Urbanization is a resource-extractive growth driver that has put our ecosystems, people, and communities, on the edge of catastrophic disaster.
The worsening floods, rising water levels, and landslides hitting our major cities, urban areas, and wider rural communities are warning signs that we are not doing right and well with our environment and natural resources.
Urbanization is the national growth driver of
the government.
It is easier to undertake, highly attractive for investors, developers, and creditors, and easy money raising activity for government agencies and officials. However, it is also the deadliest program because it is highly dependent on intensive and extensive extraction of our resources.
The drive for unrelentless expansion of urbanization as the main economic driver has put so much pressure on our natural resources; more quarries, mining operations, clearing of our remaining frontiers, and even protected parks, to give way to massive extraction of aggregates for horizontal and vertical construction projects, land development, reclamation projects, mining operations, and many more.
Look at the case of Davao City, Gen San, Cagayan de Oro, Cebu, Ormoc, Tacloban, Dumaguete, Bacolod, Iloilo, Calabarzon, and many more, urbanization has been wreaking havoc on their environment and people.
Every day, weekly, monthly, year-round, millions of tons of sand, gravels, armor rocks, boulders, mineral ores, lumbers, and livestock are being hauled to cities and urban centers and thus leaving behind our agriculture producing less and rural folk so wanting
in survival.
It has also put an intense burden on our fast-depleting water, food, and energy resources thus further weakening our already helpless agriculture.
The worst is yet to happen as the climate crisis is further worsened by the massive drive for urbanization and plunder of our resources and ecosystems.
As this worsens, more rural folk will be forced to leave the countryside to seek refuge in increasingly chaotic urban centers, leaving behind rural areas deserted.
Urbanization is a failed development strategy worldwide. Cities and urban centers in Europe, North America, South and Central America, and even Middle East and Central Asia, increasingly grappling with solutions to the worsening problem of floods, landslides, rising water levels in the cities, and need for potable water.
As a growth driver, it has only been devouring our ecosystems and natural resources and pushing us to the brink of our nation’s destruction.
In our case, this growth driver is an integral component of the government’s neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization within the framework of its export-oriented, import-dependent, and debt-driven economic fundamentals.
When our agriculture can no longer feed our people, can’t meet the economic requirements of nation-building, and our ecosystems can no longer hold everything intact, we are all doomed.
We better do something right and good in development planning and advocacy to put an end to the madness of our crook and corrupt ruling system before they push everything to the point of irreversibility.