The Apao Rolling Hills: Beauty From Tragedy

The Apao Rolling Hills is a beautiful region straight up the mountains from Bangued in the capital of the Tineg region of Abra in the Philippines. You can see Bangued and the broad Abra river valley from the high hilltops as seen in the bottom photo above. After about an hour winding our way up from the valley, we arrived at the nice little hilltop town of Vira, the new capitol of the province of Tineg, one of the most remote and undeveloped in Abra. During the wet season, the grass covered hills are green, resembling taller versions of rolling hills like the Killdeer Mountains in North Dakota and other parts of the world. During the dry season, they resemble the rolling oak studded grasslands of northern California with its brown grasses.

 

Since these mountain top areas are much cooler than the lowlands where most people live, I wonder if there was long term thinking with climate in mind in locating the capitol there. Most of the buildings are new in this new provincial capitol and it looks like the beginnings of something larger. Many new hardtop roads have replaced what used to be almost impassable ones, making travel to formerly inaccessible corners easy. This is still an isolated region. We met local medical personel who walk for days through thick jungle and up and down mountains to get to isolated villages in this place with few roads.

 

 When I first saw the hills via intrepid vloggers on YouTube, I wondered how it could be that these tropical highlands could be barren and not covered with thick jungle and topped with the distinctive tropical pines of the Philippines. The beautiful sight I was seeing that has become a tourist attraction is in fact the scarred landscape of an environmental and human rights disaster that happened in the late 70s and 80s during the Marcos dictatorship. It would be interesting to mention the people I went there with or those we met, but the Philippines is one of the most dangerous places for those who speak truth to power, so they will remain a secret.

The unique beauty of bare hills that has become a draw is in fact the result of crony capitalism that allowed a government affiliated lumber company to strip the hillsides, take the lumber and leave the local people in the lurch. Ironically, just like places such as the North Dakota Badlands, part of the beauty of the hillsides is their deeply incised nature due to the extreme erosion of the past. Was this erosion ancient, held in place by centuries of forest cover, or was it the result of the aftermath of wholesale clear cut logging that likely chopped down everything and left nothing to hold the soil? Since the beautiful landscape was chopped down to make pulp for cellophane to be exported, the hills were likely stripped bare. I would like to see photos from the time of the logging. My guess is many of the deep draws in these pictures date to that time. Every time we buy something or throw it away in our current iteration of capitalism, it is likely stripping someone else's back yard.

The local people are mostly Itneg in their language, but are also known as the Tinguians, a name given by the Spanish colonizers. It is a convention similar to the dual names of American indigenous peoples: their own names and those given by the colonizer. The people resisted the stripping of their forest, some even became rebels, but it wasn't enough to stop the team of corporate and state power. We have enough of a problem with that in the U.S., I can only imagine under a dictatorship how disenfranchised people were.

I don't know enough about it to comment on efforts to restore traditional lands or develop the site of an environmental crime that has created something unique and beautiful upon the bones of tragedy. If the local people can pull out a win by drawing tourists to view their unique, artificial, highland grassland, that will certainly be a step forward. In the Philippines you generally pay a modest fee to local authorities to visit their sites as we did. This supports the local economy. I just hope all these new roads don't just make it easier to exploit the land even more.

 

I hope to write more about this tragic episode in the future when I know more, but will end with the wise words of leader Macling Dulag, assassinated during the same period in nearby Kalinga, for similarly challenging the taking and exploiting of land by Marcos:

"You ask if we own the land and mock us saying, ‘Where is your title?’ When we ask the meaning of your words you answer with taunting arrogance, ‘Where are the documents to prove that you own the land?’ Titles? Documents? Proof of ownership. Such arrogance to speak of owning the land when we instead are owned by it. How can you own that which will outlive you?" – Macliing Dulag