos plant. If only to help the people of Dingalan and stop deforestation, he is not afraid to expand to Dingalan because it has immense agri-waste and he knows the immense market potential of green charcoal is growing rapidly. The impact of green charcoal may reduce deforestation in Dingalan by a third or a quarter, if the UMALUN model gets off the ground. Let us cross our fingers and wait.

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