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Celebrations of environmental milestones often take the form of
Mardi Gras. There is street dancing, outlandish paeans to Mother
Earth, poetry and music.
If politicians are there, speeches are
inevitable. Let us not forget that it was an obscure US senator who
initiated the celebration of Earth Day.
But given the recent horrible events in Burma
and China, there is doubt that the celebration of World Environment
Day on June 5 will be just as festive and gay. Much of the world’s
attention is focused on these two earth-jarring events that require
international relief work on an unprecedented scale.
Injecting gaiety and festivity to the June 5
World Environment Day will be entirely inappropriate and
insensitive, given the tragic backdrop of the Irrawaddy Delta in
Burma, the center of Cyclone Nargis’s fury.
In the Delta, lakes, rivers and ponds are jammed
with rotting corpses. Whole communities had been wiped out by Nargis.
The entire delta is overwhelmed by the stench of death and massive
destruction.
The upland portion of Sichuan in Western China
was the epicenter of a 7.9 earthquake. It was the second most
powerful earthquake in China’s quake-marred history, after the
Tangshan quake in 1976 that killed more than 200,000 people. The
Sichuan quake was so powerful that it shook buildings in certain
areas of Pakistan.
Right here in our own backyard, there is no
sense of relief either. Typhoon Cosme, which struck mid-May, left a
trail of death and destruction. The Pagasa weather office said we
should brace for the typhoon season.
Sen. Loren Legarda, who is identified with
environmental issues, said nature is “running amok.” There is an
impossible ferocity to its physical outbursts. The planet we
know—gentle most of the times and turbulent occasionally—is
over.
Worse, said the senator, is the official failure
to do something draconian and dramatic to counter climate change,
which has altered the planet’s ecological equilibrium and is at
the root of extreme weather shifts, snow-less winters, summers that
produce killer heat waves, extra-powerful cyclones, droughts,
famines and pestilence.
Sad but true. The government, on paper,
recognizes climate change and claims it has programs to mitigate it.
There are tomes and tons of official papers dealing with climate
change. In reality, this is all lip service.
The cavalier attitude toward climate
change—and all the horrors and the hazards it bring about—may be
rooted in the extraordinary capacity of the Filipinos to rebound
from disasters, no matter how horrific.
After destruction, comes reconstruction. In our
long history, not a single disaster-ravaged areas has been
abandoned. The survivors always start from scratch and build anew.
And the success rate of the rebuilding efforts is enough to obscure
environmental issues as pressing and urgent as climate change.
From time immemorial, communities savaged by
natural calamities manage to bounce back and literally rise “from
the ashes.” The Pinatubo eruption in June 1990 disgorged sand and
lahar that the volcano piled up through 600 years on hapless
communities.
The buried communities were as desolate as
Nagasaki and Hiroshima after the bombing. The only throb of life
left was from the fleeing survivors. For weeks, gloomy ash
formations blanketed the atmosphere, hovering over flattened houses,
buried churches and schools and zero vegetation.
Every minute or so, the earth shook from the
eruption-induced tremors.
The banks and the politicians have written off
the place. Every square inch of the affected area was declared
worthless and unfit for housing, business and agriculture. The US
military abandoned Clark and Subic, the largest air force and naval
base of the US outside continental America.
Five years later, the Pinatubo-buried areas were
back in the list of the country’s fastest growing and most dynamic
communities.
Today, commercial areas in the City of San
Fernando, declared as worthless after the eruption, sell at P30,000
per square meter or higher. There are BMW dealerships. SM has two
giant boxy malls just a few kilometers apart. The rich have acquired
helicopters.
Ormoc City is thriving. The towns of Quezon that
saw much death and destruction after being hit by strong typhoons in
2004 have rebounded from the tragedy.
In 1735, a tsunami wiped out the entire township
of Baler, Aurora . Only five families survived and the survivors
moved further inland to start anew. The harder part was attracting
migrants who were gutsy and adventurous enough to resettle into a
tsunami-stricken community.
In the 20th century, Baler produced a president
and two Senate presidents. And the first woman majority leader of
the House of Representatives.
mvrong@yahoo.com
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