Soul Of a Campfire

….michael a. bengwayan..

Before cocks crow last night, I donned a bonnet, thick leather jacket, put on my sneakers and limped out in the garden. It was cold and pitch black. I lit the spotlights, it turned the dark shadows into beautiful hues reflected by the trees and flowers .The garden floor burst into light, glistening from the dew heavy on leaves and sedges. Not too many night critters were awake. Nary was even Jiminy cricket. On the second floor terrace stretched Saddam, his full frame barely six feet, with Princess quietly asleep on his side. Both German Shepherds are shy eight years. On the first garage under my worn-out Pajero wagon lay Sha-sha, the Labrador-Dalmatian halfbreed. They are about my only companions day in, day out, weekend, week out..months and months .

I want a campfire underneath my Monterey pine. I never have enough of natural fire in my fireplace. A real fire is an open fire. Under the cold night, alone, where I can watch the starry sky. Where I can smell the scent of burning pine needles that lifts the senses to the forest. Where wisps of smoke cross my face as it gets blown now and then by a lost gush of the Siberian cold. Where flames burn steadily in praise of every living thing that it puts light upon.

Nothing beats a campfire. On my woodpile, I can choose the best fuel that burns the brightest, gives off the least smoke and burns the longest. I get a pine log knowing its resin and e-pinene chemicals will easily heat, while putting four wrist-thick mulberry branches, that flame almost without smoke and a couple of petroleum nut twigs as tinder before I lit a flint wood (saleng) from a dried pine root. The fire leaps and dance , turning the cold air into refreshing warmth. I could start a fire even without a flint wood, even with wet wood, even without a box of matches. That’s how good an outdoors man I am.

In my many years I’ve had campfires in mountains and forests –in Ireland, India, China, Nepal, Indonesia, Taiwan and faraway Tanzania. If I’ve walked on days, and had campfires with farmers, forest dwellers, tree planters, even colleagues. But mostly alone.

Often, after a tiring day from a long hike in wet weather, with feet and shoulders aching, and a cold front rolling behind I would immediately build a campfire.. And all of my tiresome things melt away. I would just stare at the rolling flames, while warming up myself..

A campfire can easily change my mood , lifts my mood. I gaze at the fire, transfixed by the vines of light tangling in the air. The brilliance, the warmth, the crackle of the firewood.…it brings life to the cold surroundings. There is always something mystic about those flames. It feels like it is sending a message from the Earth, from nature itself, an encouraging note of warmth and energy. Even Saddam, Princess and Shasha feel this as they snuggle closer to the fire.

Sometimes I do my cooking over my campfire. Literally cooking over the fire.. It feels like an ancient task. “Insalabasab”, my Ilokano friend Remy would say. I could almost feel how my ancestors did it. I still remember many meals done this way but were some of the best meals ever in my life. And not because it was well made, which it was, but because the entire meal was cooked on an open fire. It always lifts up my mood and fills my belly.

Spending a night or two out in my garden with an open fire brings out many memories, mostly wonderful. In the wilderness, it can be scary, but a campfire can chase away those fears. It’s a process that humans have been doing for eons.

The human race has a special relationship with campfires. It’s a ritual of light, a safe zone of warmth and community. Gazing into the flames, we connect to our past. For thousands of years our ancestors sat around fires, not for fun, but for necessity. Human history began by the firelight. When we build campfires, it brings a taste of the timeless into our cluttered modern world.

It’s essential to be safe when building a fire. Only build a campfire when conditions permit. Campfires are truly wonderful. A campfire can warm a freezing night and bond a family or friends. Gazing into the flames inspires you in ways that are hard to describe. The flames roll and your thoughts roll with them.

Years ago, with my son Miki when he was five, and his older siblings Abi, Grail and Phy on a cold Christmas night, I made a fire in our forest garden the Habitat and kept the flames going until morning. We roasted marshmallows, had barbecue and sang along with an untuned guitar. The flames twisted up into the night with our laughter in tow. I looked across the fire, into their eyes, they were loving every moment of it, throwing twigs that sent small burning embers into the cold air. The campfire underscored the mood, it was a shared love of the moment. With each pop from the fire, sparks floated up into the sky, mixing with the stars. We felt so… connected.

As the night ended, the flames fell into coals and the embers pulsed like a heartbeat. I tucked them to bed, zipping them into the tent and into their sleeping bags. I then sat alone, poking at the embers. Thinking, always thinking.

I always sleep like a rock after sitting around a campfire. It’s almost like the flames were a lullaby for my busy mind. One of the great things about a campfire is that it stays with you. The next morning you can smell the campfire in your clothes, an aroma of smoke, an echo of nighttime fun. More than once, I’ve been caught standing stock-still, sniffing my clothes and smiling, remembering the flawless joy of a campfire.

Last night, I settled onto a stool, close to my fire and thought of all those years. Of how I used to build a fire alone with my thoughts, pondering on solutions to problems. Figuring out why how humans could be so wrong. Why there is so much suffering. And why the Earth is dying while half of the world’ people are starving.

A bat swooped by as insects start to unruffle. Dawn is about to break but my dogs don’t mind a bit. I keep listening to the night, even of nothing. Keep glancing at the dark dancing shadows, even as no sight was really clear. I knew I was not alone.

With the campfire, I feel the warmth of a blanket on my shoulders. An assurance of a better tomorrow. A better sense of hope. The fire rekindles the spirit. I know I am enjoying a great gift from the Maker.

And only He can make this magic

PLANTATIONS ARE NOT FORESTS: FAO, Please Change Your Definition by Michael A. Bengwayan

PLANTATIONS ARE NOT FORESTS: FAO, Please Change Your Definition
by Michael A. Bengwayan
How does the FAO Forest definition harm people and forests?
An open letter to the FAO

In September 2015, during the XIV World Forestry Congress, thousands of people took to the streets in Durban, South Africa, to protest against the problematic way in which the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), insisted on defining forests  to be basically just “a bunch of trees”, while ignoring other fundamental aspects of forests, including their many other life-forms such as other types of plants, as well as animals, and forest-dependent human communities.

Equally, FAO ignores the vital contribution of forests to natural processes that provide soil, water and oxygen. Besides, by defining ‘forests’ as only being a minimum area of land covered by a minimum number of trees of a minimum height and canopy percentage, FAO has actively promoted the establishment of many millions of hectares of industrial tree plantations, of mainly alien species, especially in the global South. As a consequence, only one particular sector has benefitted: the tree plantation industry. Industrial tree plantations have been the direct cause of many negative impacts on local communities and their forests; which have been well-documented .

The protest march that took place in Durban in 2015 had people holding up banners saying Plantations are not Forests!, and ended in front of the venue of the World Forestry Congress, which was organised by the FAO. In response to a call from civil society leaders at the march, a WFC official left the Congress building to receive a petition that had been signed by over 100,000 individuals and groups from around the world. The petition called on the FAO to urgently change its forest definition and to define forests by their true meaning. But once again, the FAO did not change its definition.

Nevertheless, something new did happen: Unlike the silence in response to previous demands for the FAO to change its flawed forest definition, this time FAO reacted to the protest, and sent a letter in response. One point in the FAO letter is particularly interesting. It stated: “There are, in fact, over 200 national definitions of forests that reflect a variety of stakeholders in this matter….”, and goes on to say, “…to facilitate the reporting of data…, a globally valid, simple and operational categorization of forests is required” in order that it can “enable consistent comparisons over longer periods of time on global forest development and change”. In writing this, the FAO attempts to convince us that its role is merely one of harmonizing the 200-plus different definitions of forests that different countries have.

But is it really true that the existing FAO forest definition did not influence the way the 200 national definitions of forests were formulated in the first place? And is the FAO correct when it claims that the many different national forest definitions are a result of the reflections of a variety of stakeholders in these countries, again playing down its own influence?

We believe the opposite to be true. First of all, FAO´s forest definition was adopted a long time ago, in 1948. According to a recent joint analysis by different authors of forest concepts and definitions, “FAO´s definition, agreed on by all its [UN] members, is the first to be used by all countries for harmonized reporting; the definition adopted by FAO remains the most widely used forest definition today” .

A good country to use as an example to see if the FAO definition is being used, is Brazil, the country with the highest forest cover in the global South, and according to official sources, almost 8 million hectares of industrial tree plantations, mostly eucalyptus monocultures. In its 2010 (4) publication “Forests of Brazil” the Brazilian Forest Service (SBF), under the national government Ministry of Environment and responsible for forest-related issues “… considers as a forest the woody vegetation types that come closest to the forest definition of the Organization of the United Nations for Food and Agriculture (FAO).” As a logical progression from basing its definition on what FAO already defined, it states that “Brazil is a country… of natural and planted forests”, where “planted forests” refers to the 8 million hectares of mostly eucalyptus monocultures. How the Brazilian government defines a forest is therefore not the result of a process that “… reflects a variety of stakeholders in this matter”. On the contrary, it is rather a result of what the FAO had already determined.

But the influence of the FAO´s forest definition goes beyond just determining national forest definitions. In these times of climate change, the FAO´s definition has been the main point of reference to define what a forest is under the UN climate change convention (UNFCCC). By adopting the FAO´s narrow wood-based definition, the UNFCCC has also promoted a view of forests being an area of land containing only trees. For the UNFCCC, it’s mainly the trees in a forest that matter because of their capacity to store carbon as they grow, and not forest-dependent communities. Such affected communities are most negatively impacted by restrictions placed on their use of forest resources by “forest carbon offset projects”, also often referred to as REDD+ projects . A forest definition only focused on trees opens the door to including “planted forests” – read: industrial tree plantations – a completely false way of “reducing deforestation and forest degradation”, as an option under the climate change convention through which carbon can supposedly be sequestered from the atmosphere and permanently stored. In practice this is just another money-making opportunity for the tree plantation industry, and a major threat to communities affected by the trend of expanding “carbon sink” tree plantations.

Following the latest UNFCCC negotiations, countries have recently been revising their forest legislation, in the hope of attracting so-called ‘climate finance’. Unsurprisingly, the definitions used are largely based on the FAO´s forest definition. In Mozambique, for example, at a workshop on REDD+, a consultant proposed a new forest definition for the country. Just like the FAO´s definition, it is also based on the presence of trees saying that a forest is an area with “…Trees with the potential to reach a height of 5 metres at maturity..”. Also in Indonesia, the Ministry of Environment and Forests submission to the UN Climate Conference in 2015, stated that it had “…adjusted the FAO forest definition…” in order to define its forests. Once again a definition that defines and values a forest only through its trees, and that divides “forests” into a number of different categories including “natural forest” and something called “plantation forests” .
The FAO´s forest definition also influences the actions of the financial and development institutions promoting wood-based activities such as the industrial logging of forests, industrial tree plantations, and REDD+ carbon offsets. The main example is the World Bank (WB) which as part of the United Nations conglomerate has been partnering with the FAO for decades in a number of forest-related initiatives. They again joined forces in one of the most ambitious plans launched during UNFCCC COP 21 in Paris, the so-called African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) . AFR100 aims to cover 100 million hectares of deforested and so-called “degraded” lands in different African countries with trees. The World Bank will make US$ 1 billion available for this plan. But to understand what the World Bank views as “reforestation”, it is crucial to see how the Bank itself defines a forest. Unsurprisingly, its definition is also borrowed from that of the FAO, describing a forest as “An area of land…with tree crown cover of more than 10% that have trees...” . By defining forests in this way, the World Bank opens the door wide for tree plantation companies expanding their large-scale monoculture tree plantations over community territories in Africa to be part of the ambitious “restoration” plan it is promoting together with the FAO and other partners. The AFR100 proposal strongly resembles the failed Tropical Forestry Action Plan (TFAP) from the 1980’s, which was also dreamed up by the World Bank in collaboration with the FAO.

There is an urgent need for the FAO to stop misrepresenting industrial tree plantations as “planted forests” or “forestry”, because national governments, other UN institutions, and financial institutions, as well as the mainstream media will then follow its inappropriate example. This deliberate confusion of tree plantations with forests is misleading people, because forests in general are viewed as something positive and beneficial. After all, who could be opposed to “forests”?

Above all, the FAO should take full responsibility for the strong influence its “forest” definition has over global economic, ecological and social policies. The 2015 petition that was presented to the FAO in Durban states that it portrays itself in its founding principles as being a “neutral forum where all nations meet as equals”. To live up to this claim requires, among other things, that the FAO must urgently revise its forest definition from one that reflects the preferences and perspectives of timber, pulp/paper, rubber, and carbon trading companies, to one that reflects ecological realities as well as the views of forest-dependent peoples. In contrast to the existing dominant influence of wood-based industries over the FAO, a transparent and open process to establish new and appropriate definitions for forests and tree plantations must also engage effectively with those women and men who directly depend on and therefore protect forests.

Change your definition FAO and stop misrepresenting people who dwell in forests

Signed,

Michael A. BENGWAYAN, Ph. D.
Cordillera Ecological Center, Philippines

Take Time to be Thankful...

Take Time to be Thankful...

...michael a. bengwayan

The early morning drizzle that kisses the dry land. A rainbow's shimmering hues when a shower has ended. An early bee in the sunlight out to ensure genetic continuity. A sparrow singing while a thin veil of clouds is drawn like misty curtains across the face of the sky. A clothesline waiting for clothes to dry but serves as early dew-catcher. Children's laughter as the walk early to school in slippers and the fluttering of bird wings in a tiny flowing stream.

The best of beautiful things are still free. They are bits and pieces of joyful things that become part of us - a child in a field of daisies, a friendly hand, a smile, a whispered prayer. What are we that is not a fragment from a past happiness - a moment of peace.

And when we all see these changes of day and night, the sun, moon, and stars in the sky, and the changing seasons upon the Earth.... we must realize that it is the work of Someone most powerful in the Universe.

Of Prayers and Health's Passing

Of Prayers and Health's Passing

by michael a. bengwayan

The path to my woods is no longer easy. I scale the 129 steps slower ,with more energy, the excruciating pain making me reel from every step. But upon reaching the last stair, joy replaces pain. The  woods is soft and silent underfoot. It is always there waiting for me. The twigs sway with the pine needles whistling through the cold soft breeze exuding pine scents I cherished since as a child.

Wet leaves pad the ground beneath the trees and bright patches of green moss cover every rock. Many plants in sheltered places thrive even now. This place is sweet solitude-but never silent. Twittering birds have moved in from the North's  winter traveling from as far as China, the red and blue of the swifts and bush birds color the darkening woods. Time hangs between  cold January nights and warm late mornings in mellow breezes and a few bright yellow sunflowers. It is a pensive time, a time to reflect and let go and enjoy.

 In these moments when I get to quietly sit with mind centered on the fact that God is only good, and that no situation devious or twisted in appearance, has any power except that which we give it by dwelling on how terrible it is - then, there is hope.

I am full of hope for this new year.  If I  can become quiet enough in my mind to know God is good, it will produce one of those times of sweet serenity that settles like an invisible veil between us and our troubles. And the new year will be better. In those moments of growth and faith will come peace that passes all understanding.

It is good to live an active life, but some of life's most productive moments are not when the mind and body are hurled through hectic hours at a furious pace. Life offers many tender and beautiful times that demand nothing and give only a quiet calm that will never come in pill form. It is time I pull, back, slow down, let others make paths for others to follow.
The flesh and bones are weak but never the spirit. A doctor or two  quipped i just overdid myself, I never thought such thing could happen. Somewhere, a muscle, nerve or ligament just fails to function adding to my haemolytic anaemia plight.

Contrary to the belief in any power except God's, there is a happy medium. It does not come simply by demanding, and there are times when it can be touched on only so briefly. But even in our sore travails there is a time when life finds balance and we live in harmony with God's laws.

So I prop myself to the ground, kiss the Earth and chant my prayers....  face down  the soil, hands to the Maker,  taking up  all its life-giving forces. 

Thankful for life once more..

Step Out and Breath the Peace

Step Out and Breath the Peace
..by dr. michael a. bengwayan

...it's 4 am, far from being bright. i step out in the garden, greeted by the cold whiff of siberian wind..the terrace spotlights reveal frosted grasses, lemon and cherry leaves awash with icy dewdrops. such mornings call us to brightness of spirit and to healing the deep hurts of the soul. step out and breathe in the peace. turn up the palms to give thanks and receive strength for the day and wisdom to begin this year. because nature thrives where humans give up, the negative is turned away. all around us the breathtaking views tell us to do the same...