We, the society

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines -Madelline Romero specializes in development communications. She currently works for a renewable energy rural development project. She graduated with a degree in Broadcast Communication from the University of the Philippines.

 I will never forget the image on television of bare-chested men atop wooden planks floating on the rampaging floodwaters, the people on the bridge scampering to throw anything that the ill-fated could hold on to, and the tragic — albeit expected — end: sodden wooden planks breaking up on the other side of the bridge, making its passengers an addition to the total death toll of the worst flooding in the recent history of Metro Manila.

Environment groups seized upon the disaster as an opportunity to turn the spotlight on the issue of the earth’s warming. Others were as quick to point an accusing finger at climate change, as if saying that the flooding that submerged most of Metro Manila and surrounding provinces was the most natural and inevitable eventuality, with the objective of exonerating themselves from responsibility.

But as the floods receded and Metro Manila was found lying in its own filth — all 1,500 tons of garbage that end up in our water systems every day and have accumulated in the past years — climate change proved to be a not-so-convenient, let alone sufficient, scapegoat for the typhoon Ondoy tragedy that wreaked a painful (337 deaths) and costly (P10 billion in infrastructure and properties) devastation.

That a society brings upon itself its own devastation is the main thesis of Collapse (How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed), a study of both failed and successful past and present societies. What is interesting about this work is where others have identified military warfare or invasion by another group as the most common cause of a society’s extinction, Prof. Jared Diamond goes deeper and identifies environmental destruction as the underlying and ultimate cause of a society’s devastation, and in some cases, demise. The warfare and the political, economic and social chaos that one may be quick to pinpoint as the cause of a society’s failure, may be, when one dug and looked deeper, just the natural offshoot of a population’s mad scramble for what’s left of their resources in a depleted and overexploited environment.

The perplexing question had been and still is: why would a society ruin the environment on which their very survival depended? Why did the Easter Islanders (a small Pacific island) denude the forests of their already fragile environment to largely support the construction of huge stone statues (15 to 20 feet tall, weighing from 10 to 270 tons) erected on massive stone platforms (13 feet high, 500 feet wide, weighing from 300 to 9,000 tons), the construction of which overstretched the island’s resources? Why did the Mayan kings fail to recognize that the population was outstripping available resources, and instead focused their attention on wars (which had to be waged as more and more people fought over fewer resources), erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support their activities?

Why would we construct high-end subdivisions on the hills and mountaintops of San Mateo, Rodriguez, Angono, Cainta and Marikina when we know that doing so would further denude the Sierra Madre mountain ranges, making them unable to catch most of the rainwater that would eventually flow down to Metro Manila? Why would we continue to quarry the Sierra Madre for gravel and sand when we know that this would make the Marikina River silted and, thus, very shallow, so that it easily overflows when abnormally heavy rainfall (like Ondoy) comes? Why would our government allow any of this to happen?

When the environment that once supported a population and made institutions flourish finds itself no longer capable of propping up a society’s way of life, the first to collapse is the leadership institution. The royal palace in the ancient city of Copán in Mayan civilization was burned down soon after a confluence of environmental damage, population growth and climate change began to fail to deliver the rains and prosperity that the Copán king had promised his people in return for the power and luxuries that he claimed. The government of modern Rwanda simply broke down and lost total control in a civil war that not only pitted traditional tribal opponents (Hutu vs. Tutsi) against each other, but also people from the same tribe against one another, in what was unconventionally observed to be “a unique opportunity to settle scores, or to reshuffle land properties,” a war “that is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources.”

And as always happens when tragedies occur, the spotlight was embarrassingly turned to the Philippine government’s lack of foresight and preparation: why Metro Manila’s (overpopulated at 12 million) waterways are blocked by garbage and slum dwellers or else have been appropriated by commercial developments; how real estate developers are able to circumvent the Revised Forestry Code (PD 705) that prohibits the building of houses and residential development on slopes of more than 10 degrees; why more than 70,000 urban poor families have not until now been offered alternative housing sites.

Diamond admits to the possibility of oversimplification should a society’s collapse be attributed solely to environmental destruction. He proffers a five-point framework of contributing factors to societal collapse: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and the society’s responses to its environmental problems. While the first four of these factors may or may not prove significant in every society surveyed, the fifth — the society’s response — always was the weight that tipped the scale over to either survival or annihilation, success or failure.

And society has a government and the governed. While our government indeed hasn’t made it very difficult for us to lash out at it every time disasters of huge proportions occur, we also only have to look around us, while the flood waters recede and the mountains’ eroded topsoil is washed off houses and properties, to see an imprint of our own reckless, irresponsible behavior. It is our own garbage that clogged waterways, our own greed and inappropriate values that made us build beautiful architecture with breathtaking views on mountaintops, our own folly and lack of vision that have made us exploit our environment more than it can sustain us.

But all is not lost. So even while with arms raised to the heavens we pray for truly visionary leaders, our feet are planted firmly on the ground, which — as recent tragedy has painfully taught us — could shake and break and swallow us whole if we don’t amend our excessive ways. It is after all, we, members of society, that choose whether to fail or succeed.