Saving the Philippine
Environment
Forum tackles solutions
to Philippine ‘environmental crises’
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.
Crises
“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.
Logging and
mining
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
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