Sunday, June 29, 2008 Mercado: Lethal treadmill By Jual L. Mercado Sidebar
“HERE we go again,” Cebu City Councilor Edgar Labella said on hearing reports that 826 were missing after “Princess of the Stars” ferry turned belly up from pummeling by Typhoon “Frank.”
Labella survived 38 hours in stormy seas when mv Princess of the Orient floundered in an October 1998 typhoon. “My wife got on a life raft but I was thrown away by a big wave.”
He now seeks to distill lessons from past tragedies. In 21 years, four Sulpicio ships sank: mv Dońa Paz (4,000 deaths); mv Dońa Marilyn (250 deaths); mv Princess of the Orient (150 deaths).The Princess of the Stars death toll is not final.
Thus, Labella campaigns for reforms – from tighter guidelines for sailing to better weather forecasting equipment. “Haven’t we learned from past tragedies?” he plaintively asks.
Apparently not.
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all lessons that history has to teach,” Aldous Huxley wrote.
Look beyond shipping to tragedies throughout society: from government, media ecosystems.
“The Senate probed at least seven sea tragedies in the last 20 years,” notes ABS/CBN Newsbreak. “All it produced was an appeal to speed up victim compensation. This was archived.”
Now, a congressional hearing is proposed. The mountain will labor and produce a mouse–again.
“We experienced powerlesness,” ABS-CBN’s Maria Ressa said on the “Media In Focus.” The program asked: What did the press learn from the Sulu kidnapping for ransom of broadcast journalist Ces Drilon and team?
A “revised protocol” will take into account kidnapping and murder of Oblate and Claretian priests and foreigners like Gracia Burnham. Hopefully, lessons learned will prevent a re-run of this snatch.
“There does not seem to be a common perception as to what lessons were learned” from past degradation, notes the new book, “Forest Faces – Hopes and Regrets in Philippine Forestry.” “Memories that do not feed vision are but a lost future.”
Forests once covered 94 percent of this country. We’ve ravaged that down to less than 18 percent. And even that shrinks as illegal logging persists.
Greed is one reason. Loggers and corrupt officials turned much of this country into emerging deserts. But are we also a people of truncated memories?
Who recalls now the over 10,000 Ormoc flood victims? Or the killer floods of Aurora and Quezon in December 2004? And Iloilo’s rampaging rivers this month?
“There was no time to run,” a Quezon evacuee explained. “Drop a coin. And as you pick it up, water swirls around you. Dead people, bloated animals, huge logs everywhere.” And there were mass graves – which we see today in Romblon.
Were wrong lessons taught? Filipinos invented, in the 1960s, squirting cyanide into reefs to stun fish, UN Environment Program notes. Marine poisoning spread to Asean countries, leapfrogged to the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.
Today, only 4 percent of our reefs remain in pristine condition, “Inventory of Coral Resources” reveals. Degraded reefs in Panay Gulf and Bohol Sea yield only four to five metric tons of marine products per square kilometer yearly – far below original potential: 15 metric tons.
“Great evils brutally enforce ignored lessons.” Today, 56 of the country’s 530 bird species are threatened with extinction. Many rivers are biologically dead. And cities like Cebu “borrows against tomorrow”: It pumps out twice what aquifers recharge.
People play tong-its rather than attend disaster preparedness seminars, Archbishop Angel Ladgameo found.
Abante ako, yell noon-day soap opera audiences. “We spend more on a ‘fiesta culture,’” Peter Walpole of Environmental Science for Social Change at Ateneo notes.
And the price for this lethal treadmill is mass graves.
