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Thursday, July 17, 2003
Osmeña: Need for environmental ethics
By Antonio V. Osmeña
Estatements
HOPE EXISTS. Many cars and trucks plying Metro Cebu continue to violate the Clean Air Act. Faced with the pollution of our air, water and food; energy problems; land misuse; toxic wastes, species extinction and potential resource shortages, many of the Cebuanos and the Filipino people as a whole feel overwhelmed and powerless. Many people are asking whether there is any hope.
Despite these problems and dangers, there are grounds for hope–one of the greatest driving forces in life. The present undesirable trends do not necessarily indicate where we are heading.
During the short period between 1965 and today, most Filipino citizens became aware of and concerned about the environment. People should go to the streets to demand better environmental quality and declare an Earth Day. This problem of implementing sustainable Cebu ethics will begin with individual and collective efforts:
l You can evaluate the way you think the islands of Cebu work and sensitize yourself to the environment. Stand up, look around, compare what is with what could and should be. Examine your room, your home, your school, your place of work, your street, and your city.
l You can become ecologically informed. Give up your frontier, or linear, thinking and immerse yourself in sustainable earth thinking.
Specialize in one particular area of the ecological crisis and pool your specialized knowledge with that of others. Not everyone needs to be an ecologist, but you do need to “ecologize” your lifestyle.
l You can choose a simpler lifestyle by going on an energy and matter resources diet to reduce resource consumption and waste and pollution production.
l You can become more self-reliant by trying to unhook yourself from dependence on large, centralized systems for your water, energy, food and livelihood.
l You can remember that the environment begins at home. Before you start trying to convert others, begin by changing your own living patterns.
l You can avoid the four do-nothing traps of technological optimism, gloom-and-doom pessimism, fatalism and extrapolation to infinity.
l You can become politically involved on local and national levels.
l You can do little things. Individual acts of consumption and litter have contributed to the mess.
l You can work on the big polluters and big problems, primarily through political action.
l You can start a counter-J-shaped curve of awareness and action. The world is changed by changing the two people next to you.
For everything, big or little, that you decide to do, make it your goal to convince two others to do the same thing and persuade them in turn to convince two others. Carrying out this doubling process only 28 times would convince all the Filipinos.
l Don’t make people feel guilty. If you know people who are over-consuming or carrying out environmentally harmful acts, don’t make them feel bad. Instead, find the things that each individual is willing to do to help the environment. Begin at the individual level and work outward.
Join with others and amplify your actions. This is the way for our society to change. Envision the Filipinos as made up of all kinds of cycles and flows in a beautiful and diverse web of interrelationships and a kaleidoscopic of patterns and rhythms whose very complexity and multitude of potentials remind us that cooperation, honesty, humility and love must be the guidelines for our behavior toward one another and the earth.
(July 16, 2003 issue)
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