Effective Education has to Start at Home

SCHOOLING should never be equated to education. Especially in the Philippines where the aim of schooling has degenerated into the effective mass production of Filipinos as highly-competitive workers or slaves for export. Especially in the Philippines where schooling entails the spoonfeeding and memorization of tons of un-related data with no attention to analytical skills, much less to character development. Philippine education has been one area of utter neglect of government, such that many people are not served on their basic right to it, and they have had to spend huge sums in the commercial schooling industry also known as private schools

Those people who do get to and get through the school system become mostly unemployed or underemployed products of underpaid and overworked teachers. It is as if the Philippine officialdom and the “education entrepreneurs” are contented over the fact that at least there exists a schooling system to speak of, and they actually mislabel it as our “educational system.”

But what about the legitimate concern for our nation’s human resources development? For our people’s character-building? Even as basic a point as having any motivation to pass through the schools system aside from the drive to secure a diploma that would be a raffle ticket to employment is a failure point of the existing system.

Parents have had to crawl to earn tuition money for their children upon the false hope that such schooling would really redound to the better future of their beloved offspring, only to witness the latter descend into a pattern of directionlessness and even juvenile delinquency.

The problem with starting the children’s schooling much earlier than before, with many parents welcoming the schools as glamorized day-care centers, is that parents have largely abdicated their natural responsibility and role as their children’s first teachers. Their very young Pepe or Pilar have been thrust under the care of overloaded teachers who each have to pay attention to five dozen or so other children in the same classroom at any time.

Foundational education has to start at home, with the children learning from their parents’ example and also from whatever explanations the parents have quality time to give them.

Here is where the first fork on the road of life for the children. Are they going to be good citizens of the planet and the country, part of the solution to our festering woes, or are that going to be hangers-on, part of the problems, like cattle to be herded, or even stampeded, when they pursue too desperately what is seen as solutions to their problems?

Are we allowing our children and youth develop into a future nation of weaklings, a nation of victims, a nation of destitute beggars who have had our land grabbed and despoiled? Or can we still develop in the next generation the foundations the beautiful and strong character of the original Filipino so we can have a nation of nature-loving, active and empowered stakeholders?

It depends on whether or not we decide not to be weaklings on our responsibility for giving our children foundational education right at home, to give them character development that can set their basic direction in life as wholesome citizens. That is, whether or not we take upon ourselves this responsibility, knowing so well that we cannot depend on our formal educational system for this.

Let the “University of Real Life” develop our children. And let their first classroom be our own homes! We can do it. At the very least, we can try!

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  Collective Amnesia and Myopia

SENSE of history or “kamalayan sa kasaysayan” (“kamalaysayan” for short) means a keen interest in, and working knowledge of, the main threads and most significant events and developments in our nation's lifestory, and a consistent conscious effort to apply the lessons and frames of past history to present tasks of opinion leadership and decision-making for the future. Such sense of history would help enable the people to grapple effectively with problems of the present and chart a bright future for this and the coming generations.

To forget the past, to ignore its important lessons our ancestors and parents had dearly paid for in blood, sweat and tears, is to be sick of collective amnesia. To disregard our responsibility to make decisions and take actions today for the good of our children and our children’s children is to be sick of collective myopia. The Filipino people display obvious symptoms of both maladies. In court language, we are collectively “guilty on both counts.” The consequences have been disastrous and full of disasters — disasters that combine natural and human causes, disasters we’ve never successfully learned lessons from, disasters that we have not considered planning well to prevent from recurring.

And so, recur they do! And through our tears, we have been putting much blame on official irresponsibility, ineptitude and downright stupidity. To be sure, a great many among government agencies and officials under succeeding administrations really deserve such judgment and blame. But why have we continued to gamble by entrusting our lives and our children’s lives in these officials’ tricky and often-handwashing hands?

There are things we have to adjust in our mindset and behavior. We have to cure our collective amnesia and myopia and learn active stakeholdership ASAP!

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  ‘Kamayan Forum’ Marks 16 Years!

WE’VE been at it for more than a decade and a half. Surely the people behind this project called Kamayan para sa Kalikasan are now in a position to take the long view, a bit more consciously avoiding the pitfalls of collective amnesia and collective myopia that have menaced many of us, including some of our colleagues in environmental advocacy.

Once upon a forum session, we cautioned some of these colleagues against putting too much faith in an incoming administration just because it was headed by someone who was “not a drunkard, a gambler, or or womanizer,” someone who even took into her close circle a friend of the environmental movement.

Sixteen years is a long time. At the end of our session just after the Marinduque tragedy, we reiterated the call aired right in that forum by the bishop of Boac for the erring firm to be made to pay a big price. It has by now become an “old” development that Marcopper got away scot-free, and there are no measures to prevent a repet-ition. The then-new President is now crazy for mining.

After 16 years doing this work, we can dish out “We told you so!” so many times. But we’d rather not.

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  Days of Hope for the Environment  

TOMORROW, APRIL 22, is Earth Day. Less than two months from now, on June 5, we have the World Environment Day. On each of these annual international celebrations, hundreds of millions of people around the world express in various ways that they marvel at the life and beauty of our planet and their commitment to conserve the environment. Alas, in our land, there are more reasons for despair and protest than for celebration, given the state of our environment.

Though the Philippine is one of the richest in natural resources, its environment remains in crisis. Since the last century, our environment drastically “changed for the worst.” Our forests have almost been wiped out because of corporate logging; our mountains have been disemboweled with the spate of large-scale mining, construction of large dams and similar activities.

Agricultural lands are laced with poisonous chemicals from agro-chemical corporations, while our rivers, coral reefs, mangroves, and seas are polluted and depleted of their bounty because of commercial overfishing, aquaculture and pollutive industries. While we see our environment being destroyed to serve the insatiable greed for profit of the corporate world, we similarly witness the untold suffering of our people who bear the burden of an environment in crisis. Up to this day, environmental devastation intensifies under the government's globalization policies. Our natural and human resources such as minerals, timbers, fishes, and most especially Filipinos workers, are being exported as cheap raw materials and cheap labor in exchange for foreign currencies. They become mere commodities priced and bought by the highest bidder.

One case in point is the mining liberalization policy of the Arroyo administration. The government, in order to entice foreign investors, is virtually giving up our mineral lands to transnational mining companies. In eleven years of implementing such policy, billions of pesos’ worth of our minerals were exported abroad yet our mining industry remain in shambles. Worse, "responsible and sustainable mining" have become catchphrase promises by the government and mining companies to subdue the mining realities etched on the people's mind by mining disasters like Marcopper, Itogon, Surigao, Siocon and Lafayette mining crimes, to cite a few.

Still, both Earth Day and World Environment Day are days of hope. It is for the alarming state of our environment that such days of reckoning were born. These commemorations are days for heightening our awareness on our environment and our commitment to preserve it for ourselves and our patrimony. We salute all the brave people of our land who struggle to protect it from narrow, senseless, and profit-making objectives. The indigenous people, fisherfolks, peasants, workers and professionals are becoming more aware of the root causes of environmental crisis that we have. Our environmental problem is rooted in our history as an exploited nation where the social, political and economic structures remain in active support of foreign plunder and exploitation.

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  Convenience and Contamination

IT WAS NOT very long ago when Filipinos, would be carrying the reusable bayóng to the marketplace and bring it back home full of fish and veggies wrapped in newspaper or banana leaves. And we got our drinks in glass bottles with deposit collected so we’d return them.

We have “modernized” since then with the advent of plastics. Actually, it’s an oversupply of plastics that we now have. Items are now often double-wrapped in this thin, light-weight and waterproof packaging and they all go into many layers of small plastic bags in big plastic bags. Even our drinks, including water, now come in plastic bottles that sellers don’t bother to collect.

Also up to about a decade ago, most eateries would have dishwashers on their staff, and you could pitch in for one of them if you are unable to pay up fully for what you had just eaten. Now it’s all throw-away styros, which waiters just pack into trash bins to be brought later by garbage trucks to some unsanitary landfill or other, from where toxic fluids leach out to contaminate the land.

The plastics and the styros get burned in these places, releasing lethal doses of dioxin into the air we breathe. And then many of these clog our waterways, causing floods, and finally end up as permanent litter in the seas. Great modernity! A convenient human invention now effectively contaminates the land, the air and the sea!

Actually, something else may be happening before convenient plastics and styros become inconvenient litter. Some scientists say that when these touch food, some of their toxic particles join up with the food. These get ingested in our bodies, contaminating our health, perhaps including our values system and mental health, making convenience our most important consideration.

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  June 12: Celebrating Galíng ng Pilipino Towards Attaining Real Independence

BY OFFICIAL habit, Filipinos wave or hang thousands upon thousands of Philippine flags and their multi-sized replicas whenever June 12 comes around. This date has been designated as Philippine Independence day on the basis of the public reading of a proclamation titled Acta de Independencia at a balcony in Kawit, Cavite on that day in 1898.

The annual celebrations are twice removed from reality. In the first place, the Acta actually proclaimed not an independent state but a protectorate, with Las Islas Filipinas merely switching foreign overlords from Spanish to American. Moreover, a people that is still being controlled indirectly but effectively by foreign economic interests and policies has no reason to celebrate an Independence Day. We have to attain real independence before we can have a legitimate reason for such.

But the official illusion being foisted upon us yearly have had some positive effects. On this date four years ago, a strong-willed lady took over a website project that had just been orphaned by the sudden death of a patriotic businessman, and led a small group of people in launching a new movement that would showcase the positive and more so the excellent in the Filipino.

On June 12, 2002 they launched the Galing Pilipino Movement or GPM. Two months later, on August 24, which is a much more historically-significant date being the anniversary of the birth of our nation and of its first national government, GPM joined the National Economic Protectionism Association (NEPA) and Kaisahan sa Kamalayan sa Kasaysayan (Kamalaysayan) in founding the Katipunang DakiLahi para sa Pambansang Pagsasanib-Lakas. We are proud that SALIKA joined this soon after. This synergy of these synergies has been growing to en-courage, affirm, and publicize the inborn greatness of our race that has been impeded for centuries by the continuing foreign subjugation of our nation.

Still, if we may paraphrase a bit, “you cannot put a great nation down, at least not completely!” Hindi mapigilan ang galíng ng Pilipino! Our compatriots at home or on foreign soil just can’t help but excel and keep shining, at times mistakenly competing more among themselves as they find themselves successful in reaching the top of the world, both figuratively and literally. June 12 is a date to celebrate the Filipinos’ galíng as we strive harder to eventually attain real independence.

We applaud the move made last June 12 by three Filipino-owned “small players” in the local petroleum industry. The three – Eastern Petroleum, Flying V, and Seaoil – put out a full-spread joint ad in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, titled “Sugod!”, to announce what they are doing for the nation’s quest for environment-friendly and lower-priced fuel products. The Eastern Petroleum’s powergas LPG conversion, so the announcement goes, “delivers equal power, better mileage and cleaner air for…35 percent less than gasoline. Eastern’s new system involves conversion kits and specially made LPG tanks that would occupy minimum trunk space.

Flying V’s “biodiesel blend” with “envirotek” additive boasts of delivering more complete combustion for vastly increased mileage, reducing exhaust emissions for clean air and a healthy environment. The ad says the over 950,000 loads in 10 months “prove the growing acceptance of the significant attributes of Flying V BioDiesel premium pump blend.”

SeaOil’s E10 Ethanol, used by “over 2 million motorists nationwide,” is claimed to be improving engine performance with its high octane rating and better combustion, environment-friendly, and less dependent on foreign oil. With less dependence on imported petroleum, E10 is said to reduce oil imports that drain our foreign reserves, and thus helps the Philippine economy.

To be sure, these are not by themselves represent the heaven-sent solution for our quest for “earth-friendly and wallet-friendly fuel.” But these are significant contributions to the effort, and they deserve to be at least tested by Filipino motorists. Unless the habit of trusting only the products of 100% foreign-owned companies, ironically coupled with celebrating “independence day” every June 12, has been invincibly entrenched in our “isip, salita at gawa,” a mentality that pushes further away the realization of our dream to attain real independence someday and have a clean environment as well!

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Social Acceptability and the Active Stakeholdership Imperative

GOVERNMENT policy that covers the issuance of an Environmental Compliance Certificate requires “proof of Social Acceptability” for any environmentally critical project anywhere or for any project in an environmentally-critical area. A housing project, per se, would not be an environmentally critical project. But if it is to be built in an environmentally-critical area, then it needs an ECC.

The water reservoir that supplies water being piped into the homes and workplaces of 12 million or so residents of the National Capital Region, is definitely an environmentally-critical area. Ergo, the housing project slated to be built for the unionized workers of NWSA/MWSS upstream from the La Mesa Dam water reservoir really needs an ECC.

What worries many Metro Manilans is that the project just might get that ECC! There is much basis for the apprehension: The DENR, which is the department awarding the ECC has not been known for really protecting environmentally-critical areas, and neither is the incumbent secretary widely known for that.. Malacañang can make sure DENR forgets environmental considerations on any case that might involve foreign business interests or politically-critical segments of the population like the rich and famous and their relatives.

Does not the law prohibit outright any environmentally-destructive undertaking? No, it just requires such projects to acquire an ECC, and that is not usually very difficult to get. Take social acceptability as a requirement for being issued an ECC. The requirement is only for securing a “Favorable endorsement from Brgy. of Muncipality.”

The stakeholders in the La Mesa Dam controversy are all the barangays in all the cities and towns receiving water from that dam! But DENR can easily interpret it to mean just the barangay covering the area where the dam is located or where the planned housing project is located!

But what is the essence of social acceptability even on an ECC question of very narrow significance? It means that the majority of the population in that place have excercised their right to free and informed choice as the stakeholders, the sovereign body politic of the community concerned.

Many ECCs have been issued in the past after a barangay captain alone had signed a “proof of social acceptability,” or the council signed right after a one-sided information campaign had been conducted among loyal supporters of the incumbent. Some ECCs that were issued carried some DENR bravado, threatening to give a set of “stiff” penalties that proponents can afford to ignore or laugh about. Something like “if they pollute our air and hundreds of people get sick we will fine them no less than a few thousand pesos!” Cheap!

But there has also been this saying, not really without wisdom, that the people get the quality of governance that they deserve. If the majority of people in any community allow such established behavior to continue, if the majority of actual stakeholders depend on a minority of conscious and active stakeholders to do all the fighting for them, negative consequences would surely follow. And these cannot be remedied by reactive ranting after all the harm had been done. Active stakeholdership is an imperative in the people’s collective self-defense against government acts that harm their legitimate interests. And such active stakeholders should be pro-active stakeholdership.

So, with regards to the La Mesa Dam issue, what will the majority of the actual stakeholders, the majority of tap water users – and tap water drinkers – do? They surely can’t all shift to the much more expensive bottled water!

Let us all shape up, learn and live the essence of active stakeholdership, assert and optimize the potentials of the social acceptability clause in ECC requirements by demanding effectively enough for its essence to be respected. Rizal said through character Simoun in Fili: “There are no tyrants where there are no slaves!”

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  Synergy for Environmental Education

THE ANNUAL Moonrise Film Festival is reaping this year yet another bountiful harvest in educational films, to be shown for two straight days at the Gateway Cineplex in Araneta Center Cubao in Quezon City on August 19 & 20. We laud the Center for Environmental Awareness and Education (CEAE) for consistent efforts to generate educational tools on Philippine culture and the environment in the powerful audio-visual form.

This will surely go a long way in raising the environmental awareness and sense of pride in our cultural heritage and diversity, as these generally low-budget but high-quality productions get shown to decision-makers and ordinary people all over the country. We salute all the members of competing and non-competing groups, who put their best effort and creativity to stretch budgets and chase deadlines. They are all heroes in our current efforts to rescue, rehabilitate and restore our environmental and cultural resources. As of now, we can extend happy congratulations to those entries that have garnered recognition for high quality in various aspects of these productions, even as we still have to know which entries would have the highest number of tickets sold.

Specifically, citations were received by the following entries, as announced by CEAE:

Wala nang Tiempos Muertos (No More Dead Season), a film on organic farming and the plight of the sakadas (sugarcane farmers) in Negros topped the Grand Charlie Award by Ford Motor's Conservation and Environmental Grants with a PhP 100,000 prize. The Citation on Marine and Aquatic Resources' at PhP 75,000, sponsored by the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources was presented to The Hidden Treasures of Agutayan. This showcases collective efforts in rehabilitating the Agutayan Marine Sanctuary in Mindanao.

Technical Awards on editing and cinematography went to The Gods of Rice, a film that looks at the impact of change on rice-growing communities that define Asia. Sa Dulo ng Paraiso (At the Edge of Paradise), a film produced by a church-based advocacy group in Mindoro which involved the active participation of the indigenous groups concerned, got the Best Production Team Award.

The Technical Awards at PhP 10,000 each were awarded by the festival organizer, the CEAE.. Youth-oriented volunteer groups also extended their appreciation to filmmakers who, through film, are helping ensure a sustainable future for the country's youth. Rock Ed Philippines, a volunteer and advocacy campaign group for alternative means of education and socio-civic actions hosted the first Moon Rock Award. The award went to Memories of the Sea, a film which essays the lives of the Badjao or sea gypsies in Manila who abandoned their seafaring lifestyle due to the long drawn war and sea piracy in Southern Philippines. Newly-formed volunteer group, ADD UP!, granted their first Add-Up! Volunteers Choice Award to The Silent Natives of Fuga. The film unfolds from a journey to the paradise island of Fuga into a nightmare that revealed the rampant poverty and malnutrition caused by unlivable rules imposed on the 2,000 poverty-stricken natives of the island. ADD UP! is a group of young volunteers who have bonded together to do their share in nation building through youth empowerment, educational reform and sustainable development.

These and all the other entries are competitors only in the formal sense, for in the context of broader realities in the environmental conservation scene. They are all actually in a big team-up. Together with other mass education projects for environmental education, including regular broadcasting programs, publications including the “green-page” section carriers among campus papers, regular like what we have been holding at Kamayan, exhibits and annual festivals.

We are also aware that all these Moonrise Festival entries are in themselves also products of teamwork, the synergy that all deep lovers of Mother Nature have learned well from her: healthy symbiosis in bio-diversity. So in each team of participants there would be a rich diversity of capabilities and even personal temperaments that are woven together by the strong synergizing power of strong commitment to the environmental cause, including a predisposition to unite, something we Filipinos have in our bayanihan heritage.

SanibLakas ng Inang Kalikasan (SALIKA) being a co-convenor of the Kamayan Forum and co-publisher of KFJ, we are familiar with the spirit of the synergism principle that produced the Moonrise Festival entry Hinga, Hingal, Hingalo… where SALIKA was one of the major partners of the Alternative Horizons Media Cooperative (AlterHorizons) that produced it. As Marie Marciano of both SALIKA and the video productions cooperative shared with KFJ, “We had practically no money for this project, but we got to do it, powered by the spirit of voluntarism and commitment to the work. The very beautiful effect of this project was really in synergizing the group. The people involved were all working so hard that you’d think we were being paid, even paid a lot. Actually all the money that our hardworking solicitor could raise was going to operations, and we even had to spend from our own pockets to augment this!” We can just imagine the other groups with their similar stories.

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  Human Development Imperative: Eliminate All Justifications for War!

SELF-DEFENSE has been invoked in wars that have been waged and are raging – specifically, many have been waged invoking a rather queer concept called “preemptive self-defense.” This is as absurd sa concept as “sustainable mining”!

But it made sense to King Herod when he or-dered the slaughter of the innocents all around Bethlehem some two thousand years ago. It doesn’t have to make sense to us in 2006.

Even self-defense, the legitimate principle, has to stop at defense. It has no reason to go into retaliation. “An eye for an eye” is supposed to have become an archaic dictum by now.

Much less do we subscribe to the logic of teaching anyone a lesson. The furious and vengeful can not be effective educators. Or at least, they can not be earnest and well-meaning educators as they may be wont to claim!

If we have to suffer by it one way or another, to whatever extent, let us not applaud any which side of the war. The logic of retaliation, eye for an eye and teaching lessons by overreaction are all signs of the sad fact that the human species has not yet evolved beyond the separative consciousness phase it has been in over thousands of years. It’s some-thing like evolving in intelligence to develop more and more sophisticated and increasingly efficient tools for shooting ourselves in the foot. It’s some-thing like feeling one foot irritating us with some pain and deciding hastily to just amputate that foot!

Yes, war is the surest sign that human development has been retarded. We are pre-sapiens!

And if humans are determined to kill humans, how can war freaks (actually war tycoons) be expected to care for the broader living reality populated by what we call the Environment?

On the occasion of the United Nations-declared Month of Peace, we invite everyone ti seriously study and make this “Unity Pledge” which was composed by a California-based SanibLakas Foundation member Shyam Tony Reyes.

I believe:

that humanity and all life emanate directly from One Eternal Source, which makes us all closely and deeply related to one another;

that the innate sense of oneness that comes from the heart can only be brought forth by the practice of love and not by any other means;

that my own true worth lies in the quality of my service to humanity;

that my brethren’s needs are peace, health, happiness and prosperity;

that our greatest common wealth is the goodwill that we share among all our brethren;

that the environment and the good of all people have to be protected to ensure lasting personal, national and international progress; and

that my thoughts and actions always make a difference, positively or negatively, the effects of which multiply in combination with those of many million others.

Therefore:

I will nurture only thoughts of truth, peace, inspiration, oneness, selflessness and Divine love which allow me to function in my best capacity;

I will keep abreast of international events, developments and trends so I can participate more effectively in national and global problem-solving, reconstruction and development efforts;

I will support and initiate efforts to protect the environment, to improve health care and nutrition services, and to promote economic ctivities that are ecologically sound and the benefits of which are equitably distributed;

I will seek ways to improve and strengthen our educational system, our system of government, the mass media and other public service institutions; and

I will live for enlightened fellowship through the daily practice of compassion for all and striving for excellence in my service and contribution to the human family.

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  An Alarming Situation

WHERE can you find a country acclaimed as a bio-diversity superstar prostituted to mostly foreign extractive industries, its pristine forests denuded, mountains laid bare and flattened, fertile soil and pure aquifers penetrated, poisoned and laid waste, its precious fresh-water bodies and seas contaminated?

Where can you find a people turned into unknowing guinea pigs in an experiment by unscrupulous transnational corporations without controls or accountability in spite of the threat to the food chain, and entire ecological fabric with its rich bio-diversity? And to complete the national betrayal and criminal assault on environmental and human rights enshrined in the Constitution, the same administration that allowed the above, is now poised to turn our unfortunate country into a dumpsite for another country’s waste. Only in the Philippines!

True, environmental degradation is nothing new in the Philippines and around the world. But the deliberate, systematic and indiscriminate despoliation of a country whose renewable wealth of flora and fauna above ground and in its seas have more value than the non-renewable mineral resources for which these are being sacrificed –now that is really shocking. So is replacing our rich and prolific biodiversity with monoculture and the sterile seeds of GMO’s, especially now when our farmers have realized the advantages of organic farming over the “sophisticated” model that uses chemical pesticides and fertilizers and an awakened world has put a higher premium on organic products and is rejecting GMO’s.

The third and ultimate betrayal is the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement which has opened the Philippines to all kinds of waste from Japan, toxic and hazardous included, by imposing no tariff on waste. This is a blanket invitation to turn the Philippines into Japan’s dumpsite when our own laws prohibit Filipinos from putting up dumpsites and incinerators! Is GMA already above the law? This law degrades not only our environment, but our very humanity, dignity and self respect! Is this how low GMA thinks of her own land and people? Negotiations for the Japan-Philippine Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA) started two years ago. But the people, including their representatives in Congress, were kept in the dark until after the treaty was quietly signed in Helsinki, Finland on Sept. 9, 2006 by GMA and Japan Prime Minister Junichiro Koijumi, away from the glaring lights of media. It seeks to remove barriers to investments and trade of goods and services between the two countries, including toxic waste!

Article 29 of the Basic Agreement allows waste trading, including the trading of ash and residues containing arsenic, mercury and thallium, incinerator ash, clinical/ hospital and pharmaceutical and chemical waste which are all toxic and hazardous.

This is in clear violation of international commitments like the Basle Convention and Philippine laws (RA 6969, RA 4653, RA 8749 and RA 9003).

The Philippines was the first country in the world to ban incinerators under the Clean Air Act (RA 8749) when the government realized that it could not deal with dioxin contamination from incinerator ash. Now it will be made the dumping ground for such deadly ash or residue, declared toxic and hazardous by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993. Also, the Ecological Waste Management Act (RA 9003) prohibits dumpsites.

The JPEPA will make the Philippines the dumpsite of Japan. We are still struggling with our waste problem because of the non-implementation of RA 9003 by most LGU’s, and GMA wants our country to take on a bigger and more dangerous waste problem! Why? Why??

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Coming Home to Our Living Quarters, Coming Home to Ourselves

KAMALAYSAYAN shares with us invaluable information on the healthy culture of our ancestors in this archipelago and this knowledge can help us regain our self-image as a noble race. It can also go a long way in rediscovering the highly effective nature-based health care knowledge that we have known all those thousands of years before the Iberian colonizer told us we were savages.

Advocating a keen and deep sense of history, instead of memorizing trivia from the fairly recent past like the time of Lapu-Lapu and Magellan, the 15-year-old association recently issued an article about “a dozen distinct endowments” from our ancestors, and three of the twelve treasures are very useful in coming home to our “living quarters” and to our very own selves.

1. “BATHALANG KALOOBAN” (Divine Spark at the Innermost Core or “Loob”) This is the Overflowing goodwill towards one another and towards the rest of creation has been our nature. Coupled with this goodwill at the very core of our being (“Magandang Loob”) has been the innermost sense of self-confidence in our own individual and collective capabilities (“Lakas ng Loob”) in the pursuit of goodwill-directed endeavors. Our own genesis legend of Malakas at Maganda, far from being a mere copy of the Jewish biblical version, pertained not to beautiful and strong physical bodies as widely interpreted, but to the innermost being – souls with the divine attributes of being all-good and all-mighty, of “magandang loob” and “malakas na loob.”

2. “BAHAY NA BUHÁY” (Living Quarters Within Nature’s Bounty) Not yet contaminated with the mental framework of Scarcity, which underpins much of human greed that was later introduced by western colonialist behavior, our ancestors co-habited and interacted very well within healthy eco-systems. Our tribal ancestors were like all other indigenous peoples the world over living in harmony and abundance with the rest of nature in their undisturbed home communities.

They cared for, and were nurtured fully by, their living quarters, with this last term deliberately meant to carry a double meaning: they lived healthy lives in their common “house” as given them by the Creator, and this “house” actually lived with them as fellow family members in a home. Part of our natural resources has been our indigenous culture which values and cares well for the rest of such resources, fully enjoying the reality of symbiosis with them.

6. BABAYLAN (Doctors for Holistic Health) Our long tradition centered on the babaylan (shamans, usually female) indicates the efficacy of folk health care systems that combined the well-studied use of appropriate herbs with spiritual rituals and practices to maintain health and to cure specific illnesses. Much of our traditional health practices were drastically suppressed after having been dismissed as mere superstition or, worse, witchcraft. The colonizers even declared practitioners of these as open targets for murder. But many of these practices are now being recognized and revived by bio-medical physicians and spiritual healers who understand and appreciate well the holistic health paradigm now gaining ground around the world since the last few decades of the 20th century.

Each Filipino who wills to inherit such noble wealth of character in our loob, worthy to be recognized as Anak ng Dakilang Lahi, are thus challenged to rediscover and develop these wealth of heritage to enhance, among others, our invaluable wealth of good health. Each of us who heeds the two-fold Prime Directive, “MagpakaTao at Makipagkapwa-Tao!” would be well prepared to use fully the bounties of our Living Quarters, our common home, for all our basic needs including prevention and cure of illnesses whether physical, emotional, psychological or spiritual, the only way holistic health is ever attainable.

Together, we can apply on this as we ought to apply on everything else, our ancestors’ way of taming up and synergizing well. This is the third in the list of the dozen treasures from our heroic heritage. It goes by a well-known name – bayanihan.

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  Faithfully Fatalist? ‘Di Naman Siguro!’

"HINDI naman siguro!” this kind of retort to a justified warning of some dire consequence of a decision would tend to summarize our strong tendency, nay faithfulness, to being comfortably fatalist.

That sentence textually says the possible harm is quite unlikely, and socio-economic pressures are said to be pushing us against the wall, leaving us “no choice” but to banish all traces of paranoia and even reasonable foresight away from our mindset.
Occasionally, we can sense a tinge of nervousness in saying this, with fingers even crossed behind our backs. We could even hear the unspoken “sana” (let’s hope) in place of “siguro” in that sort of self-assurance.
But this happens only occasionally, specifically at times when some big tragedy had just occurred and our minds get to swallow the reality behind the warnings we had earlier dismissed as unlikely. And this aberrant behavior (tongue in cheek here) lasts, comfortably, very briefly.
As new dramas replace a recent tragedy in the front pages and primetime of the mass media, disasters and tragedies recede from our memory and we’re back to being our usual fatalist selves.

But this mindset, the diametrical opposite of believing in Murphy’s Law (“If anything wrong can happen, it will!”) is perhaps caused not by great socio-economic pressures but by some other hidden malady in our collective psyche – our aversion to inconvenience.
For example, we know that throwing a banana peel in the middle of the sidewalk, or leaving one there as if we didn’t see it, is not at all caused by being pressed against the wall by our economic poverty. This can cause some tragic accident on someone else (or some loved one or some of those who had earlier ignored it) who can slip on it.

Our tendency to be dismissive with our “Hindi naman siguro” attitude is not based on any mathematical logic with the statistical science of probability. We know, almost for sure, that an accident can very likely happen, considering the sheer number of people rushing in both directions along that sidewalk. But our aversion to inconvenience would almost always push us to settle for false peace of mind.

So who would bother to undertake that very in-convenient burden of stopping bending down to pick up that banana peel? Not I, said the cat. Not I, said the dog, not I… that’s the job of government!

Well, we know that we pay more than enough taxes to expect improved government performance in serving the citizenry, such service being the only reason we are being made to pay taxes. But for our own good, we can really exert the effort to make that inconvenient stoop to pick up the banana peel, or try to feed it to the one who threw it in the first place. Because we can’t depend on government. We want to prevent an accident, and not just be concerned about whom to blame when it happens.

Now, there are real hazards lying around the “sidewalks” of our daily lives, and they are bigger risks than banana peels. Residents of Marilao, Bulacan found out about one such hazard recently while they were not yet out on the sidewalks but sleeping peacefully in their homes. The hazard is composed of the existence of toxic waste, with a government incapable of effectively enforcing its own laws on the proper handling of such wastes, and a prosecution system that vests violators with the shield of near impunity. (We would like to be proven wrong in the Marilao case—jail the culprits and close down their firm!)

There’s a bigger hazard on the horizon. It is called JPEPA, short for Japan-Philippine Economic Partnership Agreement. Malacañang had earlier directed it to be negotiated in complete secrecy and then signed it as an executive agreement before being reminded that it needed to be Senate ratification before it could come into force. JPEPA provides for the entry into the Philippines of toxic waste from Japan, which Japan wouldn’t like to threaten the health of its own citizens. Filipino backers of JPEPA are saying that provisions for the dumping here of toxic wastes were just included but we have laws that prohibit them, anyway. They are in effect saying they were just fooling the Japanese! It’s us they’re fooling!

How sure are they that the toxic wastes will not be dumped here? They change the subject and say more Filipino nurses and caregivers will get jobs in Japan. We can say that under JPEPA Japanese toxic wastes will be dumped on us! And the answer of those who are pushing for the ratifiication of JPEPA and also of those seeking to avoid the “inconvenience” of opposing it vigorously:

“Hindi naman siguro!”

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Let’s All Rally Behind a Common Banner Call!

WHILE WE ARE doing all we can in the environmental conservation movement to protect, rescue and rehabilitate our Mother Nature, our beloved Inang Kalikasan, we will definitely work better by learning more from the wisdom of her ways.

Symbiosis, as dynamic interdependence, is the synergetic song of nature, upholding the value of stability as founded on the synergy of widely di-verse members of every ecosystem, big or small. People have realized by now that variety does not necessarily lead to conflict and, further, to destruction, and quite on the contrary we have valued bio-diversity as the foundation of habitat stability. In fact many people are more ready to embrace this than accept human equality and harmony alongside ethnic and cultural diversity.

Still, with all that diversity around us, which we have come to perceive and appreciate only partially, Nature sings in rich harmony a single song of celebrating life together. Even if unconsciously and also indirectly, an animal is celebrating the phenomenon of photosynthesis, while flowers bloom in appreciation of the pollinating work of insects! They, we, are all part of one beautiful symphony, the symphony of life.

We have to learn synergy from Mother Nature. We have to learn to work very closely together while fully respecting, even celebrating, the diversities within our ranks. We have to learn to sing together in the varying voices of bass, tenor, alto and soprano our common song of celebrating life. Let’s start with the unifying song. It has been proposed that we all adopt an overarching banner call and consistently rally behind it.

Specifically, the call would be to work for “Safe Food, Healthy Environment and Sustainable Economy for All." Kamayan Forum Journal supports this formulation of an overarching call, that we all can pair harmoniously with whatever specific-issue slogans we carry from time to time and from area to area. This would emphasize to the people, to the government, to all players in the environment scene, and, most importantly, to all of us advocacy groups and people’s organizations, that we are consistent and are singing the same song to promote and protect our common natural environment.

With such a heightened feeling of oneness within the broad environmental movement in this country, we can consider ways of building mechanisms for closer coordination and mutual support among the various groups, especially among active players in the same lines of advocacy and carrying on the same campaigns, without any which group feeling unduly commanded or, worse, used. For this reason, we caution against any tendency to unduly hasten the quest for closer and closer convergence.

“Umbrella organizations” with only the leaders committing their entire organizations to recognize a “joint-command” are quite easy to form, but leading their entire respective constituencies to share a culture of dynamic harmony, and getting their mandate for such umbrella-building efforts to have any long-lasting value, is much more difficult, especially if we start on the wrong foot, like inadvertently excluding some groups for extraneous reasons. Such effort to unify might even backfire and have an opposite effect.

“Joint command” structures do not find models in the synergy of nature. Hierarchies like these, which can likely stifle creativity and initiative in the field, are, historically, human inventions that arose from our species’ fixation with systems of control and compulsion. Let us learn well from the natural processes of Mother Nature herself.

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  Active Stakeholdership for Active Teamwork

FOR EVIL to triumph, good people have only to do nothing. The evil of continuing environmental destruction, including the acceleration of global warming currently evidenced by winds turned cold by melting arctic ice, is allowed to be the trend because the majority of our species have not mustered enough desperate energies to avert what has started to look like the terminal destruction of life on this planet.

Defeatism and finger-pointing have provided most of us with excuses not to be active stakeholders in our own survival! It’s like conducting endless investigations on who had punched a big hole in the hull of Noah’s Ark…while our giant boat sinks.

Having called ourselves homo sapiens, with the second term implying possession of wisdom, we still have to get our act together as a race, we have to have effective teamwork for our own survival. Teamwork is not merely teaming up among ourselves.

The synergy of teamwork comes from the bringing together of the energies needed to do some work. There can be no teamwork among people in blissful slumber, unless the cacophony of snoring can be called a “symphony.”

We need active stakeholdership at the personal level, and hardworking teamplay from the scope of the family’s home to the neighborhoods’ “common backyards,” to our common planetary habitat. Now!

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  Elections and the Environment

LET US STRIVE for democracy, but only for real democracy, which is the productive and beneficial synergy of the human bodies, human minds and human spirit of all for the interests of all. Let us be shorn of all partisan snobbishness and personality-oriented biases, so we can all be worthy advocates and beneficiaries of democracy, of the rule of law and of human equality, dignity and harmony.

That way, we can extricate ourselves from the ridiculous situation with two warring camps of “democracy-lovers”: one partisan camp self-righteously calling upon us all to “defend” democracy while the other partisan camp self-righteously calls for us to fight to “restore” it.
Democracy has to be a synergy of all human social and natural capabilities to address all human needs in every big and small community, where the bigger-scope communities are synergies of smaller-scope communities, all the way to the family and the individual human.

The people’s self-empowerment process through the “magical” application of the principle of synergism is the only way the people can be empowered. Not by proxy empowerment whereby an entity seeks the people’s help to capture and consolidate political power and promises to exercise such power consistently in the service of the people’s “objective class interests,” earnestness assumed.

Neither by token empowerment whereby an entity already in power grants bits of high-publicity seats of participation in decision-making processes to representatives of the people but making sure to protect its own narrow interests from being really disturbed by such representatives.

Only the people’s direct self-empowerment can work to establish real democracy.
In the words of Prof. Nito Doria of UST Social Research Center: “If progress is to be shared and enjoyed by all, then it must be the achievement of all, the result of concerted effort of a responsible citizenry to make progress a way of life for the nation; not the result of some singular heroic effort of some exceptional individual who does not exist except in myth.

“A responsible citizenry, however, is just a concert of responsible individual citizens liberated, informed and empowered, and made responsible for their own welfare, It must necessarily be in that sequence of development, for one cannot expect to make a responsible citizen out of one who remains un-liberated, un-informed and un-empowered.

“A strategy for national progress must be an exhilarating liberating factor in the nation’s life, one that will free the Filipinos from the disquiet and listlessness generated by failed models of dogmata that have shackled their mind for centuries and inevitably made them dependent on and beholden to the patronage of oppressive power.

“Such a strategy can be no less than a new conceptual scheme, no less than what Thomas Kuhn in a landmark dissertation, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, refers to as a ‘paradigm shift.’ ”

If we may add a paraphrase of what I state in the previous section, “failure to have such a strategy has been our consistent strategy for failure.” And we bring in Albert Einstein, describing insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting to get a different result. We cannot possibly solve problems with the same thinking we had when we created them.”

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  Still in Denial After 15 Years?

FIFTEEN YEARS ago, two historical events took place in Humankind’s relationship with our planetary habitat.

First, in June of that year, the world’s nations met in an “Earth Summit,” in Rio de Janeiro to discuss the Earth’s environmental problems. Also known by its formal name, the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED), this was the largest gathering of heads of state in the history of the world, and it was called because of the danger of losing our planet.

Five months later, on November 18, 1992, a document titled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” was released. More than 1,600 senior scientists from 71 countries, including over half of all Nobel Prize winners still living then, signed that document.
It was the most alarming warning the world has ever received from such a powerful body of researchers. You would think that this document would hold great credibility and that the world would carefully listen. But there’s something about what selective hearing does to inconvenient truths.

The document began: “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices out at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and many so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.”

The warning document enumerates the crises: polluted water, oceans, soil, atmosphere; diminishing plant and animal species and human overpopulation… The words become stern:

“No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we know confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. We the undersigned, senior members of the world’s scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead.

A great change in our stewardship of the earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home pm this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”

Yet, most of the world rejected this statement even though it was created by one of the most respected scientific bodies ever assembles on earth. You would think we would pause and say, “ If this is true what can we do? Let’s drop everything and do whatever is necessary.”

But the governments know that if we are to avert this crisis, we must change the way we live, and that would not be politically comfortable. No politician wants to be the one to introduce this unpopular change. To the governments, the economy would suffer and perhaps even collapse if we were to stop polluting. So it has become a war of money against life. Now, money, per se, is not really the root of all evil. What is the root of all evil is anyone’s love for money that exceeds his or her love for life!

Let’s ponder this point again—This warning gave us “one or a few more decades” to avert this crisis. And it was written 15 years ago!!!
And it is not exactly a reassuring realization that the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2002, the supposed sequel of the Rio Summit, negated for the sake of profits the most important victories gained by environmental conservation during the Rio event of exactly a decade before.

We have the freedom to ignore the 15-year-old warning and all subsequent ones. We have the free choice to keep on, business as usual. We have the right to choose between being familiar with the truth and act accordingly, or we can choose stubbornly maintained ignorance, for as the saying goes, ignorance is bliss. Apparently we have clearly chosen money and convenience over life and survival. Terminally ill patients would have an equivalent stage for it. Denial, to be followed, sooner or later—probably sooner—by death.  

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  Reach the Homes, Schools, Workplaces… Reach the People’s Hearts!

WE CAN’T afford to maintain the current rate of development of the green movement, more specifically of its snail-paced expansion. We need to motivate the multitudes across the archipelago into mobilizing themselves as active stakeholders within and outside our parameters of organized action.

We have said exactly this in our editorial last month in the Kamayan Forum Journal. And we see a big need to repeat it, and this: “Let each member of each green organization go out of her/his comfort zone and undertake to motivate at least a dozen of her/his own family members, neighbors, friends and workmates to mobilize themselves to be active stakeholders and to mobilize, in turn, a dozen or so each. It can be done. It has to be done. We cannot afford to wallow in defeatist hesitation on this! We have to melt the boundaries between the acknowledged environmental activists and the rest of the population and build bridges of effective communication between these widely disproportionate sets of people.”
Let us now stare at the gap we have to breach between the hundreds or thousands of committed environmental activists and the rest of the Filipino people numbering in their dozens of millions. These are the consciousness and the ethical values gap.

We have been straining our resources to address the information component of the consciousness gap. We have been holding activities and issuing primers and press releases to get our information printed and broadcast by the mass media and we have had reason to celebrate great and modest successes. But the effects of the mess media, although very very important, have had to be filter through the people’s sphere of interest so that they would spot, read and finish the news reports that do get into the newspapers they actually buy, so that they would listen with interest and full attention to items aired on radio and television about our environmental stands and actions.

They must be drawn to own those concerns and own those actions, fully identifying with these stands and actions at least in spirit.
For this reason, the consciousness gap can never be fully addressed by the circulation of information, even if we could double or treble our current output. There is the sorely lacking success in education.

It was only very recently that a convergence of various organizations was able to arrive at a very clear articulation of the integration of all issues, major and minor, an integrated call that is unmistakably a life-and-death interest of every Filipino man, woman and child and therefore the motivating basis for every single one of us to be an active stakeholder. This is the call for all to converge for safe food, healthy environment and sustainable economy. If we can really succeed in getting the people to grasp firmly such integration, that would be a significant success in education. After that is achieved, many more people will pay real attention to the items we can get the print and broadcast media to carry.

Education goes to the mind in the latter’s integrative function, more on the level of comprehension and discernment that would be enough to motivate them to self-mobilize for environmental conservation, to self-mobilize for actions that would get them out of their comfort zones, for sustained significant actions that are now urgently needed to address effectively the current levels of environmental crisis we are now all facing.

Effective education goes to the heart, and opens, or further opens, the mind. Without this, the people who get to see or hear the results of our media output would be moved just enough to make them shake their heads and say “Tsk! Tsk! Tsk! Grabe!”

In such education, the role of the peers is very important. The impact and other effects even of formal seminars are optimized to a large extent by peer processing. In the absence of these formal learning processes, it is oftentimes purely the peers or peer groups that educate people, on analysis of data and of ethical values involved. The environmental activists should therefore be known and really felt by the people in their teeming millions as their peers, speaking their own language, considering their own problems and contexts, feeling their own feelings.

There should therefore be many more committed activists consciously advancing the environmental cause right in the homes and neighborhoods, in the campuses and workplaces, in the fishing boat fleets and in the market stalls, in the tricycle and jeepney queues -- where the people are. Our environmental movement has to reach the people where they are. We have to reach their hearts!

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  Needed: A Government the People Can Trust!

WE’VE LONG BEEN searching for solutions to our festering environmental problems. One of these problems has been our overextended dependence on the highly-pollutive and expensively-imported petroleum products to run our transportation vehicles, industrial machineries and power plants. Actually, there has been a wider consensus among many countries of the world that petroleum-based fuels have to be phased out at the soonest time possible because their combustion, along with the burning of other fossil-based fuels, accounts for the bigger bulk of carbon dioxide emissions that has caused global warming to worsen to unprecedented levels, with dire consequences for the planet.

Comes now the phenomenon of biofuels, which can really wean the energy-starved world away from dependence on petroleum. But the concerns raised by some quarters in the Philippines and around the world, even by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNDP, see page 2), is that big business will just take the opportunity to replace their “petro-profits” with bigger incomes from the biofuels, including the planting of power-plant crops that can take over what are now forest areas and food producing farms.

Now if we review our high school lessons about what governments are existing for, we can sit back and relax because, really, no honest-to-goodness government worth even just a tiny fraction of the taxes it collects would allow its citizens to be put at a disadvantage, to go hungry because the businessmen and the farmers among them would plant lucrative biofuels crops instead of food.

But if reviewed the newspaper items in the past decade or so, we get the very strong impression that we have had no such honest-to-goodness government hereabouts.

Or haven’t we read about the million hectares of land in this farms-scarce country sold by government to the land-rich mainland China, so the latter could start biofuels enterprises in the Philippines?

Many of the issues making people apprehensive about replacing petroleum-based fuel with biofuels stem directly from lack or absence of confidence that the government would exercise whatever prudence it could muster to protect the most basic interests of its broad citizenry. Many of us feel this government, at first opportunity, will do what is quite the exact opposite, for its own official and unofficial fundraising activities.

We can only wish it were actually still sane to entrust our lives to this government. After all, doesn’t it consider population a “big problem,” too? Worsened mass starvation can “solve” that! We ought to be glad we cannot be sold outright as slaves. At least not yet.

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  Vote for the People’s Servant-Leaders!

IT WAS Dr. Jose Rizal who said, through one of his novel characters that “There are no tyrants where there are no slaves. We can only enjoy as much democracy as we can successfully demand for. This is true especially in the localities where the foundation of any such democracy should stand if it can stand at all. It is in the localities where the officials ought to behave unmistakably as the facilitators and representatives of the people’s will that functionaries of larger-scope government entities should invariably hear and obediently heed. These local officials should not be allowed to continue being slave-herders of officials in larger-scope government instrumentalities.

Being mostly politicians, these officials have the strong tendency to behave as rulers, instead of as servant-leaders. How can we know which ones of the reelectionists and the challengers deserve our vote in the barangay election, when one is finally held?
Let’s see first the complete process that a local community must undergo in order to protect its legitimate interests, including defense of patrimony.

The community people have to chart their own collective path of development, with full control and judicious use of all the natural and cultural resources under their collective stewardship. The people have all the reason to be pro-active, and their own plan should be respected by all as the main plan. (National government entities and various other players may respectfully propose alternative plans.)

The people have the right to insist on being effectively facilitated as they undertake to forge their own collective specific green agenda, their own cultural-environmental-economic program. Once such a program has been hammered out by the people, it becomes the sworn duty of their local government officials to help them assert such program.

Who would be the best facilitators and advocates of the people of the barangay to serve them in their consensus-building and in asserting their will? The local folks have reason to vote such servant-leaders to be the officials in their barangay halls!

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