Commentary : Ode to Environment Month

COMMENTARY First posted 00:47am (Mla time) June 30, 2006
By Nereus AcostaInquirer

http://news.inq7.net/archive_article/index.php?ver=1&index=1&story_id=7328

Editor's Note: Published on Page A15 of the June 30, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE poetry of the earth, John Keats mused, is never dead. But if the dire threats to the Philippines’ staggering natural bounties are anything to go by, the poetry of land, sea and mountain may have already given way to the prosaic, or worse, the pathetic. It should not take cursory references to June as Environment Month to remind us of how much damage we have wrought on our fragile ecosystems -- and the pressing need for action on various fronts.

Rapu-Rapu Island and the Bastes report on the dangers of untrammeled mining have recently re-heated the ecology-versus-economy debates. How much of the environment and long-term sustainability are we going to sacrifice on the altar of much-needed development?

In the metropolis of 12 million residents, the meandering Pasig River, a symbol of romance and beauty to writers and poets like Jose Rizal, has become a fetid cesspool of domestic and industrial wastes. Smokey Mountain, once an infamous gargantuan heap of garbage spilling into Manila Bay, emblematic of everything wrong with the country during the Marcos years, may have had a facelift with new housing tenements and a church under construction using recycled and eco-friendly materials. But from the towering sides of a metropolis’ refuse, compacted over the years, ominous methane gas continues to billow.

Today, much of Metro Manila’s solid waste makes its way -- over 500 truckloads daily -- to the other side of the city, to Payatas, where only a few years ago, 300 families perished when tons of garbage buried them alive.

Elsewhere in the archipelago, the environment takes a constant beating. We are all too familiar with the litany of ecological devastation: a paltry 800,000 hectares of virgin forest today, compared to over 10 million hectares of sheer abundance and biodiversity before World War II; our coral reefs, once billed as the richest on earth, now down to 5 percent in pristine state; our topsoil, the very source of food security, severely eroded in over half of our provinces; over half of 450 rivers now declared dead or dying; our urban air quality ranked among the most polluted in the world.

The Environmental Sustainability Index by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (see www.esi.yaleenvirocenter.edu) ranks the Philippines 126th in a field of 146 countries. The components for the study included environmental systems, population pressure and threats to public health, as well as governance and institutional factors like investments in science and research. In 1998, when the ESI field was limited to 60 countries, we ranked 58th.

We often hear ourselves wondering: for a country so blessed with the bounties of the earth, with dive-spots judged among the finest in the world, with forests hosting species of endemic flora and fauna found nowhere else on earth, with the Visayas Sea now declared by the marine biologists as the richest in marine biodiversity on the planet, why has it come to this?

“Man’s untrammeled greed,” stresses Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales, known for his staunch anti-logging fight when he was bishop of Bukidnon, has brought us to this state of decay and destruction. We have failed to see ourselves as intricately part of a web of life, environmental lawyer Tony Oposa reminds us.

As ecologists bewail a “tragedy of the commons,” they challenge us to take to task a system that has failed to incorporate ecology in the calculus of national development. The mandate of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, sadly, remains two-faced: the utilization of natural resources (now with an undersecretary of mining to boot) on one hand, and the regulation of such practices on the other.

We forget that ours is still an ecology-dependent economy, Lory Tan of the World Wide Fund for Nature underscores. Forty million people are directly tied to agriculture, to irrigation and watersheds for rice and corn production. Thirty million rely on fisheries and coastal resources for sustenance and livelihood. The environment is the only social security system of our country’s vast numbers of poor, but it is the first casualty in the drive for so-called material progress.

Notice how some sectors are salivating over the prospects of opening the bowels of our mineral-rich islands following the restoration of the Mining Act, while using the oxymoron of “sustainable mining” even in the face of ecological disasters like Marcopper’s Marinduque, Lafayette’s Rapu-Rapu, or Diwalwal in Mindanao. Or how long-dormant or canceled Timber License Agreements in ecologically threatened areas like Samar and Southern Mindanao are surreptitiously revived via official edicts.

Yet, despite this dismal state of affairs -- or perhaps because of it -- we have one of the most committed civil-society environmental movements in Asia. The work of passionate environmentalists in communities, with novel initiatives all over the country, serves to inspire and educate.

Against a mixed backdrop of widespread despoliation and glimmers of hope and action, it behooves those of us in policymaking to revisit our priorities, move beyond lip-service and ensure that our laws have the corresponding teeth of enforcement and oversight. We need to proactively engage with business to ensure that it becomes integrally part of the larger search for solutions.

While job creation and economic development preoccupy our national trajectories, we cannot forge ahead at the expense of the very life-support systems -- Keats’ poetry of land, air and water that Providence has bestowed on this land -- that alone will guarantee our country’s future and sustainability.

Nereus Acosta is a member of the House of Representatives and former chair of the committee on ecology. He was the principal author of the Clean Air, Clean Water and Solid Waste Management Acts.