First, a heartfelt tribute to Atty. Archer Martinez on behalf of GWAVE.
In the early years of our NGO when we had neither in-house nor retained lawyers, Atty. Martinez did not hesitate to offer pro bono services for cases of abuse and violence especially against disadvantaged women.
The loss to Dumaguete and to all of us is twofold: a respected man and lawyer with a sense of social justice; an equally significant loss is the rule of law that makes an orderly and civilized society possible.
If authorities do not rise to the challenge of apprehending, prosecuting, and punishing killers and their masterminds, the future looks bleak indeed.
Second, the City Council is to be commended for passing an ordinance aimed at regulating and radically reducing the use of plastic shopping bags.
By now everyone is aware of the many harms that result from the pervasive presence in our lives and in the environment of plastic in all its forms.
This ordinance is a start in the long and admittedly difficult work of restoring the environment to a healthier state, but its passage marks a crossroad: of either going the path of conflict avoidance and allowing merely patchy compliance to its provisions, or of letting the people of Dumaguete know that the City means business by effective enforcement.
There is nothing more demoralizing than having scores of laws and regulations routinely violated.
Already, the culture of getting-away-with-it is what too many people live by, from ordinary citizens to the high and mighty who remain comfortably beyond the reach of the law.
Finally, an issue that worries FENOr (Friends of the Environment in Negros Oriental): the City plan to make organic fertilizer from the garbage in the City dump in Candau-ay, cosmetically named the “Environment & Ecological Park”.
A visit there this week found trees and ornamental vegetation thriving nicely beside a tall mountain of trash, but the evidence detected by our noses was of tons of rotting matter in the un-segregated garbage.
Successive administrations have been at a loss to find a solution to that rising mountain of trash and the resulting environmental problems.
The City now plans leachate treatment ponds and methane vents but precisely because of its inability to enforce segregation, the problem remains of the huge accumulated mass of garbage.
It, therefore, proposes to reduce the volume by digging out chunks of the mountain, sifting away non-biodegradable elements, and processing the remaining organic matter into fertilizer.
What worries FENOr is that over the years and decades, the un-segregated waste has included batteries, light bulbs, old medical wastes, containers of cleaning, automotive, paint and all manner of products that may have released chemical, heavy metal, and other contaminants into the whole mass of garbage.
Will it be possible to ensure that the fertilizer made from this material, and which will be distributed to farmers, is free from these contaminants and safe for food production?
Adding constant laboratory testing to the plan may be cumbersome, and may not entirely dispel unease over possible contamination of food produced with this fertilizer.
The decade-long problem of the City dump, and compliance with RA 9003 on solid waste management is at a point that calls for hard thinking and serious money; partial or half-baked measures will merely delay better solutions.
As a footnote to our visit to the City dump: it is a piteous sight to see the 60 or so scavengers at their livelihood, the majority of them women, whose earnings from this dirty, unhealthy environment go towards meeting their families’ needs. They perform a useful function, and deserve services from the City.
I believe that it is only fair and just that they be provided on a regular basis with gloves, boots, masks, germicidal soap, and washing facilities — the City owes it to them.
