Category: junie kalaw

environment 2: state of the planet

STATE OF THE PLANET

Junie Kalaw

We have been blessed with a beautiful planet and a beautiful country but we are destroying it at a beastly pace.

The earth’s green cover is a pre-requisite for life in this planet. It is responsible for converting energy from the sun into chemical energy that starts the food chain. It moderates our micro climate, retains our water supply, and renews our soil. Unfortunately we are cutting down this life-support system at a rate of 12 million hectares (an area the size of England) a year and degrading it at a rate of 10 million hectares a year. In the Philippines, we are deforesting at a rate of 105,000 hectares a year and reforesting only 40,000 hectares a year. From 1972 to 1988, we lost 8.45 million hectares of forest.

Land forms the foundation of our biospheric home. It is our primary resource, one that our tribal ancestors in Cotabato, the T’boli people, believed to have been a gift from the gods through the Batute Bird. This resource takes 50 years to build up to a 30-centimeter height and covers only 11% of the total area of the planet. We are losing it at a rate of 11 million hectares through erosion. By the year 2000 we would have lost 275 million hectares, or 18% of our total land area. In the Philippines we are losing our precious topsoil at the rate of 100,000 hectares a year, which means we will lose 1.2 million hectares, equivalent to 12% of our crop lands, by the year 2000.

Our oceans make up 70% of the total land area of our planet. It is the regulator of our climate and provider of our marine-based food supply and 70% of our oxygen. In return, it has been the recipient of 20 billion tons of garbage ranging from beer bottles to radioactive waste. In the Philippines, we dump 2,700 tons of garbage a year into the Pasig River and Manila Bay. As a result, our mangroves have been diminished from 500,000 hectares in 1920 to 38,000 hectares today. Fifty percent of our coral reefs have been destroyed by siltation, dynamite, cyanide, and muro-ami fishing methods.

Life-giving fresh water comprises only 3% of the total volume of water in our planetary home, and most of them are found locked in the polar ice caps. While there is enough to sustain life in our planet, it is unevenly distributed, so we have large areas with drought, water shortages, and polluted drinking-water supply. There are about 1.15 billion of us in the Third World without clean water. This results in 25 million deaths each year, with children composing 60% of that number. In the Philippines, our major inland waters such as Laguna de Bay — the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia — and rivers such as Pasig and Tulyahan are either heavily polluted or biologically dead, and many of the other 384 rivers and 59 lakes are in bad condition. Increasing salinity in the ground water reservoirs of major cities like Cebu, Negros, and Metro Manila is also a major problem. Metro Manila’s water supply is projected to run short by the year 2010.

Climate is an expression of the great interacting realms of atmosphere, land, and ocean. The burning of tremendous amounts of fossil fuel since the start of the industrial revolution has driven up the count of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere from 265 parts per million in 1850 to 340 parts per million today, and could reach 600 parts per million by the year 2050. This has created, in combination with the burning of our tropical forests, a “greenhouse” effect and resulted in the steady warming of our planet. Global temperatures are projected to rise to a mean 30 degrees Centigrade above normal within the lifetime of our children. This could disrupt life on earth because of the effects on agriculture and the polar ice caps.

At present there are about 5 billion people in the world. This number is projected to increase to 10 billion before it peters out to zero growth by the 22nd century. By the year 2000 over 50% of us will be living in cities like Manila. In the Philippines, 14 million Filipinos are squatters in forest areas.

One billion people have no decent housing, and about 100 million have no roof over their heads. In the Philippines, we have about 2.6 million squatters in Metro Manila. Our national shelter gap is estimated to be around 2 million units. While five hundred million people worldwide are undernourished, caught in the cycle of poverty and land degradation, 30% of the world population consume three times the normal food requirement and waste 30% of food prepared.

Environmental degradation impacts on our health and mortality. In the Philippines, the crude death rate in 1983 was 8.2 per thousand population (Malaysia’s was 5.4, Singapore’s 5.3, and Thailand’s 5.1). Infant mortality was 59.3 per thousand, compared to Malaysia’s 20.2 and Singapore’s 9.4.

A June 1988 report to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources which would later be submitted to the Philippine Congress in the early stage of the log ban law-making process shows that with the aid of S.P.O.T. (Satellite Probatoire Pour d’Observatoire de la Terre) we have enough information and knowledge about the status of the various life-support systems of our country. However, its conclusion about the root causes of environmental decay is, at best, cautious and, at worst, self-serving in its evasiveness.

The report focuses on “high population growth and the ensuing poverty” as the major cause of environmental destruction, successfully hiding the fact that the cause of poverty is the social inequity in the access to, and benefits from, natural resources. Our forest resource provides the most glaring example. Statistics given by the Asian Development Bank show that from the years 1972 to 1988, the estimated profit from our natural resources was US$42 billion, which benefited only about 460 logging concessionaires.

Another root case cited is the “unecological orientation of our industrial activities.” This can be traced to a world view of man having dominion over nature, of nature being a mere stockpile of resources rather than a living life-support system, and of wealth as material accumulation and consumption rather than “life flow.”

The report states that lack of “operational knowledge” about our life-support system is the third root cause of environmental destruction. I feel, however, that our lack of knowledge lies more in the area of assessment of risk and of the technologies we use, which are constantly changing.

Finally, the report fails to mention lack of political will in enforcing constitutional provisions for equitable sharing of natural resources and in implementing environmental laws. This lack of political will reflects on the quality of governance and the extent of the leadership’s investment in the status quo.

The Sunday Journal, 13 November 1988

environment & revolution

if junie kalaw were alive he’d be saying i-told-you-so, just like odette alcantara.   junie and odette were our leading environmentalists, pioneers, who didn’t live to see the great floods wrought by ondoy & pepeng [and some dam(ned) officials] but who warned us often enough since the 1980s that this would happen one day unless we changed, radically transformed, our politics and lifestyles.

i never got to meet odette but junie i knew very well.   youngest son of maximo m. kalaw, the author, educator, and fierce advocate of philippine independence from the united states in the early 1900s.   met junie in ’84 through jorge arago and it was as researcher and managing editor of his journal Alternative Futures that i learned all about the sad state of our environment, thanks to bad government policies.

in ’97 anvil came out with junie’s book Exploring Soul & Society, a compilation of papers on sustainable development published and presented in different publications and fora here and abroad from1986 to 1995.   the first part, Environment & Revolution, opens with a call to empower ourselves a la EDSA.

finally the time has come.   john nery is correct,  the political dynamic has changed, the environment is an agenda waiting for a president.

A LETTER TO FUTURE FILIPINOS

by Maximo ‘Junie’ Kalaw

Our story began more than 14 billion years ago with a burst of cosmic fire and the evolution of our solar system. Ten billion years later, life forms were spawned on our planet, followed by the emergence of human consciousness, which formed and informed different cultures.

Early myths speak of a Being who created us, our land, forests, rivers, mountains, oceans, and all living creatures. This Being — known as Apo to the Lumads of Mindanao, Kabunian to the Kalingas of the Cordilleras, and Bathala to the Negritos of Central Luzon — imbued all creation with a sacred potential.

Beginning in the 16th century, however, waves of colonialism washed over our island archipelago. The Spaniards, then the Americans, then the Japanese brought with a different source of power and revelation about the nature of life. The Divine was driven up to the heavens and life hereafter. Nature was viewed as a mere resource for making mechanistic and utopian dreams come true, legimitizing conquest, exploitation, and two world wars.

Five centuries later we find ourselves at a critical moment in our history. Our survival as a people is imperiled by the destruction of our tropical rain forest, the erosion of our topsoil, and the killing of our coral reefs. We are shutting down, ierreversibly and at an alarming rate, the very systerms that support life.

Yet our population continues to increase, even as more than half of us live on incomes inadequate to feed an average-sice family. Because every one of us owes foreign creditors over Php 3,000, we sell what remains of our precious natural resources at undervalued prices and allocate more than 43 % of our foreign exchange to servicing foreign loans. If present conditions continue, the sustainability of our society is doubtful.

We cling, however, to the belief that grave crisis is a correspondingly great opportunity for change. This crisis is pushing us to take a different view of ourselves, our Inang Bayan, our planetary home, and the process we call development.

It is an opportunity to recover our cultural identity and affirm the values of our indigenous peoples; to create with them an alternate way of caring for the life that flows through all beings; to translate this vision into new forms of villages, farms and factories, transportation and communication; and to live a sustainable spirituality which translates the teachings of great spiritual traditions into norms and ethics that can guide the realities of large wholes and systems.

It is an opportunity to empower ourselves anew, as we did at the EDSA revolution, by participating in decisions that affect our future. We need to create a completely different chapter in our story as a people and as a species where the predominant ethics of our actions will be based on the authority of Nature and our interconnectedness with her, thus empowering us to transform state, party, and church bureaucracy.

It means the exercise of a different kind of politicalwill, that is, a new politics of facilitating the flow of life/resources rather than accumulating it as political bounty. It means the exercise of true service in the noble enterprise of creating a Filipino community within the sacred community of life on earth.

On our ability to transform ourselves rests your future.

Time Magazine, December 1990