Welcome Rotunda now an unwelcome sight

AT ONE time I passed through the renovated landscape at Welcome Rotunda, a structure that serves as a boundary marker between Quezon City and Manila. I couldn’t help noticing that the new landscape has become an unfriendly sight and site.

Gone are the grasses and plants that for a long time converted carbon dioxide into oxygen for the benefit of living things; in their place are drab, dreary-looking granite and tiles. With a structure made of heat-exacerbating materials like concrete, granite and tiles having replaced the vanished greenery, I guess that the earthworms that used to live underneath have died from oxygen deprivation.

What the developer did to Welcome Rotunda has turned out to be an unwelcome development unfriendly to nature and the environment.

The same thing has happened to the rotunda at the Timog Avenue-Tomas Morato Avenue intersection in Quezon City.

—AERIC P. BERNARDINO, aeric_bernardino@yahoo.com