. We will celebrate, all right, but such celebration will have to face the challenge of answering two questions: "Has the Kamayan Forum made a dent on the environmental consciousness of the people, at least those based in the national capital region where most of the forum participants have been coming from?" and "What can we do to raise the level of our humble achievements, which have to be upgraded and maximized in the face of natural and nature-related disasters that have grown to be more severe and more frequent in just the past few years?

 The whole planet, with the Philippines as a particular flash point, is now facing greater magnitudes of danger looming and threatening to unfold fully in the next few years! What do we have to achieve in this decade and the next ones for a fighting chance to survive?

 To be sure, all the efforts would take decades, and the achievements should also have consequences spanning decades. Global warming has been caused by human thinking (?) and behavior that spanning decades, even centuries. Discussions about them have also spanned decades: on a global scale, the series of discussions in meetings, conferences, summit conferences, etc. that culminated in Copenhagen last year spanned decades. Even the very humble project, called Kamayan Forum, has already lived for two full decades. Time is not the only element needed for success of the decades-long discussions.

 The spirit of the discussions should be the collective and synergized will power to seek together the truth that will set us free from the monstrous problems that we ourselves have created or at lease passively allowed to be created. If a minority that is strong but immensely powerful (as giant corporations and governments in their grip) can quite easily hold the process hostage just to protect and perpetuate the disaster-causing status quo, while the vast but unconsolidated majority demands radical changes in worldwide patterns, that spirit is nowhere present and debacles like the one in Copenhagen last December can only be expected.

 On a much smaller scale, as the vast majority of the most vulnerable stakeholders in the Philippine environmental survival are not active enough, not informed enough, not even interested enough, to attend environmental forums like that in Kamayan, or not even to just read intently, understand and share with even just their own families and small social groupings whatever conclusions and vital information emanate from these discussions, such collective inaction will continue allowing the enemies of the environment to destroy our living quarters, our living home planet.

 Discussions will have to be earnest, participatory, and directed towards unified collective actions that would really address our grave and worsening environmental problems. Who should be active in those discussions? All who are aware of the problems and the needed collective actions to address them (Balik-Bayanihan for the Environment), and all who can be made aware of these. We have to reach out to those people who are now blissfully ignorant of very real dangers to their lives and their responsibility to stand up and be counted in the great “Balik-Bayanihan para sa Kalikasan.” Let the monthly face-to-face “plenaries” of “Kamayan para sa Kalikasan” have consultative and “echo” discussion sessions in the dinner tables at home, in classroom lecture-discussions, in the breaktime conversations in workplaces, and even in telephone and internet sharings.

  A new decade dawns for Kamayan Forum – where we will be shaking hands to seal agreements on observations, analyses, and concrete highly-participatory and highly-consequential actions, where we will be shaking hands in agreement to conserve nature and live close to its own Life-loving principles. It is a dawning of a new day of enlightened consciousness for our people (in the Philippines) far beyond Kamayan-EDSA's function room. 

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. As full sponsor since March 1990, Kamayan serves free lunch to all participants (see map).