Eureka Moment – ReFORESTation Is Not Enough; It Must Be ReBIODIVERSification. As We Cannot Live On Logs Alone!

On 15 March 44 BC, a group of senators assassinated Emperor Julius Caesar during a Senate hearing at the Court of Pompei (Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org). With that, the “crown” itself lost its imperial power.

To keep my own Eureka Moment alive, let me categorically state: At about 9 AM today in the Philippines, Saturday, 15 March 2025, my Eureka Moment, I had the sudden deathly idea of “ReBIODIVERSification,” that which assassinates the longstanding imperial idea of “ReFORESTation”! (I hereby claim “Rebiodiversification” as my original concept of power to slay the dictatorship of “Reforestation.”)

Truth to tell, my first government job was as a writer for the Forest Research Institute (FORI) based on the campus of the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture (UPCA) – Pete Bueno hired me as Information Editor, if I remember right – 50 years ago, 1975. FORI was and remains to be an integral part of the Department of Natural Resources of the Philippines, even as FORI has become Ecosystem Research & Development Bureau (ERDB).

Encouraged by the freedom of re/search that which Pete Bueno allowed me, from 1975 to 1980, I founded and became The Editor In Chief of all the publications of FORI that I myself originated: monthly newsletter Canopy, quarterly technical journal Sylvatrop, and quarterly color magazine Habitat.

The information contained in the above paragraph should tell you that I became an off-the-cup forester, and since the Philippines already at that time was suffering from overlogging of forests, became an ardent supporter for reforestation.

That is all to say I have been espousing the need for reforestation in the Philippines in the last 50 years!

This was all before the coming of the Internet in the Philippines in 1991.

But this morning, I had an epiphany:

Reforestation is only a minor problem;
Rebiodiversification is the major problem!

The one to assassinate is Reforestation and the one to resuscitate is Biodiversity!

In Reforestation, your major objective is to return the major species of a forest as much and as soon as possible. This is, you hope, to return the mixed balance of natural plant and animal and species. Which will then tame the natural forces of floods and droughts.

Reforestation is not a bad idea!

But if it insists on being dictatorial, it must be assassinated!

Qualitatively and quantitatively more than Reforestation, we need Rebiodiversification.

Yes, we need more trees in those logged-over forests; but we need more than trees, we need more than logs for protection – We need such as fruit trees for their fruits, such as vines for our arts & crafts.

The undisturbed soil fertility of the forest is also a lesson for our disturbed soil fertility – of our agriculture!

Those are lessons that eluded our numberless doctors of philosophy in agriculture in the past 217 years, since the founding of UPCA on 06 March 1908 by American Thomasites in Agriculture led by Edward Bingham Copeland. They must remember with Aristotle: “The duty of a wise leader is to serve, not to rule.”@517