Since a child, I’ve always remembered Baguio City to be a breezy mountain town with quiet streets, pine-scented air in the cold months, and plenty of trees on the hillsides. Spending a weekend afternoon searching for the biggest pinecones at the former American Airbase of Camp John Hay was always a welcome treat. That was Baguio, circa 1983. Things have changed, really changed.

Progress has brought several new developments since I was in primary school. Baguio now has several fastfood outlets, banks, hotels, schools, and we mustn’t forget… the malls and shopping centers.

Much have been said and written about these developments and how they have contributed to the progress of Baguio as a commercial and educational center… and even more have been said and written about how these same developments are turning the once pine-choked hills of the City into concrete forests. While it may be easy to point the finger at big corporations, like SM Malls and Fil-Estate/Camp John Hay, it’s the smaller developments that are making more of an impact on our environment. 

The “big builders” aren’t the main problem.

Near where I live across the Baguio General Hospital and beside the controversial BGH flyover, a hillside with at least 20 pine trees - each probably at least 50 years old - is being excavated for a new building. On the other side of the ridge where the General Hospital is situated, one can find Balsigan and San Vicente, two areas of the city where wanton cutting of trees is done for the sake of making houses. Almost every square inch of this area is built-up with galvanized-iron shanties and ill-designed concrete apartments. The place reeks of sewage, the hillside unable to cope with the high-density population. There is not a tree in sight.

The same thing can be found in almost every corner of Baguio City: Trancoville, Brookside, Aurora Hill, Quirino Hill, Quezon Hill, San Luis, Pacdal, Quarry, Hillside… in practically every major residential area in Baguio the story is the same, houses first before environment. Even the activists who regularly complain about deforestation by the big corporations live in houses that don’t even have a tree in the yard.

While it may be sad to see the trees go, it’s even sadder to think that migrants who build these homes in the City, hoping to get a job in one of them fancy malls, find themselves unemployed since most don’t qualify for minimum-wage positions. A large proportion of students from the lowlands, who study here for college, find it hard to leave the cool temperature of Baguio and decide to stay. Most of them get jobs that might otherwise go to native Baguio residents. These are the people who build the houses on every vacant lot they can find, or at least fuel the demand for building even more houses everywhere.

This is the reality of Baguio now, and I’m afraid to think of how much more change the City will undergo in the next 10 to 20 years. It’s a vicious cycle of building houses that allow more people to move in and build even more! At the pace were going, the future doesn’t look good - Baguio will just be another typical mismanaged Filipino city, devoid of trees and open spaces.

This is my fear… the fact that nobody here really cares anymore.

:’(

It’s been long overdue but Abandoned Insanity, my blog, now has a new home here at www.abandonedinsanity.info. For the past 5 years my blog has been piggybacking on a sub-domain on my main server at iBaguio.net. My baby site (iBaguio) has been building quite a following ever since I moved the whole site unto WordPress and the drain of my blog on disk space/bandwidth has become quite evident recently. So, I knew the time had come for a dedicated home for Abandoned Insanity.

Despite the relative obscurity of my blog, some of my posts have been getting heavy hits courtesy of Google searches. By far the most popular has been my repost of the procedure to make a dual-booting PC with Vista and a hacked version of Mac OS X Tiger (I won’t be reposting that here since IT IS illegal). Following close behind is my rant on somebody ripping off my design of the Baguio Centennial Logo. Another popular post is my Top 5 Worst Places to Eat in Baguio City. Holy Zola!

People have been asking me, what’s with the name, Abandoned Insanity? Well, in the short history of my blog, it really wasn’t called that originally. The original blog name was “Baguio Beans” in 2003, which turned out to be used by a couple of hundred other people who live, or used to live, in Baguio (Baguio Beans is the colloquial name of the vegetable formerly known as string beans… it’s also what they call people who were born and raised in Baguio). So, wanting to be original, the name was changed to “MUGged”, in honor of my addiction to posting and replying at the Philippine Macintosh Users Group, PhilMUG for short, hence the MUG… MUGged… get it? That of course didn’t fly off too well. It was just too common. Around 2005, I was asking my friend for the best name for the print design studio I was starting up. The choice was between “The Bureau of Design” and “Abandoned Insanity”. Since most of my clients were of the corporate type, my friend wisely advised against using “Abandoned Insanity” since it sounded juvenile and top-honchos probably wouldn’t take me seriously. So “The Bureau of Design” was born (eventually merged into PXL Republic, but that’s another story), and I just decided to use “Abandoned Insanity” for my own personal consumption.

So that’s that, hopefully the new home of my blog should encourage me to post more often.