GIVE A GIFT TREE
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What’s Green, Brown, and Made of Carton?
by Gita Luz
Haring Ibon Issue 38 | April-June 2009

A perplexing project of putting together paper lanterns, pizza boxes and paper mache animals.

Can you do it? When Haribon contacted Campaigns Social Response (CSR) for their Earth Day Exhibit at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), our first thought was, can we pull this off? With the tight schedule, it meant creating a concept, writing, designing and constructing the exhibit materials in just over six weeks. But the chance to create a fusion between art, the environment and a good cause was too hard to resist. It was the perfect opportunity to use creativity not only to showcase the beauty of nature, but also to get people to move their butts and do something to save our forests.

Art and trees. These two words combined can spawn a thousand ideas. Just google it and you’ll find all kinds of images, from bronze tree sculptures to log-shaped throw pillows. But we buckled down and tried to think of the best way to use art and trees to present not only the bounty of Philippine forests but also the devastation that’s happening and how it affects us. So how do you create something that’s fun, educational and interesting to look at?

Then we had our Aha! moment. A universal truth. The simple idea that a tree is something everyone loves. Think about it: you don’t really need a reason to love a tree, you just do. Sure it keeps you alive by producing oxygen and it can be made into a variety of things like paper and medicine. But when you get down to it, a tree is not just something useful, it’s a friend that brings back memories of summers spent climbing its branches, of picking its fruit, or of simply lazing under its shade.

So now what do we do? With that idea in mind, we set out to make an exhibit that is interactive and experiential, something that would bring back those well-loved memories of the outdoors and hopefully, push people to do something to save our forests. And did I forget to mention that we needed to use sustainable materials for the exhibit? That’s where the idea of using carton and used pizza boxes came in. Let me tell you, we have never eaten so much pizza in a week! Thankfully no one suffered pizza fatigue as the whole office pitched in to eat pizza for merienda in order to donate the boxes.

We love Philippine Forests! The first part of the exhibit tackled the big picture about the state of our forests and our biodiversity. We combined pictures of real trees and lantern cutouts in order to show the wonders of the forest and the shadows and silhouettes they leave when they are gone.

The Gift of Trees.  We did say we wanted to keep the exhibit fun and interactive right? So with our treasure trove of pizza boxes, we put together a show-and-tell exhibit about the gifts trees give. Forests help clean our air, purify our water, and maintain fertility of our soils. They provide us with food. They recycle nutrients, regulate the climate and influence the weather. They also provide raw materials and are a source for medicine ingredients. Mixed in with decoupage animals and arching branches filled with leaves, this whimsical display hopefully inspired people to take care of our forests the same way they take care of us.

Root Causes. But sadly, our majestic forests are disappearing due to logging, mining  and natural disasters. With the help of our matryoshka tree stump display  (like the Russian dolls, the boxes fit one inside the other), we showed the decline of forest cover in the Philippines throughout the years. With the smallest stump representing 2010, having only 0.06% forest cover, we need to move fast to save what’s left of our forests. Which brings us to…

Act Now! So at last, after learning about our forests and reliving our love for nature, it’s time for us to act and do something to stop our forests from vanishing. With the Act Now panels, people placed their green thumb (literally, since they needed to dip their thumb in green paint) and pledged a tree to help Haribon and their ROAD to 2020 project. As more and more people pledged, these seedlings of change created a forest out of once barren lands (both in the exhibit and soon, in tree planting activities as well).

In the end, we at CSR can think of a million reasons why it paid off to do this exhibit–-we helped raise awareness on our forests, we had the opportunity to showcase our creative talents, and we got that warm fuzzy feeling from being able to help a good cause. 

But the simple truth is we all just love trees. And that’s enough reason for everything.