“Lawyer Converts 40-Hectare Sugarcane Plantation Into
Man-Made Forest” – in this almost-5-year old article, our Ramon Magsaysay-award
winning journalist friend Zac Sarian is his usual self, telling a success story. Zac tells us:
Did you know that in Victorias City where
sugarcane is king, an enterprising lawyer-businessman has transformed a
40-hectare sugarcane plantation into a manmade forest?
The businessman is lawyer Nordy Diploma, 80. In his long 2015
story, which appeared in Agriculture
Monthly, which he edits, Zac tells us that in the Nordson Forest Park, Atty
Diploma has established
(above image I composed from the YouTube presentation[1])
these 3:
(1)
Forest Park
(2)
Gawad Kalinga Village
(3)
Negros Science High School.
Today, as a high school teacher taught at the University of the Philippines’
College of Agriculture, now UP Los Baños, graduating with a BS in Agriculture
major in Ag Edu in 1965, and as a creative thinker, I have intuited 3 radically different lessons from Zac’s
story, these:
We need a village; we
need education, especially science education; and we need a natural
environment. Really, we need to learn lessons from these 3 environments:
the environment of a village, evillage;
the environment of science, eScience:
the environment of Mother Nature, eNature.
the environment of a village, evillage;
the environment of science, eScience:
the environment of Mother Nature, eNature.
Absolutely, yes! This is all
for the good of PH Agriculture; this is much more than the lopsided inclusive growth model trumpeted by the
World Bank – this is the egalitarian inclusive
development model broadcast to the world by the International Crops Research Institute for the
Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT, when now-PH Secretary of Agriculture William
Dar/Manong Willie was ICRISAT Director General, from 01 January 2000 to 31
December 2014. I am well-acquainted with it, being ICRISAT’s international
consulting writer for 8 years, 2007-2014.
As I have
pointed out in several essays, inclusive growth
gives you Gross Domestic Product, GDP,
good for business; inclusive development should give us Gross
Domestic Prosperity, GDP2,
good for all, the prosperity distributed
down to those who have less in life, especially the cultivators of the soil.
The lesson of eVillage tells us that it takes a village to
nurture a child – all children, even as we have all been children.
The lesson of eScience tells us that we need the wisdom we
can derive from experimentations to teach each of us about how to live in
harmony with the environment.
And the lesson of eNature tells us that we need the
continued blessings of Mother Nature to continue to be blessed by our village
and our science.
Now then:
(1)
A hundred success
stories are not enough. We need every
farmer to succeed, every family to
thrive in every village!
(2)
We need to
teach in high school the science of living in society. We need to live in
harmony with everyone and with everything.
(3)
We need to
keep the environment in balance, even as we disturb the soil and go growing
our crops & livestock.
Keeping
in mind the eVillage, eScience, and eNature, I Frank A Hilario wish you the
blessings of 2020’s first Friday the 13th!@517
