By Kiara Tan
I. Like an east wind, I will scatter each before the enemy;
“The wind was like a whistle coming from the core of the earth.” Marinel Ubaldo reminisced. The earth sang to her — a paradise that was a safe haven for her and the people she called home. A cacophony of sounds brought life to her little world in Matarinao. She had grown to love her own corner in this world, yet it all went adrift because of the very thing that kept her hearth alive.
The then 16-year old, try as she might, could not suppress the violent noises brewing underneath the surface. The turbulent breeze, the waves slapping against each other, and the loud pattern of rain made for a dangerous symphony. The east wind blew and masked the distant cries she could faintly hear. She didn’t know what a storm surge was then, and neither did the townspeople. Marinel was only a child when Typhoon Yolanda washed away the life she was used to.
She still remembers the moment her childhood was stolen from her. The silence that followed was filled with quiet cries in the evacuation center. What then remained was a terrifying sound for the girl — noise blaring from radios declaring over 6,000 dead and lives forever uprooted. She was left with only herself to support and survive all on her own.
Six years later, thousands of evacuated residents still haven’t been properly relocated. 11 lost their lives, not to calamity, but to being relocated next to toxic landfills that caused them to fall ill.
Six years later, a 22-year-old activist shouts over a crowd in Tacloban. The sound carries over to hundreds of people. With each syllable of pleas echoing, the clamor invigorating the crowd, and a steady pattern of voices bouncing off of concrete encrusting a dying planet, Marinel led the first climate strike in Tacloban. She wasn’t a stranger to noise. It was just the first time in a while that it had not meant her life being stolen from her.
On May 24 of 2019, more than 1000 people across 15 cities and towns joined the first nationwide youth climate strike in the Philippines — a country devastated by ailing systems. They called for the phase-out of fossil fuels, a transition to renewable energy, accountability from the government, large corporations, and foreign investors, and climate justice for vulnerable groups in the Philippines. The strike became a public declaration that put pressure on leaders and institutions to solve a crisis that was quickly becoming the marker of this generation’s inheritance.
However, most, if not all, of these demands have gone unheeded because of negligence from responsible parties. Urging from different sides regarding the climate crisis has become a radical threat in the eyes of the government, and with officials’ grievances towards such, strikes have been treated as mass unrest that must be stopped. Moreover, only band-aid developments have been acted on to mimic an advantageous front for the administration. With these lenses in play, those ruling are still unable to address the systemic roots of the crisis. Today, their inaction is a stilling quiet, and the marginalized are paying for their silence.
II. I will show them my back on the day of calamity.
Sound is a prerequisite to the Duterte administration’s anti-people and unsustainable mandates. It is pleasant to his officials. Deals with foreign investors are closed with boisterous laughter, metal drilling into the earth for their beautification experiments creates a satisfying shrill, and declarations of catastrophic bills are met with applause. For the marginalized sectors affected by these actions, the noise signals not celebration, but destruction.
In today’s climate, the administration is notorious for its anti-democratic agenda and friendly ties with superpower giants. With such at the administration’s forefront, the ongoing global climate crisis remains neglected and deeply exacerbated. Although lesser known to the public, the government has multiple environmentally destructive policies. This includes the decision to lift a nine-year ban on new mining deals which will benefit both the United States and China — the globe’s largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
Under the current administration, the Philippines has also been bestowed with the title of the most vulnerable country in the world to climate impacts, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace. Moreover, UNICEF has also warned that the country is one of 33 nations where children face a dire future due to the effects of multiple climate disasters such as extreme floods, droughts, heat waves, and concentration of greenhouse gases. In the government’s inability to address the aforementioned’s systemic roots, they have opted to abuse, exploit, and endanger marginalized sectors.
The agricultural sector is not an exception. In this sector, which provides 30% of employment and 10% of the nation’s GDP, farmers face the worsened effects of climate change. Recent calamities and erratic temperatures have affected crops and livestock, thus resulting in severe loss in agricultural production. According to the Department of Agriculture (DA), typhoons in the year of 2020 alone wiped out ₱14.25 billion in agricultural goods. Moreover, with the lack of government aid, they not only threaten the food security of the nation, but the economic situation of these farmers. The financial losses caused by calamities are shouldered by farmers themselves, with only ₱4.5 billion allocated to the Philippine Crop Insurance Commission (PCIC) to provide insurance premiums to 2 million workers in the sector. With poor insurance and unstable farming conditions, farmers are left to their own devices in an environment rapidly changing for the worse.
The government crafts the same faulty predicament for local fisherfolk. With the presence of territorial disputes, corporational oil spills, and ravages of illegal commercial fleets, fisherfolk have seen their catches decreasing day by day. A reclamation project in Manila Bay that will destroy mussel and oyster farms also threatens local fisherfolk. Moreover, over 70% of the Philippines’ fish stock resources are considered overfished, thus resulting in a critical decline of production.
Of all marginalized sectors, indigenous people are also among the first to face the exacerbated blows of climate change. A large number of them have close relationships and are dependent on the environment and its resources for their survival. Indigenous groups, such as the Dumagats, are also vital to many ecosystems that inhabit their territories and even aid in enhancing the resilience of these ecosystems. Climate change poses a threat to this achieved equilibrium. Such dangerous predicament is only worsened by political and economic marginalization, loss of land and resources, and human rights violations at the hands of the ruling government.
When the administration’s noise is met with the clamor of the people, they are quick to silence it. The east wind blows, and land & environmental defenders are swiftly declared dead. The annual tally of deaths has risen for the past two years and is currently twice the level of 2013. In 2019, Datu Kaylo Bontolan, a known activist and Indigenous leader, was killed during a military assault. He fought against industrial companies forcing commercialization and mining, and was murdered in return. He was only 1 of the 43 land and environmental activists killed in the Philippines that year.
These consequential lives fall to a quick sound — nothing similar to the early signs of a typhoon wind, but a timbre just as fatal of a foreshadowing. This time, it is made with the sole intention to hurt. The sound, a deafening pop, ricochets off of every surface and echoes a message to all. It begs to be heard.
References:
https://neda.gov.ph/addressing-impacts-climate-change-philippine-agriculture-sector/
https://psa.gov.ph/content/measurement-impact-climate-change
https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/176899/ewp-466.pdf
https://www.rappler.com/business/ways-climate-change-crop-insurance-pushes-farmers-out-agribusiness
https://www.rappler.com/voices/ispeak/climate-change-strikes-philippines-opinion
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/13/murders-environment-land-defenders-record-high
HiLites ASHS 