Forty NGOs are up in arms against the Department of Public Woes for killing more than 100 trees – 5,000 more to go – along the narrow but beautifully tree-lined MacArthur Highway in Pampanga and Tarlac. For now, the project, initiated years ago, has been suspended by DENR Secretary Lito Atienza, but there’s no telling what the trigger-happy chainsaw massacre artists are going to do next.

Ostensibly meant to widen the highway, the exercise has succeeded only in infuriating the general public and “scandalized even us,” in Mr. Atienza’s words. Before more trees are felled, he has withdrawn the permit issued to DPWH. “It was a tree-balling permit, but they’re not balling the trees, they’re killing them!”

It takes balls to kill a tree, you know, because trees are living creatures inhabited by spirits, nymphs, elementals, so it was a haunting sight to see the white silhouettes of human beings painted on the surviving tree trunks.

Urban planner Jun Palafox, fresh from a visit to Harvard where he and other architects were challenged to “get out of your comfort zone,” bewails the “uglification of our cities” from 1946 onward and urges contemporary road designers to revisit the 1905 plans of Daniel Burnham for the cities of Manila and Baguio. In today’s city of New York, right on Broadway, he reports that “lanes have been created for pedestrians and pedicabs – yes, just like ours! – such a pleasant place, people go there for al fresco dining at night.”

Secretary Atienza, himself a frustrated architect, understands the need to “put up a lane for the tricycles, jeepneys and slow-moving vehicles that dictate the pace” of traffic on the highway. The solution is clear. Make room for faster users of the highway without sacrificing the trees; create an extra lane for those vestiges of the last century that move at glacial speed on two, three, or more wheels.

If DPWH is deaf to the outcry, can the underlings of Secretary Ebdane be such dummies that they are unaware of his desire to be a congressman by June next year? The surest way to lose the dream is to continue with the genocide of the trees.

Painfully, however, their revenge will not be on just one person or group but on all of us.