[OPINION] A massacre of trees and people

They come with permits. They come with promises of progress, of clean energy, of connectivity. They come with tarpaulins to drape over the stumps so we do not have to look at what they have done.

But underneath the tarpaulin, the wound is still there: raw wood, severed roots, the ghost of a canopy that once cooled the skin of a poor man walking to work in the punishing heat of a Philippine summer.

Across this archipelago, we are witnessing a massacre of trees. And where trees fall, people bleed. Sometimes slowly; measured in heat deaths and failed harvests, in flooded homes and poisoned lungs. Sometimes suddenly, and the bodies are human.

In the name of sustainable development

Manila residents woke one morning recently to a spectacle of stumps. Along Quirino Avenue, where decades-old trees once arched over the sidewalk like a cathedral nave, chainsaw teams had gone to work.

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources issued a permit authorizing the cutting of 617 trees to clear the way for San Miguel Corporation’s Southern Access Link Expressway (SALEX). By mid-May, more than 255 had been felled; among them a 50-year-old narra, the national tree, now a stump beneath a tarpaulin.

SMC is required to plant 57,000 replacement seedlings to “offset” the loss. Authorities called this ecological balance. (READ: DENR permit fails to quell uproar over Manila tree-cutting)

It is not. A seedling does not shade a sidewalk vendor from 40-degree heat. A seedling will take decades to become what was destroyed in an afternoon.

Bishop Gerardo Alminaza of Caritas Philippines called the cutting “ecological violence” and “a direct assault on the poor.” He was right. The National Capital Region has only 22 square kilometers of forest cover across 619 square kilometers of urban concrete.

Every mature tree is not merely a tree; it is a cooling system, a flood barrier, an air filter. When you cut it for a skyway that serves those who can afford cars, you are taxing the poor with their own suffering.

Meanwhile, east of Manila, renewable energy firm Alternergy is building the 128-megawatt Tanay Wind Power Project in Rizal. Turbine components must travel 96 kilometers by road from Dinahican Port in Quezon to the project site. The blades are enormous. The road is narrow. The trees are in the way.

Advocates from the Wild Bird Club of the Philippines estimate that around 8,000 trees along the beloved Marilaque Highway, which is one of Luzon’s most biologically rich forest corridors, face cutting or severe pruning to accommodate the turbine transport.

There is a bitter irony that must be named plainly: we are massacring a forest to build a wind farm. The poor communities along Marilaque who live inside that forest, who fish its streams and farm its hillsides, are not consulted. Their ecology is treated as an obstacle, not a home.

Acting Environment Secretary Mitch Cuna, a good government official in my view, is quoted as saying that cutting trees is required by sustainable development. If true, I can surmise that the premise of his statement is that we need the highway and the wind project. Granted that this premise is correct (I would push back on more highways in Metro Manila, as that prioritizes cars over people), I would still argue that those projects could be designed without the cutting of trees, certainly in the numbers being planned.

Pakil and the Sierra Madre: Sacred ground violated

In Laguna, the town of Pakil has become a battleground. Ahunan Power Inc., which is a joint venture involving billionaire Enrique Razon’s Prime Metro Power Holdings and the Lopez family (it is an issue in the internal fight of this family). It is developing a proposed 1,400-megawatt pumped-storage hydropower facility in the Sierra Madre.

On June 21, 2025, residents woke to chainsaws in the mountains above them. Resident Lina Naldo climbed Mt. Ping-as and found lanzones, rambutan, coconut, jackfruit, santol — fruit trees cultivated for generations, felled in an instant.

Over 300 hectares of Sierra Madre rainforest face deforestation. Families have been evicted, farmers barred from their fields, and fisherfolk blocked from Laguna Lake.

Mt. Ping-as is sacred ground, the site of the annual “Ahunan” pilgrimage. This is the very ritual from which the dam company cynically takes its name. To cut those trees is not simply deforestation — it is desecration.

Negros: When the massacre is of people

On April 19, 2026, soldiers of the Army’s 79th Infantry Battalion launched operations in Toboso, Negros Occidental. Nineteen people were killed. The Armed Forces of the Philippines declared them all rebels.

Independent investigations said otherwise: among the dead were community journalist RJ Nichole Ledesma — who had been reporting on the effects of renewable energy projects on Negros farmers — University of the Philippines (UP) student leader Alyssa Alano, advocates Maureen Santuyo and Errol Wendel, Filipino-American rights workers Kai Sorem and Lyle Prijoles, a 19-year-old farmer working his uncle’s land, and two unnamed minors.

Nine civilians, by the count of independent investigators.

This was not a rupture. Negros has been this country’s massacre capital for decades: from the Sagay killings to the 2025 shooting of peasant woman Joan Escuadro in Cauayan, killed inside her home as her two young children, aged 2 and 6, watched. RJ Ledesma was killed while bearing witness for communities that power would prefer remain unseen.

Then, barely a month after Toboso, Negros claimed another young life. On May 16, 2026, Francis Vince Dingding, 30, a UP Cebu graduate in Computer Science and former student leader, was killed in a military operation in Cauayan, Negros Occidental.

Whatever one believes about the armed conflict, Ding, as fondly called (it was a cool name during student election campaigns; vote for Ding Dingding), deserves to be mourned as a full human being. He was shaped by a society that offered the children of the poor a brutal set of choices. He was someone who believed another Philippines was possible.

His remains were buried in Cauayan on May 24 without his parents present. His mother, battling colon cancer, could not make the journey. His parents asked only to watch through a video call.

Friends who traveled from Cebu were allegedly barred from the funeral home by the military and police. They held a candlelight vigil in Cebu instead.

I never met Ding, but I knew him through the love of his life, someone who imagined a life together with him.

We do not know the full story of why Vince made the choices he made. But we know the story of a country where a bright young man from UP, committed to justice, ends up dead in a Negros hillside at 30, his body a subject of military custody disputes, his family too broken to claim him. That story is a national indictment. And it is inseparable from the story of the trees.

Two ceasefires, one future

This country needs two ceasefires.

It needs a ceasefire on the killing of trees, indeed an immediate moratorium on felling mature, ecologically significant trees for infrastructure, regardless of who holds the permit, regardless of whether the project calls itself green.

The seedling replacement formula is a fiction. Balling matures and moving them to another place is a farce. Ancient trees cannot be offset. They must be protected as critical climate infrastructure, with communities given binding rights over their fate.

And it needs a genuine ceasefire in the armed conflict with the New People’s Army, which must be bilateral, national, and not just local, comprehensive, good-faith, and independently monitored. This reopens the path to formal peace negotiations, stalled for years at the cost of lives this country can no longer afford to lose.

The peace settlement that must eventually emerge needs to include what no previous framework has adequately addressed: binding provisions for the protection of nature.

Land reform alone is not enough in an era of climate catastrophe. Any genuine peace must also settle our relationship with the land itself, guaranteeing the rights of communities to protect their forests, watersheds, mountains, and fisheries from the extractive industries that drive the conflict as much as any ideology.

The armed conflict did not begin in a vacuum. It grew in the soil of landlessness, of haciendas and logging concessions, of a state that served capital against community. That same soil, literally the same forests and mountains, is now the battleground of a climate crisis that the poor will lose unless the trees are protected. Peace and ecology are not separate agendas. They are the same struggle.

Ceasefire on the chainsaws. Ceasefire on the guns. Let the trees grow. Let the people breathe and live. – Rappler.com