Thursday, May 08, 2008 Editorial: Reflections on nature
HOW many is 22,000? How big a hall will it take to accommodate that crowd? One thing we're sure of, we do not have any hall in this region big enough to accommodate that.
The number is simply astounding; more so because it's the initial death toll in Myanmar as we quickly remember how the whole nation mourned for the tragedy of Guinsaugon in Leyte where a whole village of (just) 1,126 people was buried. Now reports from Myanmar says there are at least 22,000 dead and 41,000 missing in a cyclone that hit the Southeast Asian country just before dawn Saturday. The extent of the tragedy is unimaginable as we go on further to ask: how big a crowd is 63,000 (22,000+41,000)?
But this will not be the last, we know, as nations -- both people and governments -- continue to deny the ferocity of nature when its environment is destroyed. There have been warnings before of tragedies to come, but bureaucrats and bureaucracies including several local officials in recent history bucked calls to save the environment. Now everyone is turning green because it's today's buzzword. But nature is telling us that we've taken so long and we're moving too slow.
Thus, we had the Ormoc tragedy in November 1991, that killed 8,000 and the Guinsaugon tragedy in February 2006 in the Philippines; Hurricane Katrina, which killed over 1,800 residents in New Orleans in the United States in August 2005, and the December 2004 tsunami that killed more than 225,000 people in 11 Asian countries, as if to remind us over and over again that nature spares no one. Not world power America, not dirt poor and oppressive Myanmar, not the equally poor and corrupt Philippines.
At the risk of being called doomsayers who are in league with rabid environmentalists, we say, nature has been sending us a message and yet we seem to be moving so slow as we continue to pat our collective backs for our tree-planting project three years ago and continue to congratulate ourselves for such 'grand' project that saw us planting one tree with our name on it; or continue to boast of our coastal clean-up in September last year while no longer being able to keep track of the number of times we have surreptitiously flicked out an empty water bottle after drinking its content because we couldn't find a trash can.
Around us, monocrop plantations have not just taken over and flattened most plains, these are already up in the mountains where forests used to stand, along the highways are vast cemented spaces of yet another gasoline station with a few potted plants as decorations, while along our rivers are tons of garbage, untreated sewage, and denuded riverbanks bringing tons of silt downstream and into the gulf.
Just in case you still don't understand the extend of last weekend's tragedy... Myanmar is a rice-producing country. Today, not only are their ricelands destroyed by the cyclone, so were the farmers who are supposed to be tilling those lands. That leaves us with one less country capable of producing rice. Bananas, anyone?
