What about the environment?

Los Baños, Laguna—In March 2019, a young Cuvier’s beaked whale was found on the verge of death along the shores of Mabini, Davao de Oro, and when a necropsy was performed, nearly 40 kilos of plastic was found in its stomach—including rice sacks and grocery bags. “The plastic in some areas was so compact it was almost becoming calcified, almost like a solid brick,” Darrell Blatchley, who owns a museum in Davao City, was quoted by The New York Times as saying. “It had been there for so long it had started to compact.”

For a moment, the whale served as a disturbing reminder of how our unbridled use of plastic and our failure to dispose of it properly are polluting the oceans. We may be an archipelagic, maritime nation, but we also have the unwelcome distinction of being the world’s third-biggest contributor of plastic waste in our oceans, next only to China and Indonesia.

The pandemic, alas, has swept aside such concerns, and we embraced a plastic-intensive response that included useless plastic barriers for motorcycles and jeepneys, useless plastic barriers in classrooms, and those millions of face shields, which are not just useless but will take hundreds of years to decompose. Where have all the personal protective equipment gone—including those we find littered on our roadsides and riverbanks?

Moreover, the “fog of COVID” has detracted attention from environmental issues—from the ever-worsening climate crisis to the ever-dwindling habitats for our endangered species. In the name of pandemic “recovery,” the Duterte administration reversed a ban on mining last year, and today, various mining projects are now being pushed—from Tampakan to Sibuyan—notwithstanding their grave consequences to the entire ecosystems and communities.

Then, there is the grievous sight of Coron, disfigured beyond recognition due to a supposed “reclamation project” that has now all but destroyed the mangroves and coral reefs in its once beautiful bay—as well as its once-verdant mountains. This barbarous project was finally halted by President Duterte in March, but how can it have proceeded all these years in the first place?

What has made things worse is that those who stand against projects like the ones above have been Red-tagged, threatened, and even killed, earning us yet another notoriety: that of being the deadliest place for environmental defenders in Asia. Indeed, as Global Witness reports, there were 29 such killings in the Philippines in 2020 alone. Justice for these defenders, if at all, has come at a glacial pace; and, as the Marinduque Regional Trial Court decision last week shows, even a glaring environmental crime such as the 1993 Marcopper mine spill can take decades to resolve.

Meanwhile, more whales are washing ashore. Also last week, a sperm whale was found dead in Davao Occidental. Less visibly but more ominously, microplastics are suffocating smaller marine species, as Inquirer’s Krixia Subingsubing recently reported. “They catch more plastic than fish,” she writes of the fisherfolk of Mambacayao Island in Northern Cebu, “and the fish they catch have plastic in them.”

People all over our country are not just accepting the demise of our environment; they are resisting it. In South Cotabato, over a thousand rallied last week to protest the lifting of the ban on open-pit mining; in Coron, it was the efforts of the Sagip Coron Palawan—a local civil society coalition—that called national attention to their island’s predicament. And in Mambacayao Island, it is young people who are taking the lead in cleaning up plastic waste. Hopefully, the pandemic has brought more people to a realization that nature can be our healer and our refuge—and that, in the words of Kloyde Caday who joined the protest in Koronadal City, “we need to be in solidarity with our environmental advocates.”

Ultimately, however, we need the leadership of the national government if we are to truly protect what little remains of our forests, mangroves, and coral reefs. As Mr. Duterte—who shut down Boracay and approved the dolomite beach in Manila Bay; who supported Gina Lopez’s mining bans only to reverse them—has shown, the presidency can radically shape our environmental policies. We should also never forget that the Marcos dictatorship was characterized by massive deforestation—or what Remigio (1993) calls “large-scale depletion and destruction of the forest resource by elite groups.”

Will the forthcoming presidency of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. be any different? The coming years will be decisive, not just in determining our fate as a nation but that of the lifeworld we share with other species.

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glasco@inquirer.com.ph