Towards midday, Marianna found herself walking beside Tata Oskie and Nana Connie. She was most surprised when Tata Oskie stopped and asked her, ‘Do you know the name of this tree?’
“Marianna slowly shook her head. ‘This,’ Tata Oskie said in the same way he introduced an old friend, ‘is a molave tree.’
“This was the first of many trees Marianna would be introduced to.”
So begins “On the Trail with Tata Oskie,” a children’s book written by award-winning children’s author Carla M. Pacis and illustrated by Mikaela D. Balita.
It sounds like another laudable effort to instill the value of nature in young children.
Except that “Tata Oskie” is Oscar M. Lopez, chair emeritus and patriarch of the Lopez business empire, which includes ABS-CBN and First Philippine Holdings.
“Marianna” is his grand-daughter, Marianna Lopez Vargas, named one of the “millennials who matter” by Town & Country magazine.
She now heads the Oscar Lopez Center for Climate Change.
The book was presented to Lopez on his 88th birthday on May 4, appropriately enough, at a children’s party at Kidzania Manila in Bonifacio Global City.
“I was deeply inspired by his immense passion for something so integral to saving the planet and its people,” said Marianna Lopez Vargas when she dedicated the book to her grandfather.
“If there’s one lesson I learned from my Tata, it’s the inextricable link between maintaining the environment and maintaining social equity,” she explained. “For that alone, it has become so fundamental to who I am now and the work that I do for climate change.”
She originally wanted to become a marine biologist, she said, but her grandfather asked her, “Don’t you want to study the trees?”
That “existential” moment led her to take up Environmental Science at Ateneo de Manila University, and later, masters degrees in Environmental Development and International Relations at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
She worked for a time with her aunt Gina Lopez’s Bantay Kalikasan, before joining the Oscar M. Lopez Center for Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Management Foundation, which is involved in research on the link between climate change and natural disasters.
In an emotional address, author Pacis, a family friend, recalled idyllic childhood weekends spent in the Lopez home, with hula lessons by the Aldeguer sisters and watercolor lessons from UP College of Fine Arts dean Virginia Agbayani.
