Driving through a busy intersection is a test of skill and patience

Getting through a busy intersection is a trial of skill and patience 
Dr Abe V Rotor

Series of shots taken at an intersection along España. Manila 

Tricycle - prince of the road; advertisement-clad rear of buses - hideout and watch hole of hold uppers. It is most likely that hold up cases happen in heavily tinted buses with ad-covered rear glass.

Caged pedestrians and motorists - the feeling of being prisoners on the street where high rise building construction is going on. It's a trap, a choke point, a danger zone. España fronting the famed UST Arch of the Centuries.  

The Tropical Rainforest's Last Stand

The Tropical Rainforest's Last Stand

Dr Abe V Rotor

Bohol landscape from the air.

Farming in Chocolate Hills, Bohol.

The Tropical Rainforest could be the biblical Lost Paradise immortalized in the masterpieces of John Milton.

It was after dawn and smoke from nearby homesteads rose with the mountain mist in Carmen, between Davao City and Tagum, when I spotted a company of loggers carrying a wooden cage looking very much like an oversized onion crate. To my curiosity I looked into the cage and found a pair of flying lemurs locally called kaguiang in Bisaya or ninmal in Samal Moro, clinging upside down and cringing from the first light of morning.

Cynocephalus volans Linneaus, as the animal is scientifically called, is one of the rare mammals that can fly, an adaptation they share with the versatile bats. Unlike bats however, the flying lemur can only glide from tree to tree, a pair of thin expandable flap of skin and fur connecting the whole length of its front and hind legs serves as parachute and glider combined.

It was a pathetic sight. The pair was apparently captured when their natural habitat - tall trees that made the original forest were cut down for lumber, and the area subsequently converted into farmland in a most destructive system called swiden or kaingin farming.

Loss of Natural Habitat Results in Loss of Species

Scientists warn us that the loss of natural habitats will result in the disappearance of organisms. This is true to the flying lemurs – and this is true to thousands of different inhabitants in the tropical rainforest, the richest biome on earth.

It is estimated that more than half the species of plants, animals and protists live in the tropical rainforests. According to a Time report, there are as many as 425 kinds of living plants that are naturally occupying a hectare of tropical rainforest in the Amazon. Similarly our own rainforest is as rich because the Philippine lies on the same tropical rainforest belt together with Indonesia and Malaysia in Southeast Asia. There are 3,500 species of indigenous trees in our rainforest.

Imagine a single tree as natural abode of ferns, orchids, insects, fungi, lichens, transient organisms - birds, monkeys, frogs, reptiles, insects and a multitude more that escape detection by our senses. The tropical rainforest must be God’s chosen natural bank of biodiversity. The “Lost Paradise” that the Genesis describes and literary giant John Milton classically wrote – Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained – is undoubtedly one that resembles a tropical rainforest.

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* The tropical rainforest is a hot, moist biome where it rains all year long. It is known for its dense canopies of vegetation that form three different layers. The top layer or canopy contains giant trees that grow to heights of 75 m (about 250 ft) or more. Thick, woody vines are also found in the canopy. Ground plants are annual and perennial species responding mainly on filtered sunlight and sustained by organically rich thin layers of soil. Towering trees called emergents now and then pierce through the canopy like living towers. Being multi-storied, living things - plants, animals and protists - have their own niches or territories, nonetheless they are all interrelated through the principles of food chain, food web, and food pyramid, which as a whole define the biodiversity of the ecosystem.

Mural Paintings of the Grand Palace of Thailand

Photos and Verse by Dr Abe V Rotor

Also visit my other Blogs:
[avrotor.blogspot.com]
[Living with Nature]
[naturalism - the eighth sense] 

                                                        Author (right) and host from Vinafoods, Bangkok 

 Mural, mural on the wall:

tell me who's the fairest of them all,
 the grandest, the most powerful - 

The wall is mute, its message full 
of wealth, power before the Fall,
and the secrets of its soul.~

A Wartime Message: To My People

A Wartime Message: To My People

Dr Abe V Rotor 
Paaralang Bayan sa Himpapawid
with Ms Melly C Tenorio
738 DZRB AM Band, 8 to 9 evening class, Monday to Friday

Things seem easy and life is not as challenging as it was with our forebears who knew war and survived it.  Less and less of their kind can be found today. Now and then it would be good to revive some valuable memories for the new generation. 

Delivered by President Manuel L Quezon 

My fellow citizens: There is one thought which I want you to have in mind, and that is that you are Filipinos; that the Philippines is your country and the only country God has given you; that you must keep it for yourselves, for your children, and for your children’s children, until the world is no more and that you must live for it and die for it, if necessary.

Your country is a great country. It has a great past, a great present and a great future.

The Philippines of yesterday was consecrated by the sacrifices of lives and pleasure of your patriotic martyrs and soldiers. The Philippines today is honored by the wholehearted devotion to its cause of unselfish and courageous statesmen. The Philippines of tomorrow will be the country of plenty, of happiness, and of freedom; it will be a Philippines with her head raised in the midst of the west Pacific, mistress of her own destiny, holding in her hand the torch of freedom and democracy and pointing the way to the teeming millions of Africa and Asia now suffering under alien rule, a Philippines.

Heir in the Orient to the teachings of Christianity: and a republic of virtuous and righteous men and women all working together for a better world than the one we have at present.~

Manuel Luis Quezón y Molina served as president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines from 1935 to 1944. He was president of the Philippine government-in-exile in Washington DC during WW II.

This message inspired Filipinos to continue their fight for the restoration and preservation of freedom.   In Nazi occupied Europe, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill raised the battle cry, “Europe arise!” I saw its imprint on cement in Zurich, Switzerland, on the spot Churchill stood some 75 years ago.