Thursday, January 15, 2009 Palasan: Help! Earth is furious By Tibs Palasan Jr. Spark of Law
IT STARTED from January 3 to 6, this year. Then there was a three-day lull. But by the evening of January 10, a beach in Opol showed the tide rising. Rain came slowly then poured as if heaven was crying and the tears were falling in one area: Cagayan de Oro.
The three-day lull turned out to be the gathering of the storm. There has been no letup of rain until now.
The city streets are flooded. A house made of light material, was floating, drifting, only to be shattered when it hit a wall. With that, the owners' hopes were dashed. A sense of the tragic gripped.
A call of help was received. A friend's house was suddenly flooded up to the neck. Its residents had to climb to the roof and as the rain continued, this friend later gathered his family and took refuge in a hotel.
Midday of the 13th, a false promise of calm shone. There were only droplets. It seemed the Earth had stopped crying. It turned out to be another gathering of the storm. At ten o'clock in the evening, there was not only heavy rain but the wind was also howling. It was a howling no different from the call to war in the olden times, when the trumpet signaled the start of a bloodbath.
This is a calamity unheard of in the recent times. Yes, there was flooding before: but not of this magnitude. Not the way nature has been pounding the residents with heavy rains for more than a week now. Not even man-made dikes and drainage could stop the sway and swell of both the Cagayan and Iponan rivers.
Statistics are showing. Statistics of deaths, landslides and destruction of properties and a general sense of mayhem always go with a war. No, this is not nature's war with the people. Earth is only asserting its omnipotence. We are only being punished for the way we ravaged our ecology.
For centuries, man has been exploiting the resources as if he truly owns them. God, in the Old Testament, admonished man to have dominion over the earth. What man has done instead is dominate it, with seeming impunity. Earth though has limits of the destruction she can absorb.
In the 80's, the press was starting to sound off the siren of environmental damage: the thawing of the polar caps in the North Pole, the hole in the ozone layer found above New Zealand, the erratic weather patterns when people suffer typhoons during summer months in tropical countries.
Globally, countries are waking up to the specter of ecological damage, which in turn has caused catastrophes and calamities in magnitudes never seen before like in New Orleans, China, Indonesia and the rest of the world. But while the Kyoto Protocol is being pushed through my small countries to salvage earth, the worst polluters are not ratifying it.
In the Philippines, we have the Clean Air Act to curb pollution of the air we breathe, and the Clean Water Act to secure the purity of the water we drink. Yet, alongside these environmental laws, we have the Mining Act enacted by Congress and declared constitutional by no less than the Supreme Court.
The Mining Act opened the floodgates of opening holes in just about anywhere so long as there is prospect of mineral presence. You have seen mounds of earth bulldozed in search of gold, nickel, iron, and chrome.
Logging, the cutting of trees, has caused the balding of the forests. It was the infantry that opened bald the mountains. Look at the mountains. You do not see the trees anymore. You see rocks exposed, enveloped by mosses, the only sign of green life in the mountain.
Mining, on the other hand, is the final straw in the many ways man has caused environmental debacle. Ironically, the Mining Act is looked upon as a piece of legislation that opens our country to mining explorations, not only by Filipinos but also by foreigners. Mining is now being done in large-scale proportions; it goes without saying that the ecological damage is done in a grand and devastating manner. Mining is seen as a great contributor to wealth building. But is wealth more important than life?
The weather forecast is still grim. Rain continues. The wind still howls. It may stop for days, weeks or months. But it is certain to re-assert its supremacy some other time. Unless we do something substantial and large-scale, the next time earth shows its might again, humanity might not be there anymore to record the statistics.
