The earth in jeopardy
April 4, 2004 | 12:00am
The charming town of Nyon by the Lake Geneva in Switzerland reminds me of Julius Caesar who used to vacation there for rest after some hard-fought battles in the heyday of the Roman Empire. A sojourn there these days is a feast for the eyes of a visitor like me: Roman relics and ruins, the placid lake with a swarm of fishes, the snow-covered Alps and the air so crisp and fresh. What a breathtaking town, indeed. One wonders what the town feels like and looks during the time of the great Julius Caesar.
I cannot imagine other places are not that lucky on my way to 60th conference of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The ice caps of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania – popularized by Ernest Hemingway in a novel – are melting. In Manila we are experiencing water shortages while in the province there are flash floods and landslides both being caused by indiscriminate logging, that claimed so many lives and caused economic dislocation.
Add to that the country suffers from droughts caused by El Niño and flash floods from El Niña and typhoons causing so much damage to property, agricultural production and economic activities.
These are all clear signals that the Earth is dying. Our climate will never be the same with global warming and climate change taking their toll. The seas are rising and getting warmer. A good number of species have gone extinct. The earth’s resources continue to be destroyed and depleted.
Over two million people worldwide have no adequate supply of water resulting in the absence of satisfactory sanitation and in some cases, sickness. The agenda for IUCN conference are significant and controversial. It includes the ravages that come from mining and other extractive industries. Other damage-prone activities to be tackled in the gathering are the genetically modified organisms (GMO), global warming and the Cartegena Biosafety Protocol of which the Philippines is a signatory.
As IUCN councilor we urge the Senate and government to ratify the Cartegena Protocol and stop the planting of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) which put human health and the environment in jeopardy.
The effects are insidious and irreversible. Recently Dr. Terje Traavick of the Norwegian Institute of Gene Ecology found out the health of farmers among the B’laan tribe in South Cotabato are severely affected by contamination of GMO resulting in respiratory ailments and allergies. No one in government and biotech industry is paying attention to this problem.
For its part, Greenpeace claims that GMO food "will lead to cancer cluster, deformities, millions of afflicted people including children."
The Cartegena Protocol on Biosafety, ratified by 87 countries, the first legally binding international agreement on transboundary movement of GMOs is encountering stiff opposition from the world’s strongest economy, the United States of America. These days, it has organized a group called Miami+Group that gathers US, Canada, Argentina, Australia, Chile, Uruguay New Zealand and Brazil. The US economy has the financial clout to intensify biosafety research that will convince Asia and Africa of the essentiality of GMO.
The world is suffering from this disaster just as people have suffered from SARS, the bird flu epidemic sweeping Asia, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) and the mad cow disease in England. What are we waiting for? It’s time to act and act decisively. Our natural resources continue to be depleted. Our planet is on the verge of an ecological disaster and yet there are many who turn a blind eye on the impending tragedy.
Gandhi once said that you cannot eat gold and yet we continue to mine and destroy our bio-diversity and our water resources. The global economy is plunging towards disaster. Which will happen first? People dying in large numbers or the collapse of the economic order. Our population is ballooning – 82 million at the last count – while our dwindling natural resources will not be able to sustain life on Earth in the near future.
On this note we cannot eradicate poverty and feed the people. The planet used to take care of that. Gold and dollars from mining mean nothing when there is no food nor water. We call on leaders of governments and economies to go easy on the use of fossil fuels while seeking renewable sources of clean energy. We implore governments across the world to adhere to the United Nations Millennium Development goals on water and sanitation and exercise the political will to preserve the mega-biodiversity of the environment that feeds us all. We cannot eradicate poverty with a dying environment.
While waiting for the next World Conservation Congress in Bangkok, Thailand this coming November 2004 let us not wait doing nothing for water and letting it run dry. Five times in 600 million years most of the organisms and creatures of the earth perished; now it’s happening again. British ecologist Thomas and Stevens lament that we have lost 65 percent to 95 percent of the world’s species. Sound scientific practices are a healthy ecology. Let us do our share in making the environment productive forever and a great place to live in.
(The author is the president of the Ecological Society of the Philippines and regional councilor of the International Union for Conservation of Nature)
I cannot imagine other places are not that lucky on my way to 60th conference of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The ice caps of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania – popularized by Ernest Hemingway in a novel – are melting. In Manila we are experiencing water shortages while in the province there are flash floods and landslides both being caused by indiscriminate logging, that claimed so many lives and caused economic dislocation.
Add to that the country suffers from droughts caused by El Niño and flash floods from El Niña and typhoons causing so much damage to property, agricultural production and economic activities.
These are all clear signals that the Earth is dying. Our climate will never be the same with global warming and climate change taking their toll. The seas are rising and getting warmer. A good number of species have gone extinct. The earth’s resources continue to be destroyed and depleted.
Over two million people worldwide have no adequate supply of water resulting in the absence of satisfactory sanitation and in some cases, sickness. The agenda for IUCN conference are significant and controversial. It includes the ravages that come from mining and other extractive industries. Other damage-prone activities to be tackled in the gathering are the genetically modified organisms (GMO), global warming and the Cartegena Biosafety Protocol of which the Philippines is a signatory.
As IUCN councilor we urge the Senate and government to ratify the Cartegena Protocol and stop the planting of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) which put human health and the environment in jeopardy.
The effects are insidious and irreversible. Recently Dr. Terje Traavick of the Norwegian Institute of Gene Ecology found out the health of farmers among the B’laan tribe in South Cotabato are severely affected by contamination of GMO resulting in respiratory ailments and allergies. No one in government and biotech industry is paying attention to this problem.
For its part, Greenpeace claims that GMO food "will lead to cancer cluster, deformities, millions of afflicted people including children."
The Cartegena Protocol on Biosafety, ratified by 87 countries, the first legally binding international agreement on transboundary movement of GMOs is encountering stiff opposition from the world’s strongest economy, the United States of America. These days, it has organized a group called Miami+Group that gathers US, Canada, Argentina, Australia, Chile, Uruguay New Zealand and Brazil. The US economy has the financial clout to intensify biosafety research that will convince Asia and Africa of the essentiality of GMO.
The world is suffering from this disaster just as people have suffered from SARS, the bird flu epidemic sweeping Asia, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) and the mad cow disease in England. What are we waiting for? It’s time to act and act decisively. Our natural resources continue to be depleted. Our planet is on the verge of an ecological disaster and yet there are many who turn a blind eye on the impending tragedy.
Gandhi once said that you cannot eat gold and yet we continue to mine and destroy our bio-diversity and our water resources. The global economy is plunging towards disaster. Which will happen first? People dying in large numbers or the collapse of the economic order. Our population is ballooning – 82 million at the last count – while our dwindling natural resources will not be able to sustain life on Earth in the near future.
On this note we cannot eradicate poverty and feed the people. The planet used to take care of that. Gold and dollars from mining mean nothing when there is no food nor water. We call on leaders of governments and economies to go easy on the use of fossil fuels while seeking renewable sources of clean energy. We implore governments across the world to adhere to the United Nations Millennium Development goals on water and sanitation and exercise the political will to preserve the mega-biodiversity of the environment that feeds us all. We cannot eradicate poverty with a dying environment.
While waiting for the next World Conservation Congress in Bangkok, Thailand this coming November 2004 let us not wait doing nothing for water and letting it run dry. Five times in 600 million years most of the organisms and creatures of the earth perished; now it’s happening again. British ecologist Thomas and Stevens lament that we have lost 65 percent to 95 percent of the world’s species. Sound scientific practices are a healthy ecology. Let us do our share in making the environment productive forever and a great place to live in.
(The author is the president of the Ecological Society of the Philippines and regional councilor of the International Union for Conservation of Nature)
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