Life in 2050

In the past few weeks, the Internet was abuzz with news about the world’s seven billionth baby who was estimated to be born on October 31, 2011. One of the most interesting websites I found in relation to this story was the BBC calculator, which determines a person’s birth order based on the day she was born. The calculator said that I was the 4,037,753,792nd person alive on Earth. And that I can expect to live to be 71.3 years old, the average life expectancy for Filipino females.

At 11:58 p.m. on October 30, 2011, Danica May Camacho was born in Manila’s Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital and declared the Philippines’ symbolic seven billionth baby. News reports said that she was presented with a cake by an official of the United Nations and a scholarship grant from local officials. Her parents were given a livelihood package to start a general store.

Baby Danica is now a citizen of the world’s 12th most populous country, at least according to the UN Population Fund State of the World Population Report. It estimates our population at 94.9 million people. She joins the 54% of Filipinos who are below 25 years old.

What can Baby Danica and the rest of the young Filipinos expect from life? I wish I could look into the future and speak of happy things. As the poet and mystic Khalil Gibran said about children, “their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”  

What I do know is that the decisions that 46% of the Filipinos above 25 will make now will play a huge part in the kind of future that Baby Danica and her generation will have.  For one, how we use our natural resources now will determine its state by the time she turns 39 in 2050.

We can choose a legacy of dead mountains and polluted seas for her generation if a representative of a mining company had his way. “We cannot sacrifice the present for the future,” he said at a technical working group meeting on mining bills at the House of Representatives. He had white hair and spoke English with a crisp accent. He looked like he was nearing or had surpassed 64.5 years, the average life expectancy for Filipino males. It was easy to understand why he preferred to sacrifice the future.

I appreciate the white-haired man’s candor about the effect of mining on the environment. His colleagues were content trumpeting the alleged advantages of mining and were silent or vague when asked about environmental disasters and human rights violations that resulted from it. Mining is a sacrifice of the future for the present. A mining lobbyist I met at a dinner party bragged about the same thing: mining can lead to revenues sufficient to support a community for forty years. What happened after that was not his problem. It will be the problem of Baby Danica’s generation unless we do something now.

We can start by demanding a moratorium on mining until a mechanism for ensuring environmental safety is put in place. We can ask our lawmakers to enact laws to change the way mining is done. At the very least, the law should identify areas closed to mining operations, which will include critical watersheds, geo-hazard areas, small island ecosystems, and key biodiversity areas. Write President Aquino, who seems enamored with mining. Write (or Tweet) your Congressman and the senators to repeal the Philippine Mining Act. Give Baby Danica’s generation a chance to enjoy a Philippines with clean air, lush forests, clear rivers, and abundant oceans.

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