LAST week, Brother Alan Brillantes, senior feast builder of the Catholic Charismatic community Light of Jesus, emailed me this:
“Pwede ka bang maka prepare one piece on climate change -- as a companion article to my message “Sounding the Alarm?” You can cite key findings from the recent UN climate report warning that we have only 12 years to act...expound further on personal actions we can take. You can also quote Pope Francis from his encyclical Laudato Si.”
We got to talk about this several weeks back. I’m grateful that in all likelihood, I won’t see that 12 years.
Brother Alan mentioned in his front page article of The Feast Bacolod Bulletin: wildfires, heat waves, and drought. He is still young enough to see and live those natural disasters.
But wait, the list of climate change impacts goes on and on. We are experiencing them now, and worse things are yet to come.
When I wrote an article on climate change, I quoted Pope Francis on Laudato Si: “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.”
Brother Alan forgot to mention rat infestation, stemborers, tungro and armyworms in the rice bug, defoliator, rice black bug, and bacterial leaf blight. I personally got to talk with victims of rice infestation in Barangay Oringao, Kabankalan City, Negros Occidental.
That was in the early 1990s.
The rodent attack of Biblical proportion totally wiped out the ripening rice stalks. The farmers tried rodenticide, human-made traps and even enlisted cats to ward off the rats. To no avail. A farmer quipped, “Only God can stop another attack.”
Humankind has disrupted the web of life that the God of purpose between predators and prey. Forests have cleared natural habitats to make way for sugar monocultures. Poachers killed or sold raptors such as snakes, wild cats, and dapay (hawks and owls) that preyed on herbivores such as rats or locusts that infested Murcia after the prolonged 1998 El Niño.
In my experience, that means conserve trees through non-timber forest products development, community-based reforestation, and organic agricultural to create or strengthen agrobiodiversity and create micro-climates.
I reflected and mediated on Psalm 65:11-12: “You care for the land and water it; you enrich it abundantly. The streams of God are filled with water to provide the people with grain, for so you have ordained it. You crown the year with your bounty, and your carts overflow with abundance. The grasslands of the wilderness overflow; the hills are clothed with gladness.”
Let us protect and defend our Mother Earth.