(I was invited recently to talk to an audience of nuns and priests about success stories in environmental defense. Here’s what I said.)
To be honest, I’m not religious in the traditional sense, so I’m not sure why I’m sometimes asked to speak to groups of the religious.
Maybe it’s because we have mutual interests and passions that transcend any religious affiliations.
Or maybe it was meant to be from the time I was born… when I was named after a priest, the Jesuit historian Fr. Horacio de la Costa.
To be honest, again, while growing up, I didn’t like my name, precisely because Horacio sounded too old-school, a name that wouldn’t appeal to girls.
I much preferred what I thought was a more normal and appealing name like David or Matthew.
Then I went to college and began to appreciate who Father Horacio dela Costa was, a historian who dug deep into the past to discover a noble Filipino civilization that our colonizers didn’t want to acknowledge. It was a literate society before the Spaniards came that had a high regard for women and even for men who acted like women.
And later on I discovered that Fr . Horacio was a religious subversive who went against the tide of the conventional wisdom of even his brother priests.
You see, as an accomplished historian with a PhD from Harvard, De la Costa nurtured a secret admiration for Jose Rizal, at a time in the 1950s when Rizal was still taboo to the Catholic leadership for his anti-friar writings. Ironically, the bishops then assigned the young De La Costa to craft an anti-Rizal statement when the Rizal bill was before Congress. The proposed law would require the teaching of Rizal’s novels in Philippine schools. The bishops obviously didn’t know that Rizal even then was already De la Costa’s hero.
So De la Costa tried to inject into the pastoral letter his own views, such as this:
“Rizal possessed to an eminent degree those moral virtues that together make up true patriotism.”
That statement did not make it into the final draft of the pastoral letter in 1952, but he did provoke thought among his brethren.
The lobbying against Rizal by the Church did not prevent the passage of the Rizal law of 1956, and all educated Filipinos today have encountered Rizal in studying what it means to be a Filipino. Honoring Rizal and his vision for the nation is now conventional wisdom.
So what does this have to do with our theme today about defending the environment?
Actually, everything… because going against the tide — or challenging and changing conventional wisdom, and opposing powerful forces — is what defending the environment is all about. Despite the popularity and even trendiness now of environmentalism, the obstacles to environmental defense are formidable and dominant.
Public policy, government projects, and regulatory action are all much more geared towards resource extraction and building infrastructure at the expense of the environment. We don’t have to look far — within sight of the vast metropolis and just beneath our noses is the largest reclamation project of our time, happening now in Manila Bay, at a time of historic flooding, crazy climate, and biodiversity loss.
But such projects have garnered public support and government approval because of the purported benefits — more real estate, more malls, condos, and casinos, and more views of the planet’s most beautiful sunset.
It all sounds so hopeless, which is probably why I was asked to speak today on the “success stories” of defending the environment, to inject a dose of optimism into our underdog mission.
So let me begin with this success story, which is also within sight and right beneath our noses: the desperate and so far successful battle to save the Pasig River.
Most of us here are hardened veterans of the horrors of Metro Manila traffic.
One solution was to build an east-west expressway above the Pasig River that would make traveling faster from downtown Manila to Taguig. Wouldn’t we all want more efficient travel?
But why yet another expressway, especially one that could rob us of the comforts and amenities of the river celebrated in our history? Such a highway would create a snaking heat island that would worsen the impact of the climate crisis where island nations like ours are the most vulnerable.
After years of grassroots campaigns and media coverage, the Pasig River expressway has been shelved.
It is a very recent success story of citizen action to defend our natural heritage. But I hasten to add that it’s a “dynamic success,” where the situation can be reversed if we’re not vigilant.
Environmental successes are not like parental successes where after a certain age we need to let our children go and find their own way, perhaps make their own mistakes without us guarding their every move.
Environmental successes are the children who never move out and in need of our constant care and watchful eyes.
If we shift our gaze, that expressway may yet be built, hastening the ruin of what remains of the Pearl of the Orient.
I started by talking about a priest and let me wind down by recalling another one.
Back when I was a newspaper reporter in the 1990s, I interviewed a legend, especially in the Cordillera mountains, Father Conrado Balweg, a native Tinggian who opposed the building of a dam on the majestic Chico River that would have flooded valleys occupied by communities throughout the mountain range. For this advocacy he was an early victim of red tagging. He eventually did join the NPA as part of his struggle to save his people. He and other leaders like Macli-ing Dulag succeeded in uniting communities to oppose the intentional flooding of their lands.
The Chico River dam project was stopped and today its rapids continue to nourish rice terraces that are the pride of our race. The idea of a single Cordillera region composed of diverse ethnic groups started with that struggle. And today long after Fr. Balweg’s and Macli-ing Dulag’s deaths, that regional solidarity continues to stand guard over the Chico River as it connects our proud history to the future.
Part of the legacy of resistance of indigenous peoples is the recognition today of their rights over ancestral domain which are enshrined in our legal system.
Earlier this year, I was shooting a documentary in Mindoro and wanted to visit a remote Mangyan village. But first my team had to seek the permission of tribal elders. After a long meeting, they declined our request, saying that media exposure of their lush land could give ideas to those who want to build dams and mine their resources.
We were disappointed but we respected that act of sovereignty, again, enshrined in law.
That sovereignty wasn’t always the case, of course. It was the rightful outcome borne of advocacy, struggle and a steady and dynamic environmental defense.
I can locate that in a continuum of “going against the tide” that goes back to our earliest episodes of resistance, to the novels of Jose Rizal, to the writings of Horacio De La Costa, the struggles of Fr. Balweg and Macli-ing Dulag, to the millennial and senior-citizen activists that stopped the Pasig River expressway, and to the Mangyan elders today who fiercely guard their ancestral domain.
These are all successes we can build on, but they all bear the hallmarks of dynamic success, easily reversible if we let down our guard.
There’s no resting on our laurels. There’s no resting at all. Our vigilance over Mother Earth must be as constant and powerful as the Chico River.
Veteran Kapuso journalist H. Severino writes occasional reflections for this website under a column entitled, “Essay.” In 2023, he was given the Gawad Balagtas, a lifetime literary achievement award given to Filipino writers by the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL), the country's largest organization of Filipino writers.
