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Kamayan para sa Kalikasan
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FORUM OVERVIEW (click here) MAIN NEWS SECTION (right below) OTHER SECTIONS (click here)
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FORUM
ECHOES
Only citizen groups can save planet now
AFTER the participants heard the
explanations and narrations of the climate change process that ended in
the UN-convened summit in Copenhagen, Denmark last December, they agreed on a
consensus that the needed broad-based efforts to mitigate the crisis and to
effectively adapt to it cannot be left to governments and inter-government
talks.
“We will now have to depend on Civil Society actions, especially at the level of grassroots communities to make possible the rescue of our planet to sustain life as we have known it,” according to the main forum speaker Marie Marciano, who had attended as delegate both the summit and a series of preparatory conferences.
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FORUM
FOCUS ‘Greening the Electorate’ for stronger, more assertive stakeholders in survival
THE Copenhagen Summit
on Climate Change
last
December was a pathetic
debacle of the Human Race. The supposedly-"sapiens" species clearly failed to defeat
the "profit-making-as-usual" attitude of the powerful governments and
corporate giants ignoring an acute and even worsening danger to the whole planet
and to the whole of Humankind. Profit "logic" has forced the nations
of the world into passively agreeing to an idiotic mass suicide mode. Oneness of All is,
apparently, still very
far off from
present levels of our supposed “homo sapiens sapiens
wisdom."
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Active Stakeholdership Should Reflect on our Votes THE legitimate collective and individual interests of the Filipinos can only be served well and effectively asserted, especially if under threat or in instances of official and unofficial violation, by convincingly motivating the overwhelming majority of the people to mobilize themselves in their teeming tens of millions to exercise active stakeholdership over these interests.
Officials and leaders that carry motivations
other than earnest public service can never be relied upon to manage our
collective affairs to our collective advantage. Having separated
their interests from ours they, almost invariably, enrich and perpetuate
themselves in power as most of us sink ever deeper in worsening poverty. How about us, at least as consumers which we
all undoubtedly are? One glaring proof
of our altered indolence, of our lack of active stakeholdership,
has been our inability over all these decades to build and sustain astrong
consumer-protection movement! As voters, we have just been submitting entries
to a “guess-the-winnners” contest!
Consider for a moment our obvious vital
biological needs as human beings, namely our need to have sustainable access
to enough safe food to eat, enough safe water to drink, and enough safe air to
breathe. Government officials in the
Philippines and other countries, motivated by interests other than noble, and
supported with explanations by experts similarly driven, have been coming out
with overt and covert policies that threaten seriously, or even destroy
outright, our collective chance for such sustainable supply.
The sustainable supply of safe food and water,
for instance, can only be guaranteed by a healthy environment, as prudently
and creatively managed within sustainable economics.
The interdependent systems for safe food, for healthy environment and for
sustainable economy have continually been jeopardized by projects and schemes that promise to promote convenience and to satisfy
human greed, as if that were possible at all!
Our chance for survival has continually been
eroded by such decisions of the greedy and short-sighted officials, using
glib-tongued apologists and brutal military might to have their way pushed
against the reservations, nay outright protests, of people with enough
information and common sense.
Thus the current urgent imperative is for us, the
people, to be fully motivated to act together, in our tens of millions,
to break free from apathy and spectatorship and engage instead in
actions that would save ourselves and our country from complete disintegration
and ruin. We don’t have much time left, with apathy, defeatism and divisiveness
plaguing our ranks, in the face of the worsening planetary climate change
crisis.
Stakeholdership is a fact of life, of our
individual lives and our collective life. We are all in this together.
But we need to move from de facto stakeholdership to conscious
stakeholdership.
And, conscious of our individual and collective stakeholdership, we would
surely feel deeply the imperative of acting effectively to promote and protect
our individual and collective stakes. For real pro-people systems to be set up and sustained, we have to build, even if painstakingly, an atmosphere of good citizenship: having enough political will to ensure good governance, a social milieu where individuals, groups and social institutions, including governance bodies, that are truly committed to the promotion and practice of the following values and principles:
1. Value of Life.
Uphold
the value of Life – human life, quality of life of people, quality of life of
the community itself, and the life of the natural environment which is the
community’s home — as immeasurable and therefore can not be assigned a monetary
price. In making decisions, therefore, it is imperative for the community to
consider which of the options would best promote the Life of the community and
of its home.
2. Truth. As a living
channel of reliable information for the community, real servants of the people
should seek out and systematically collate all important data involving the
environment of the community and shall spread any information labeled with its status
of certainty, i.e. whether it is a proven certainty, a likelihood, a possibility,
etc. Because the community needs complete and reliable information, all who
spread inaccurate data labeled as “certain” should be made to lose their
credibility.
3. Community’s Right to Decide its Affairs and
its Future.
Uphold the citizens’ right to decide
issues that affect their common welfare. Organizations should help the
community form its decisions on the basis of a free flow of information and
opinions in open and honest discussions, and should exercise significant
suasion on government units concerned to consider fully such decisions. Basic
principles of democratic governance mandate that in the conservation and
disposition of a community’s natural and social resources, the community’s will
should be decisive, and on issues affecting larger scopes of governance
(municipal, provincial, etc.) the expressed will of the small communities
forming the larger constituencies, through their synergized thoughts and
decisions, should be considered decisive.
4. Value
of Unity and Synergy. In all actions, be
guided by the Prime Directive: build and strengthen the unity of the
people. Link up the unlinked, coordinate the uncoordinated and seek to
act as living bridge among organizations or sections of the population that are
not relating enough or at all, or are even hostile to one another. The best
interests of the community can only be fully established and effectively
asserted through unity and strong synergy (many people working really
closely together, teaming up on the basis of their commonalities and
diversities) to counteract the pressures of entities that tend to harm
these interests.
5. Indivisible Basic Rights. Organizations’ leaders
snd members ought not undertake any act or even pronounce a declaration that
would violate any of the basic rights of the citizens to freedom of thought and of expression,
freedom of association and of collective action, or any of the basic human
rights of the persons within or outside the community. They should exert best
efforts to help the community members to recognize and effectively assert their
human rights which are an inseparable consequence of their dignity as human
persons. AREN'T WE ALL STAKEHOLDERS in whether or not these values are alive in the systems, in our social milieu, and upheld actively by the majority? Shouldn’t our votes reflect this fact? Have most of us have really given up on even just dreaming for this? |
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For Deeper Stakeholder Empowerment ‘Greening the Electorate’ for stronger, more assertive stakeholders in survival THE Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change last December was a pathetic debacle of the Human Race. The supposedly-"sapiens" species clearly failed to defeat the "profit-making-as-usual" attitude of the powerful governments and corporate giants ignoring an acute and even worsening danger to the whole planet and to the whole of Humankind. Profit "logic" has forced the nations of the world into passively agreeing to an idiotic mass suicide mode. Oneness of All is, apparently, still very far off from present levels of our supposed “homo sapiens sapiens wisdom."
In fairness to the entire Humankind, only a small but financially-,
politically-
and militarily-powerful minority rammed its profiteering “logic” against the
more prudent sensibilities of the vast majority of earth inhabitants. But the conditions obtaining on the planet are such that the majority is extremely vulnerable to being held by the neck by a profit-fixated elite among nations, and within individual nations. This has led some of the dismayed participants in the years-long international discourse over climate change to give up on government and inter-government will and capability to turn the global warming situation toward a slowdown and a u-turn very soon. The hopes have recently been pinned on Civil Society, the respective citizenries of the countries supposed to be served fully by the governments that operate on the basis of their mandates and consent. The mandates are extracted from populations through ballots they are made to cast periodically, but in many cases, suffrage has only meant getting the people to participate in the forging of their own chains.
In the Philippines, supposed to be a show window of a
working democracy in Asia, the electorate is largely vulnerable to the
manipulative workings of a system where democracy is maintained only in
appearances but not in essence. Accurate count has been highlighted as the most
crucial imperative’ distracting the citizenry from paying attention to the
quality of the votes to be counted, in terms of the candidates’ fidelity to
their respective popular aspirations and legitimate interests, including
their very survival. In this year’s national and
local elections,
“trapo” culture rules the minds
and behavior of both the candidates and the electorate, proving that the evils
of “trapo” politics cannot be validly blamed entirely on the “trapo”
politicians.
Candidates are fixated on winning, by fair means or foul,
no matter if none of them convincingly exhibits the desire and capability to
serve the people’s interests. Voters are largely fixated on supporting
candidates mainly on the basis of vaunted “winnability” and the prospects of
their offer, primarily to their active supporters, of undue advantage over
other voters in terms of various benefits. Two questions that always crop up
while considering a candidate are “Can he win?” and “What is in his possible
victory for me or for my family or small group?”
The state of the environment both in the nationwide scale
and within each locality has been held hostage by government officials who are
often very vulnerable to pressures from powerful proponents of
environmentally-destructive
projects and to temptations of personal windfall. In this context the February 19, 2010 of the Kamayan
para sa Kalikasan monthly environment forum, will focus its discussion
on
“Greening and Helping Empower the Electorate.” The "Greened Electorate" shall be
composed of well-informed passionate guardians of the natural environment as
active, outspoken and demanding stakeholders, who would exact clear
commitments from candidates and will not allow the latter to take them for
granted. We can't afford to be any less; literally, our lives are on the line!
The invited resource persons include Manny
Calonzo, president of the Eco-Waste Coalition; Don
Flordeliza,
chairperson of Philippine Centre for Transformative Politics; Roy Cabonegro, Secretary-General of the Partido Kalikasan; Andy
Rosales of Maging Tapat Movement; David D’Angelo, of the Pang-masa network; and a representative of KPNE.
They will
all be asked to present and explain their respective efforts to wean
voters from fixation on winnability and turn them into veritable jurists demanding
for observance of their rights, judging and exacting apt rectificaion and
retribution on whatever improper behavior and pronouncements may come candidates,
of the Commission on Elections, the military, and all other organized and
informal players in the electoral exercise this year. The Kamayan
Forum is convened on the third Friday of every month, from 10:30 a.m.
to 2 p.m. at the Kamayan-Saisaki
restaurant along EDSA (near SEC, Ortigas) in Mandaluyong
City. - |
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Only citizen groups can save planet now
AFTER the participants heard the
explanations and narrations of the climate change process that ended in
the UN-convened summit in Copenhagen, Denmark last December, they agreed on a
consensus that the needed broad-based efforts to mitigate the crisis and to
effectively adapt to it cannot be left to governments and inter-government
talks.
“We will now have to depend on Civil Society actions, especially at the level of grassroots communities to make possible the rescue of our planet to sustain life as we have known it,” according to the main forum speaker Marie Marciano, who had attended as delegate both the summit and a series of preparatory conferences. “We will now have to depend on Civil Society actions, especially
at the level of grassroots communities to make possible the rescue of planet
earth to sustain life as we have known it,” according to main forum speaker Marie Marciano,
who had attended as delegate both the summit and its preparatory conference in Bali, Indonesia; Bonn, Germany; and Barcelona, Spain; among
others. She clarified she ,meant the citizenries of the various countries of
the world, whether organized or not. The first speaker, PRRM President Isagani Serrano, explained the general process of the talks and the detailed specifics. Both speakers confirmed the narrations of fellow delegate Bernarditas Muller.
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WED 2010: Preps now on for Bacolod Fest
Initial
preparations have started in Metro Manila and Bacolod City for the tenth
commemoration of the annual United Nations-mandated World Environment Day (WED). in early June, the
organization’s
co-chairman emeritus (one of two) and secretary-general, Ed Aurelio Reyas, informed the
KFJ.
Reyes has been in
touch with Bacolod City functionaries, namely, xxx and xxx, assisted bt Ms.
Judith Sualog, who have been tasked to work out details with the WED-Phils.
Manila office before the plans can be approved by Myor Evelio Leonardia of
Bacolod. The Negros Occidental city in Western
Visayas was chosen among three Visayas nominees by the WED-2009 Annual Assembly
held last June in Batangas City. In his communication to city functionaries,
Reyes shared information on the minimums expected of host cities and what they
can add as activities that can also raise funds. |
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All are invited. to the Kamayan para sa Kalikasan Environmental Forum held regularly, since March 1990, on the 3rd Friday every month, 10:30am-2pm at the Kamayan Restaurant along EDSA, Mandaluyong City. It is convened jointly by the Clear Communicators for the Environment (CLEAR) and SanibLakas ng mga Aktibong Lingkod ng Inang Kalikasan (SALIKA), fully sponsored by Kamayan. |
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