MEET ?WANDA Walis,? ?Cora Conservation,? ?Pot-pot the Puno Planter,? ?Rambo Recycle? and ?Tinay Katubigan??five ?superheroes? of the environment sprung from the fertile imagination of Christopher Millora. Millora is a college student from Iloilo whose ?Little Ilonggo Environmental Heroes? project won first place in this year?s edition of the Bayer Young Environmental Envoy competition.
Millora heads a delegation of four young people who will travel to Germany for an exposure trip with similar envoys from developing countries. As the first-place winner in the local BYEE competition, Millora will also be representing the country in the global competition which will be held for the first time.
The Bayer Young Environmental Envoys is sponsored by the drug and chemicals giant together with the UN Environmental Program. Last Thursday?s awarding ceremonies marked the program?s 10th year, with BYEE alumni joining this year?s finalists, along with an audience of Bayer officials, representatives of the schools which nominate participants to the program and champions of the environment.
Guest of honor at the rites was President Benigno Aquino III, who in his talk paid homage to ?the capacity of the youth to contribute to nation building? and confessed to how he was amazed by young people?s ability to multitask.
He also confessed to how it was like to ?wake up every day and see for myself how bad (a state) the Pasig River is.? While the President said government agencies were readying programs to address the river?s polluted state, P-Noy said he was even more excited about proposals to subject those adjudged guilty of polluting the river to ?15 days of community service,? preferably spent cleaning up the murky waters of the Pasig.
Stopping by our table on his way out, P-Noy was collared by urban planner and ardent environmentalist Jun Palafox who told him that he had long been advocating that Malacańang lead by example and dismantle two of its structures impinging on the Pasig. One of them is the canteen of the Department of Budget and Management, Palafox said, and it should be fairly easy for the Aquino administration to get the cooperation of even the private sector once Malacańang shows its resolve to clean up the Pasig.
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BUT back to our five ?superheroes of the environment.? The five characters are the protagonists of a book written by Millora (and illustrated by a friend), entitled ?The Defeat of Basura-mon,? which he has taken along on a story-telling caravan that has visited different barangays in Iloilo City.
Millora and friends act out the story with the use of hand puppets and props in an interactive and lively session, which we judges discerned from a brief sample acted out by Millora. After each story-telling session, they donate samples of the story book to the teachers for follow-up discussions and then lead the children, many of whom clamor to don masks and capes, in a clean-up of their immediate surroundings.
What I and the other judges?Environment Undersecretary Manuel Gerochi, Reynaldo Esguerra of the DOST, Mariliza Ticsay of UP Los Bańos and Linda Bolido from this paper?found most remarkable about Millora?s project was its positive approach to the problem, and the message he includes in each session that his young audience ?could do something about environmental problems.?
?I believe that when you start raising awareness of the environment while they?re still young, they will take the message with them all their life,? Millora said.
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OF THE 12 finalists selected from regional competitions (there seemed to be a particularly strong representation from the Visayas this year), three others will join Millora in Germany.
Ma. Angelica Reyes from De La Salle Lipa presented a project called ?You and eARTh: Promoting Environmental Care through Media and Art.? Every weekend during the summer break, she gathered schoolchildren from 13 public schools in the area and five barangays, and held art sessions that included viewing videos on the environment (produced by Reyes herself) followed by asking the children to create art works from recycled material. Notably, instead of spending her limited funds on buying a white board or illustration boards, Reyes used one side of the family?s white refrigerator for her illustrations.
The only other female finalist, Elizabeth Valencia from the West Visayas State University, chose to focus her efforts on the rehabilitation of a spring and watershed occupied by a community of Aetas, to whom Valencia belongs. Living among the community and cognizant of their culture and ways, Valencia talked her neighbors into joining a tree-planting project using saplings of balete, which to the Aetas is a ?holy tree? believed to be occupied by sacred spirits. This way, she said, she was sure that the trees would be allowed to mature unscathed. Valencia also succeeded in convincing her class of developmental communication majors to adopt the sitio and hold continuous education campaigns there.
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THE FOURTH winning project was ?Radio Berde,? conceptualized by Jovic Maurice Yee of Bicol University, and which aired every Friday from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. over Radio Veritas from June to July. With funds from the University and sponsorships from Rotaract, the student-produced and -managed show featured guests from various NGOs and government agencies (the local DENR helped in developing the topic for each show) talking about different aspects of the environment. But with the university set to open its own campus radio station, Yee said, Radio Berde might soon be airing over this local station and continuing its commitment to get young people involved in saving the environment.
