EVEN IF Odette Alcantara, dear friend and passionate basura (trash) recycling and environment advocate, died the week before the big flood, everything she advocated could have diminished ?Ondoy?s? terrible destruction.

What she advocated so passionately was simply for us to maintain our balance with nature.

Ondoy proved we have lost that balance.

Once, we lived in harmony with nature, in houses constructed of natural materials built on stilts (bahay-kubo), structures where both sides of the natural equation were at equilibrium.

The open ground floor cooled the living area above, also providing a shaded area protected from the hot tropical sun, while its earthen surface allowed rainwater and occasional floods to seep directly into the ground.

In our long-forgotten past, clusters of bahay-kubo in typical Philippine barangay twisted and turned in response to the rise and fall of slope contours, their layouts usually paralleling meandering rivers or coastlines in total respect of nature.

What happened over the years was that man started imposing his will over nature.

Spanish plan

The 17th-century edict Ley de las Indias by Spanish King Philip II specifically outlined how new cities in the Spanish Empire were to be laid out with streets and civic buildings in consonance with the terrain, so not only was the position of the sun taken into account, but also drainage was designed to flow naturally into a nearby body of water.

Most Philippine towns were planned along the Ley de las Indias precepts, the hallmarks of the classical Spanish colonial layout being a rectilinear checkerboard of streets arranged around a central plaza as seen in Intramuros, the old center of Cebu, and Vigan.

Although the urban layout legislated by Madrid was clearly a system rationally imposed by the human mind, colonial settlements, whether in the Philippines, North or South America, maintained a strong respect for the environment.

Manila in Spanish colonial days was a riverine city built on marshy land. Its various districts were distributed around Pasig River and its tributaries (esteros), which provided not only natural drainage to Manila Bay but also an interconnecting system of navigable waterways that serviced city dwellers.

When the American colonial powers brought in Daniel Burnham at the turn of the 20th century, he recognized the riverine nature of the city and remade the city, envisioning the grandeur of Paris while the vast estero system recalled the canals of Venice.

Burnham?s system was totally in tune with nature.

Greed agenda

What happened since then? Another agenda took over.

In the name of development, estero banks were cemented over. Natural capacity for water absorption was lost. Ultimately, esteros were completely covered over.

Once open public land was concreted over. Gone were the planting strips along sidewalks, trees lining avenues felled for road expansion, grassy neighborhood parks cemented over. Open areas where water once naturally drained into the ground, vanished.

In natural waterways eventually arose private subdivisions, and where subdivisions could not be laid out, the informal settlers came in, further clogging waterways with unsafe dwellings, which could be washed away with strong rain.

It is not to say legal protection does not exist. Zoning and flood control laws, outdated as some might be, do offer a measure of control. However, these are routinely ignored in the name of development.

So cavalier is the attitude toward following preventive disaster and calamity plans, and totally careless is the attitude toward garbage that perennially clogs city drains, that I am reminded of Odette Alcantara who tirelessly taught anyone who would listen how to segregate and compost garbage and encouraged one and all to plant trees.

The community spirit we Manileños showed during this disaster should extend into being proactive, for each of us to do our little contribution to protect us against future floods.

It would take some of us to teach others about the environment, how each person could do something so simple that will make a difference for the future.

While government authorities piece together once again, or at last, one final and definitive time, a cohesive plan for protecting our environment from degradation, each of us could do our small part for our environment and our future. Segregate and compost trash, and plant as many trees as we can.

We?ve shown how well we can take care of ourselves when disaster hits us. Now it is time we started taking care of our future.

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