Patrimony is not just the material assets handed over. Patrimony takes its meaning and value from the act of care for the inheritors; the act of providing for what they will need. Patrimony is greatly invested with provident concern for the beneficiaries. Patrimony also implies inclusiveness. The patrimonial grant is intended for everyone: it is a birthright, a claim by virtue of simply being born into the community.

Unfortunately, for us Filipinos, we do not have this collective sense of patrimony. We read that our ancestors, the tribal and indigenous peoples had it. But colonization and the leadership and politics it engendered supplanted this consciousness. We have also lost the sense of the “commons” and of responsibility for the common good. Again, the loss is not just about the material assets, but more tragically, loss of our sense of community in the here and now, and in continuity with the past and future generations. We may may claim strong family ties, but our communitarian values have been severely undermined by the colonial experience and the brand of social organizing and governance that followed, and prevails to this day.

How else explain the current condition of our environment? A recent report from a EU study observes that the Philippines had managed, in the period 2000 to 2005, to reduce its forest cover to 24% of total land area….among the smallest in Southeast Asia, second only to Singapore.

The remaining forest cover is one of the smallest among all tropical countries, and even well below the dry Mediterranean countries like Greece and Italy. It is said to be at the level of Saharan countries. Our forest to population ratio is only 0.1 hectare of forest per head, one of the worst in the world. That society and government allowed this depradation to happen, indicates a fatal blindness of the heart, the cause of which is the very same that has earned this country to be ranked as among the most corrupt.

Before we can talk about protecting our patrimony, we must first work on identifying with nature, our Mother Earth, as wanting to nurture all her children. Then we must retrieve the sense of the “commons” by leaving much of nature open to all, including the creatures that are imperiled of extinction, because some people continue to destroy their habitat.

Then we must convince ourselves, and our irresponsible leaders, of the urgency of protecting the environment given the mounting climate disasters. Only then can we recover a sense of the value of patrimony, and authentically feel the need to protect it.

COMMON SENSE dictates to all of us by this time in Hu¬man History that we abhor slavery. This was not the situation as recently as just a few centuries ago. Earlier, especially in far-flung colonies of even the most “bene¬volent” of monarchies, the royalty and aristocracy owning slaves was common sense. The Human has progressed indeed in its quest to validate the word sapiens in the name of the species.

But long after the monarchial clans lost their crowns, something has remained that eludes sapiens logic. It is the Regalian Doctrine of private landownership. That remain- ing vestige of primitive human arrangements propped up by only by weaponry and brainwashing, has persisted to this day.

Having enjoyed its spoils for decades and even centuries, landowning clans use all the tools available to them to assert stubbornly that they have the “right” to own parcels of Nature because they had bought these. Trace the paper trail of receipts and it gets back to simple grabbing of lands previously held in common by actual residents and tillers. Unless anyone can show a receipt from the Creator, they’ve all been buying stolen property!

But various factors are blocking us in the performance of this responsibility. Large sections of our population are even now being deprived their rightful share in partaking of this patrimony, due to such factors as insatiable greed of the elite, on the one hand, and passive even if grudging acquiescence of the majority, on the other. Due to this and to its expected worsening, the birthright of hundreds of millions of Filipinos yet unborn, has now been placed in serious jeopardy.

The most important consideration in this judgment is the admitted incapability of the Montalban Methane Power Corporation 9mmpc) to recover, for turning into electric power, even just half the amount of methane expected to be collected from the cities and lone municipality in the national capital region. This means the bulk of methane to be produced in the landfill of this energy-generating facility would be a net contributor of large amounts of methane gas to the greenhouse gases directly causing the global climate change.

Methane is said to have 23 times more warming potential than carbon. Instead of the garbage being segragated at source for the methane producers to be composted immediately, this will be collected and allowed to spoil the atmosphere even more.

Speakers at the forum were Dr. Helen N. Mendoza, chair of the Philippine Network on Climate Change (PNCC); Sonia Mendoza, chair of Mother Earth Foundation, and Rei Panaligan, national coordinator of the Ecological Waste  Coalition (EcoWaste).

MMPC executive vice president Danilo Cantiller was invited to the forum but declined, citing other priorities. The invitation was for him to come or send a qualified representative. He decided to do neither.

The three are Bacolod City, Negros Occidental; Iloilo City in Panay island; and Catarman City in Northern Samar. The WED-Phils. network’s Annual Assembly in Batangas City next June will finally choose among the nominees which one will be the national site to host the WED commemoration in the Philippines in June 2010.

The WED-Philippines secretariat will formally inform shortly the local governments and the civil society organizations involved of their respective cities' having been nominated and basics and specifics of what, in the minimum, would be entailed in being a national site.  WED-Philippines has been hosted in Quezon City (2001 and 2002), Puerto Princesa City (2003 and 2008), Cagayan de Oro City (2004), Baguio City (2005), Tagbilaran City (2006), and Davao City (2007).