Mining for money

I always see the Alcoy Church on the way to Boljoon. For years, I wondered what its façade looked like up close and what its interior contained. From the road, the church looked regal. One Saturday morning in July, I satisfied my curiosity by going inside.

The sign outside the church said that the name of the church is Sta. Rosa de Lima. The year 1925 is inscribed on the façade. Beside the church is a building made of coral stones, which I assumed to be the convent.

I went inside and found workmen repairing the wall near the altar. I looked up and noticed that the ceiling had panels painted pink, salmon, beige, and white. The 9 a.m. light streamed through the colored glass windows and brightened the church interior. It was smaller than I expected.

I moved around, noticed a saint which looked as if its eye had been gauged out (perhaps by anting-anting hunters), and looked up again. I was standing on the nave when I found that the different colors of the ceiling panels gave the effect of a quilted cross. An architect friend said that this technique is called “trompe le’oil,” a French term meaning “trick the eye,” and that it was popular in the 1930’s. I admired the ceiling and walked towards the altar. To my horror, I noticed that the pews, which looked relatively new, had been eaten by termites. It was the first time I saw that much damage from termites. On my way out, I noticed that the wooden posts of the convent had been eaten by termites, too.

As a child, I had thought that Alcoy was a rich town. No other town on the way to Boljoon had a dolomite mine. I assumed that this meant that the town was getting paid for its minerals. Seeing the sorry state of the Alcoy Church made me reconsider my old childhood beliefs. And think about other places where there is mining and whether or not the people living in those places have actually enjoyed the economic growth that mining supposedly brings.

Masbate is the province that I thought of first. Mining for gold has gone on in Masbate for years yet it remains one of the poorest provinces. When I visited in 1996, Pio V. Corpus, my father’s town, did not even have electricity.

Closer to Cebu City is Toledo City. I visited it in the eighties to attend a science fair. The copper mine was in operation then and I was impressed by how busy and progressive the city seemed. I visited it again after the mine closed and was surprised at how dusty and forlorn the city looked. The Toledo City from my childhood had vanished.

Recently, South Cotabato passed an ordinance banning open-pit mining because of the hazards it posed to people and the environment. Critics lambasted the move of the local government as being contrary to the Mining Act and for being bad for foreign investments. President Noynoy Aquino was quoted as saying that he will get South Cotabato and the mining company affected by the ban to reach a compromise agreement on the issue.

   I waited for President Aquino’s State of the Nation address hoping that he would talk about his environmental policies, a subject he did not touch upon during his inaugural speech. Except for a line about investigating MWSS officials who were allowed to build houses in the La Mesa watershed and another one about the need to pass a national land use law, he said nothing.

What he emphasized was the need to make doing business in the Philippines easier. Reducing red tape is good but it should never be an excuse to shortcut community consultation processes, as when the residents of a town say no to mining. After all, if a mining disaster happens (and there have been many), they will get sick and/or die first.

I also hope that President Aquino reconsiders the assumption that developing the mining industry will bring economic growth. For whom? At what cost to the environment? What will succeeding generations be left with? Dead forests and land with gaping holes?

Mining is not a sustainable industry and nothing less than cataclysmic natural disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions can create new mountains and restore dead ones.

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