By Danilo P. Padua, PhD
Today, the phrase, climate change, is a byword worldwide. It is so common, everyone is blabbering it. Temperatures have fluctuated when it should not be. Rains that are supposed to be falling within a year, fall incessantly within only seven days. The supposed wet months are parched dry for lack of rain. Typhoons had become more ferocious. These and more, are definitely offshoots of climate change. They have brought untold tragedies all over the world.
What is even more tragic about it is that many of us don’t seem to care about it. Or, we simply do not understand that whatever we are doing may actually be contributory to such change. That is why we cut down trees, often indiscriminately, to our heart’s desire. We heavily use pesticides to produce our vegetables, flowers and fruits. We can’t seem to live without the high tech gadgets that certainly push climate change.
In Japan, they have centuries-old systems that mitigate climate change such as Satoyama. In this system, the people live in harmony with nature. That is to say, their production systems and their other activities tend to conserve nature rather than destroy it. Sadly, many of such systems had been abandoned during the furious industrialization in Japan. It is only recently that that they are rediscovering the highly beneficial systems that they had practiced before.
Satoyama is not yet well-known in the Philippines. We could benefit so much from this system. The Japanese word, sato, means arable and livable land while yama, means hill or mountain. The Satoyama concept have been developed therefore in foothills where water was abundant. It flourished through centuries of small scale agricultural and forestry use in small villages. It is a well-manged ecosystem where people get their plants, nuts, mushrooms, natural medicines, textiles, fuel, timber and wildlife from the forest and farmedsustainably.That’s why they lived in harmony with nature. In today’s ecologists’ parlance, satoyama is described as “socio-ecological production landscapes”.
Let me relate to you a story about how Satoyama helped a village of 90,000 people in the town of Toyooka, Japan. It is about the oriental white stork with a wingspan of 2 meters, which was commonly found all over Japan. It was even designated as their national treasure. This bird became officially extinct in Japan in 1971. It was found though in parts of Russia, China and Korea. It was erased from the landscape of Japan due to heavy pesticide use and for lack of food. It was found out that they lost their reproductive capacity because of the mercury that had accumulated inside their bodies from pesticides.
A farmer in the town vowed to live forever with the stork. They made good use of the 6 pairs of the stork donated by Russia. When the farmer found out that frogs feast on insects he thought they could revive the population of stork in their place. They decided to return to organic rice farming. They revitalized their water canals and let water flow again, and brought back frogs and fishes-the food of the stork. They succeeded. Today, the more than 200 oriental white storks are happily flapping their wings in Toyooka. The storks have assumed the emblem of the local brand of “Stork-Nurturing Rice”.
Happily, Satoyama had already taken root in the Philippines. Thanks to the partnership program of the Kanagawa University in Nato, Japan, Ifugao State University, and UP Open University. Their program site is the Ifugao Rice Terraces. Because of such partnership, IFSU, headed by its president Dr. Serafin Ngohayon, is now in the global map. Other state universities in the Cordillera should take a cue from IFSU to launch their own Satoyama programs maybe in partnership with a relevant university in Japan. Or maybe with the same Kanagawa University. We should all help build a “society in harmony with nature”.
