Where Have All the Parks Gone?

I mourn the the loss of a childhood filled with memories of the scorching heat of the sun, the glorious gust of wind, the prickly touch of the June beetle, popularly known as the salagubang in the Philippines, the hundreds of dragonflies caught and set free, the smell of sweet grass just after the rain, the laughter, even the fleeting whinings, of children having the time of their lives under the great, vast sky. I remember our backyard as my Central Park. I remember the beauty of the Parks and Wildlife and the La Mesa Dam in Quezon City and the Luneta Park and the Manila Zoo in Manila. I remember those memories so clearly that they give me a different kind of calm.

Yes, we still do have the same parks, but government and business have decided to pool all their efforts and finances to create a city, filling it with numerous buildings and edifices, without souls, with nary a concern in propagating greenery, and in the process, forget that we have parks where children play, where families renew their ties, where people seek refuge and rest. The Metro Manila I knew and I grew up in has turned into a money-making venture where malls can be seen at every corner to lure people from parting with their money in exchange for things material and superficial. Realty companies claim to promote the environment in their developments but are only truly serving their own interests and a few privileged ones.

Our children are the ones who suffer from this change of priorities and principles. Susan Usha Dermond in her book, Calm and Compassionate Children:A Handbook, explained how the lack of green landscape affects children, citing several sources:

"In the study published in Environement and Behavior, Nancy Wells and her colleague, Gary Evans, found that a relative abundance of green landscape bolsters "children's resilience against stress or adversity." Andrew Faber Taylor and Frances Kuo, researchers at the Human Environmenty Research Lab sponsored by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found "that spending time in ordinary 'green' settings-such as parks, farms or grassy backyards-reduces symptoms of ADHD [Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder] when compared to time spent at indoor playgrounds and man-made recreation areas of concrete and asphalt." Taylor and Kuo's studies showed this to be true "regardless of the child's age, gender, family income, geographic region or severity of diagnosis," as reported in Psychology Today. My guess is that results would be exactly the same for children who have not been diagnosed with ADHD-every child's ability to focus is improved by being in nature."

In the last twenty years, malls and commercial buildings have tripled in Metro Manila, even quadrupled, but the number of parks and forests remain unchanged. It would have brought wonder and pure, unadulterated happiness to children and adults alike to be able to see breathtakingly beautiful parks at every corner of the city without the need to go to far-flung provinces, or even other countries, to experience the gift of nature. Metro Manila had built multi-billion pesos worth of malls and commercial establishments, thus, I do not see any reason why it cannot create the same number of parks and forests as a gift to every Filipino child.