This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 43, December
4-10, 2005
Saving the Philippine
Environment
How do you
tackle a problem as serious and complex as the various crises afflicting the
Philippine environment? Environmental historian Prof. Rowena Boquiren proposes a
simple and creative solution: for everyone who has come to learn the true state
of the environment to go out and tell the same to at least three individuals who
in turn will each tell three more people.
BY
FELICISIMO MANALANSAN
Bulatlat
How do you tackle a problem as serious and
complex as the various crises afflicting the Philippine environment?
Environmental historian and University of the
Philippines-Baguio professor Rowena Boquiren proposes a simple and creative
solution: Everyone who knows the true state of the environment should go out and
tell the same to at least three individuals who in turn will each tell three
more people.
But what is the true state of the Philippine
environment? And what does one do with this knowledge?
An environmental forum held at the St. Thomas
Aquinas Research Center of the University of Sto. Tomas (UST) in Manila Nov. 29
tried to answer these questions. Coinciding with the first year anniversary of
the Quezon-Aurora landslides, the forum brought together participants from
various religious denominations, college students, environmental activists and
surviving victims from the landslides last year.
The forum was sponsored by the Center for
Environmental Concerns-Philippines, National Council of Churches of the
Philippines and UST’s Contextualized Theology and Ethics.
Rich and archipelagic
“The Philippines is a richly-endowed
archipelagic country,” Boquiren, the forum main speaker, says, beaming with
pride.
According to her, there are many implications to
the country’s being rich and archipelagic. One of them, she says, is the
challenge on resource utilization without harming the environment.
“The Philippine archipelago comes from a long
history of geological formation whose product is a unique assemblage of
bio-physical ecosystems teeming with biological and natural resources,” she
says, adding that on these depend the lives of a current population of 85
million Filipinos.
The country’s rich natural resources have
supplied the people’s food, shelter and health through nature’s provisions for
clean air, water, sources of livelihood and even a sense of security for the
population, Boquiren says.
“But the Philippines is now experiencing
unprecedented crises,” she explains, adding that these resulted in environmental
problems such as the inaccessibility of water to many Filipinos, air pollution,
food insecurity, garbage and the threatened state of biodiversity among the
country’s forest, agricultural and coastal and marine resources.
Boquiren says that underlining the environmental
crises are issues of natural preservation and the people’s development. Neither
the latter nor the former should be sacrificed for the other, she stresses.
“Hindi pwedeng bumigay ang isa man dyan” (Neither one should suffer), she
says.
Nature imbalances that result in disasters, she
explains, should not be seen solely on their biological and physical aspects.
Natural and biological resources that are managed often result in tipping the
ecological balance with catastrophic consequences for the people, she says.
She cites as examples the landslides and
flashfloods which killed more than 1,000 individuals last year in Quezon and
Aurora provinces east of Manila. The volume of rain which poured on the two
provinces during the disaster was unprecedented, Boquiren says, citing logging
as bringing about the disaster.
More than half of the remaining forests in the
two provinces are occupied by logging concessions.
Boquiren says that only about 17 percent of the
Philippine land area is left forested while less than 3 percent of the land is
planted with old growth forest. The latter, she adds, are among the most
severely threatened of the country’s ecosystems.
The threat comes from logging and mining
companies, points out Boquiren.
The remaining patches of old growth forests in
northeastern parts of Luzon’s Sierra Madre mountain ranges, as well as Samar,
Surigao and Palawan are also where large logging companies are concentrating
their operations. She further says that it is in these areas, as well as in
secondary growth forest areas, where about 12 million Philippine indigenous
people live and where more than 12,000 species of plants, 204 mammals and 576
birds exist.
Logging has naturally come along with mining in
the country’s history of environmental destruction and degradation, Boquiren
says. In the former mining areas in Baguio, American miners who established
Benguet Corporation cleared all the timber forest to be used for underground
mining tunnels. “As early as 1928, Baguio was already barren, forcing loggers
which supplied Benguet Corp. and the export market to go to the Mountain
Province to continue devastating the forest,” says Boquiren.
From then up to the present, Boquiren says,
large-scale foreign mining has continued to be a highly- destructive economic
activity in the Philippines.
She warns that with most of the country’s land
and water formation now under different forms of mining applications because of
the government’s mining revitalization program, “the devastation and crises of
the Philippine environment can go a lot worse.”
Samar threat
Nowhere is the threat on the country’s remaining
forest more apparent than in Samar, says the speaker. Samar, the third largest
Philippine island, has some of the most significant concentration of Philippine
biodiversity where lowland old-growth dipterocarp tree species still abound.
Boquiren says corporate logging and bauxite mining in the island threatens to
decimate the island’s remaining forest.
The Ramos administration created the Samar
Island Natural Park (SINP) that made island’s 333,000-hectare forest a protected
area. The SINP, on the other hand, is part of the Samar Island Biodiversity
Project (SIBP), a $12.8-million nature conservation project funded by the Global
Environment Facility (GEF), United Nations Development Fund, U.S. Agency for
International Development, the Philippine government and nongovernment
organizations.
In August this year, however, the Department of
Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) lifted a logging moratorium in the
province and reinstated the suspended logging permit of Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile’s
San Jose Timber Corp. covering over 90,000 hectares of Samar’s forest.
Global patrimony
The richness of the country’s natural and
biological resources, according to Boquiren, is the Philippines’ and Filipinos’
contribution to “global patrimony.” She says this patrimony landed the
Philippines on top of 17 so-called megadiverse countries, notwithstanding that
the country has also earned a distinction as “the hottest of hotspots” in terms
of threats to the survival of Philippine biodiversity.
Saving the environment has a lot to do with
asserting the Filipinos’ birthright to this patrimony, according to Boquiren.
“Our counterpart in the global patrimony, our
national patrimony, is what we need to save our environment and that can only be
done by our people uniting to defend our people, our land and our environment,”
Boquiren says. Bulatlat © 2005 Bulatlat
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Forum tackles solutions to Philippine
‘environmental crises’Crises
Logging and mining