When Gina Lopez burst on the scene like some sort of environmental berserker, quite a few people applauded her passion and New Age enthusiasm. Keen watchers of the insider game in government viewed it as an interesting example of good cop, bad cop. A zealot can always be neutralized by the bureaucracy, as she quickly found out when the Executive Secretary, in typical bureaucratic style, blandly put the implementation of some of her decisions on hold.
… Oceana Gold … despite years of protests, countless studies and reports, and now a suspension order, continues to operate in Nueva Vizcaya (Bulatlat.com, 3 March) like it hasn’t done anything wrong at all.
BETWEEN the pro-mining students protesting against the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) officials, and the insistence that we talk only about the jobs to be lost and the stock market crash, it is clear that we are being distracted from the more important questions about whether or not the mining projects that the DENR has ordered closed have in fact been bad for the environment and our communities.
I was one of many who thought Gina Lopez was one of President Duterte’s more daring choices as far as picking members of his cabinet was concerned. A staunch environmentalist, she was a welcome decision for Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) secretary, after decades of seeing our natural resources go to waste in the hands of big business, oligarchs, capitalists all in the name of investments and “development” as every government before this one has claimed.