Sometime in high school, we all sat through a lesson about the environment. Maybe it was about the water cycle, maybe it was about global warming, maybe it was about proper waste segregation. What most of us were never taught, though, is that the environment does not treat everyone equally. The floods that ruin a home along the esteros of Manila are not the same as the floods that inconvenience a subdivision in Quezon City with a blocked driveway. The mountain stripped bare by a mining company does not affect the executives signing the permits the same way it affects the indigenous families who have lived off that mountain for generations.
That idea, environmental racism, is what set the wheels in motion for Sabrina Victoria's debut novel, The Princess of Himmapan. In her preface, Victoria shares that the term was introduced to her by a tenth grade social studies teacher, and it stayed with her long after the class ended. She noticed something that many of us have probably noticed too without quite naming it: most environmental stories made for young audiences center the animals and the fairies and the talking trees, but rarely the people. The ones who actually lose their homes, their clean water, their way of life. So she went looking for a setting that could hold both the wonder of nature and the weight of what happens when we fail to protect it, and she found it in the legend of the Himmapan Forest, a mythical woodland found across Buddhist and Southeast Asian traditions.
I want to talk about why that choice, folklore as a vessel for a very real and very present issue, feels so relevant to those of us reading this in the Philippines right now.
We already have our own tradition of doing exactly this.
Long before environmental impact assessments and congressional hearings, Filipino communities used stories to explain why certain rivers should not be disturbed, why certain trees should not be cut, why certain mountains were home to something that deserved respect. In the Cordillera, there are still sacred groves called muyong, forest patches that Ifugao families have protected for centuries, not through fences or laws, but through belief. Cut down the wrong tree, and you disturb more than wood. You disturb balance. Among the Bagobo people near Mount Apo, the mountain itself is treated as sacred ground, home to spirits that must be respected before anyone dares to build on it. These are not quaint superstitions to be outgrown. They worked, in the sense that they kept forests standing long after logging concessions elsewhere had turned hills into mudslides.
What happened, then, when belief stopped being enough?
We know what happened. We watched it happen in real time in places like Itogon, Benguet, where a mining town was buried by landslides, killing dozens of small-scale miners who had nowhere else to go for work. We watched it happen where a large-scale mining operation and the local community have been locked in tension for years over land, water, and who gets to decide what happens to a mountain that indigenous families call home. We are watching it happen right now in parts of the Sierra Madre, our so-called natural barrier against typhoons, as illegal logging continues to strip away the very thing protecting millions of people downstream in Luzon.
None of these stories made it into a children's book growing up. We were taught to turn off the lights and not to litter, useful lessons, sure, but they quietly let us off the hook from asking harder questions. Whose forest is it. Who benefits when it disappears. Who is left holding the damage when it does.
This is where Victoria's approach struck me as genuinely thoughtful. Rather than writing a straightforward contemporary story about deforestation or corporate greed, she reached for myth. The prologue opens not with a courtroom or a protest but with a queen telling her son a bedtime story about a mystical forest on top of the mountains, filled with cows with butterfly wings and elephants with fish tails, guarded by winged half-human, half-bird creatures called Kinaree. It reads like the kind of story a grandmother might tell you before sleep, gentle and strange and a little sad underneath its beauty.
And that, to me, is the point. Folklore has always been how communities pass down what matters when they cannot yet explain it in policy language. Long before anyone in the Philippines had access to terms like carbon sequestration or biodiversity loss, our ancestors had aswang stories that kept people out of certain forests at night, and tikbalang legends that made travelers think twice before wandering off marked paths. Fear of the supernatural did double duty as a kind of primitive conservation law. The story protected the land because the land could not protect itself, and no one had yet built the institutions that could do it properly.
We still do not have those institutions figured out, if we are honest. The Philippines loses forest cover every year to a mix of legal and illegal logging, agricultural conversion, and mining, even as we rank among the countries most vulnerable to climate disasters on the planet. Every typhoon season, we relearn the same lesson the hard way: a stripped mountain has nothing left to hold the rain, and the people living closest to these mountains, usually the poorest, usually indigenous, usually the ones with the least political voice, pay the highest price for decisions made far away from them.
Reading the early pages of The Princess of Himmapan, I found myself thinking less about the mythical creatures and more about the real ones we have failed to protect. The forest in Victoria's book, with all its impossible colors and strange animals, becomes a stand-in for every forest that has ever been treated as expendable once someone decided there was money to be made from it. You do not need a translation guide to understand what a forest being disturbed means, even inside a fantasy story. We already know what that looks like. We have seen the photos of the hills surrounding Marawi stripped bare, of Palawan's mangroves cleared for fish ponds, of ancestral lands turned into golf courses and resorts without the consent of the people who lived there first.
What I appreciate about approaching this through folklore rather than a straightforward issue-driven narrative is that it does not lecture. Nobody wants to read a novel that feels like an environmental science module with characters attached. Myth works differently. It lets you sit with wonder first, so that when the weight of the story eventually settles in, you feel it rather than just understand it intellectually. That is a harder thing to pull off than it sounds, and it is part of why I think this book is going to resonate with Filipino readers in particular, even though its setting draws from Southeast Asian and Buddhist traditions rather than our own specific folklore.
We already know how to listen to a story about a forest that needs protecting. We grew up with our own versions of it. The question this book seems to be asking, quietly, underneath the fantasy trappings, is whether we are actually listening this time, or whether we will let this story become just another beautiful tale about something we lost.
I am not going to tell you what happens in the forest, or to the Kinaree, or to the missing princess the queen speaks of in that opening bedtime story. That is for you to discover.