Dear Danica May

That was quite a picture you made, on the front page of this newspaper’s Nov. 1 issue. On a day when most Filipinos’ thoughts turned to remembering the dead, your birth turned our attention to life, to the promises and perils that your arrival, as the country’s symbolic “Seven Billionth” person in the world, presented.

Already, health officials and politicians are debating whether you symbolize the joy of new life or the dangers of over-population. Maybe you are both. To your young parents Camille and Florante, you are certainly a harbinger of a better future. With your birth has come a shower of blessings: a financing package worth P25,000 that would help your parents open a sari-sari store; help for your mother to start a networking business of her own; a college scholarship for you; and even a chocolate cake with a pink birthday candle. Interviewed on TV, your mother summed up her feelings over your arrival: “I came here thinking only of the expenses (involved in giving birth), but now there have been so many blessings.”

Amid the flashes of cameras and the intrusive questions of reporters, and the attention of health officials, you lay content on your mother’s bosom, a bright red bonnet giving a pop of color to the tender scene.

But there was one reminder, as well, of what your being one of the “seven billionth” babies could mean to our country and our planet. Also present to celebrate your birth was Lorrize Mae Galvan, born 12 years ago as the country’s symbolic “six billionth” baby. Lorrize is only 12, still a minor and dependent on her family’s support. And yet between her birth and yours, one billion babies were born, one billion more still unable to contribute productively to their countries’ development, and yet already contributing immensely to the growing demand for resources: for food, water, fuel, energy, clean air, land and housing.

* * *

You have also been born to a planet in peril. As you grow older, you will hear the words “climate change” a lot. In all probability, you will come to feel one or some of the impacts of climate change in years to come.

Perhaps—or surely—when it’s time for you to go to school, you may find yourself wading through knee-deep floods when typhoons or just heavy rains hit Metro Manila. Pray that when another “Ondoy-level” flooding hits the metropolis, something environmentalists say is just a matter of time, certainly within your own lifetime, the waters will not inundate your home and make you a victim of disaster.

Food is getting not just more expensive, but harder to grow, process and market. Fish catches, including in the once-rich waters of the tuna trade off Mindanao, are falling rapidly. And already, tensions are rising between countries over access to fresh water sources like rivers.

In the past few years and months, natural disasters have hit our neighbors in the “Pacific Rim of Fire,” setting off a series of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami, storm surges, and devastating typhoons and hurricanes. The Philippines, too, has been subject to both a major earthquake and the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the last two decades, and given the series of natural calamities among our neighbors, it is very possible that within your lifetime, you, too will experience a cataclysm.

* * *

I hope I haven’t dampened your joyous reception. But you, as well as your parents, must realize that you have been born at a time of great and difficult challenges.

Those challenges are even greater because you were born a girl, in a world which still, despite the advances made by women—and men—before you, still discriminates against individuals based on their sex and gender roles. I pray that your parents keep intact the scholarship money granted to you, because education will be one tool you can use to pursue your dreams and achieve your promise.

Women like your mother, who at 23 already finds herself a mother of two (the news reports did not say how old your older sibling is), are finding themselves caught in the squeeze between those who believe motherhood is a woman’s essential calling, and those who blame women for not having the will or wherewithal to have only the number of children they are capable of rearing, educating and loving.

There is actually a middle ground, you know. Women and men have every right to have as many (or as few) children as they wish, but they will need the help of people of goodwill, government officials among them, to assist them in acting on their decisions and in raising children like you to be productive and reproductive citizens.

* * *

It just so happens that in my own personal family circle, we too have welcomed what seems like a bumper crop of babies, the latest of whom have been Charm and Brian’s Uno, Cesi and Rob’s Theo, and Haidee and Al’s Jacob.

When I glimpsed that photo of you in this paper’s front page, I couldn’t help but think of them, and of the fate they share with you. While we are gladdened by the coming of every new life, we can’t help but worry about the kind of earth we are leaving them. I’ll admit it, the generation of your lolos and lolas blew it. When we were much younger, caught up in the idealism and bravado of the 1960s and 1970s, we thought we could actually change the world for the better. And in many ways, people’s lives have improved a lot in recent decades.

But we never thought we would actually be leaving your generation a world that is deteriorating, that is physically exhausted and near collapse. I am sorry we didn’t do enough—or acted too late—to leave you a better world. It’s now up to you, and your cohorts, to turn the world around.