ON THE PLUNDER OF THE ENVIRONMENT^[1]

THE Chinese have a proverb: "the mountains are high, and the emperor is far away." Martin Wolf writing in The Financial Times explained the proverb's meaning.

He wrote, "When the emperor was weak, it became difficult to reach decisions. Officials looked after themselves and their families. Infirmity of purpose, corruption and an inability to protect the empire itself ensued. Sooner or later the dynasty fell, to be replaced by another, often after a period of chaos."

We are a nation systematically poisoning itself even as our state accords a favored few the chance to systematically enrich themselves at the expense of the majority.

Illegal logging has not ceased, despite the logging-ban imposed in many part of the country. The report of Transparency International dated 23 October 1998, that during the last 20 years the number of forest concessionaires has numbered 480, requires little revision because there has been little change in the policies of whatever government happens to be in power.

Just as there has been little change in the end results of these policies. During this period, it is estimated that these concessionaires have amassed 42 billion U.S. dollars in profits, due to very low concession fees and taxes. This system has enriched only a few families while the livelihood of millions of others have been adversely affected by the loss of the forest cover and the displacement of local communities.

It is a circle of death. The state does not protect its forest lands; it farms them out to loggers who cut down the forests, and make fortunes, while their forest-clearing efforts result in increased soil erosion due to damaged watersheds, which leads to farmland that becomes less productive, pushing the poor and marginalized to clear forests on their own, to seek a subsistence existence.

Conflicting policies on land use, and outdated laws on land classification have led to overlapping jurisdictions and counter-productive, not to mention, ecologically counter-intuitive, frameworks for development. This has exacerbated the depletion of our forest reserves, and the over-exploitation and excessive withdrawal of our natural resources.

This state of confusion, exacerbated by official inaction, is not just a sad confluence of incompetence and short-sightedness. It is something worse. It is a situation that's arisen precisely because that's how the present administration wants things to be.

We must recognize the simplest of truths. Environmental losses are due to the lax enforcement of environmental laws and regulations. Why are laws enforced in such a lax manner? Because the priorities of the national agencies tasked with implementing and upholding those laws, do not lie in environmental protection, but rather, in environmental utilization.

In other words our environment department is a Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde department. It is schizophrenic by nature and design. The DENR's problems in the regulation and implementation of environmental laws can be traced to its divided and conflicting mandate of both "resource development" and "conservation."

Through the years, our government agencies have favored resource extraction and sales at the expense of conservation and regulation, because only environmental pillage provides hard currency numbers administrations can boast about. The result of this institutional schizophrenia are policies of the agency on forestry, coastal resource management and urban tree conservation that contradict each other, or are so toothless as to be useless.

What can be done? I have proposed putting our Department of Environment out of its misery. And the creation, instead of a separate agency, tasked solely with the conservation and regulation of natural resources. While the ruling coalition has ignored it, this effort must be continued.

As does our effort to view environmental issues primarily from the perspective of social justice: that our environment exists not just for some, but for all -but also, that its preservation needs to be accomplished in a manner without detriment to the rights of the individual.

You are familiar with these harsh realities. We have the data, we know the consequences, we understand what is at stake. Public opinion is on our side.

But officialdom is not. And it has figured out how to ignore public opinion, because it has perfected the black art of ruling with impunity.

What then, is to be done, what can a study group like this one, do? Your energies have been devoted to the collation of facts and figures, and to putting data in the proper order and the right context, to understand that this is not just an issue concerning our ecology, but our basic rights, the rights of all humanity. Plundering the environment is an act of violence against whole populations.

The particular manner it's being done in the Philippines is a front in the broader war in which the state has set out to oppress its own people.

We must do far more, to amplify the bedrock message of our efforts. It is not enough to boggle the mind with facts and figures.

It is necessary to unleash the imagination, to fire up passions, and engage a younger, and in many ways, decadent new generation of Filipinos, to recognize that they cannot separate the oppressive order that exists, from the solutions that will finally ensure our descendants a healthful ecology.

We must study not what we have studied before, but how we can engage others to study what needs to be done -we must study why we have a sense of solidarity that unites us, yesterday and today, and how we can inflame the hearts of many, many more, to achieve success tomorrow.

[1] Speech of Sen. MA Madrigal, [Chairperson of the Senate Committee on Peace, Committee on Youth Women and Family Relations, and Committee on Cultural Communities], before the Third International Assembly of the International League of People Struggles, June 19, 2008, Hong Kong.