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On Shooting Stars and Dancing Fish

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I have fallen in love. In love with Tony Oposa’s newest book Shooting Stars and Dancing Fish: A Walk to the World We Want.

And therefore, I am also in love with the figure of the author himself. Recently published by the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc., this book was not easy to acquire. Like any treasured book, I go through the pages with reverence, slowly relishing each page. Some pages have the author’s poetry, and some have his paintings…almost childlike, with the scenery and vibrant colors of his beloved Bantayan Island in Cebu where he founded the School of the Sea for young people to learn how to become advocates for the earth and the sea.

Who is Antonio Oposa? Tony is an environment lawyer who fought for the log ban after he saw how logging concessions were denuding our country from about 21 million hectares in the 1900s to merely 800,000 hectares of virgin forests left today.

Here in Negros Oriental alone, our Province has roughly five percent of its original forest cover left, and this can be found in the Mt. Talinis range and in Canlaon. In less than 100 years, Perlas’ forests were gone.

I first came across Tony Oposa many years ago in a mayor’s league meeting held in Dumaguete during the early years of our NGO called Friends of the Banica River & the Environment (FBRE).

Oposa presented a topic on solid waste management according to RA 9003 which became a law in the year 2000. To emphasize his point, he emptied on the floor a garbage can of Bethel Guest House where the meeting was being held, and showed us its contents: crumpled paper, some plastic wrappers, a plastic bottle, a banana peel.

How much of this is really garbage?, he challenged the audience. Only about 15 percent of what we normally discard deserve to be thrown away. The rest could actually be recycled or composted, he said.

That impressed me. (I wonder what the mayors were thinking.) Here was a man who knows what he was talking about, preached it, practiced it, and showed us how.

Tony Oposa co-authored Environmental Law in the Philippines in 1992, and wrote A Legal Arsenal for the Philippine Environment in 2002.

One of the papers Oposa wrote for his academics in the US was Charting the Course for Citizen Suits. This provision has been included in our laws which empower ordinary citizens to initiate legal actions to enforce environment laws in the country.

At the meeting that time, Oposa warned the mayors of Negros Oriental that any citizen can actually sue them for not implementing RA 9003 or the Solid Waste Management Act.

Fast forward year 2017. Dumaguete City is fined P2.5 million for non-compliance of RA 9003, for continuing to operate a dumpsite, for non- segregation of waste, for open burning of waste, among others.

Sadly, all these violations are so true. For the last 17 years, no city mayor or administration has ever professionalized the operation and management of an environment office, including providing it with a decent budget.

I understand that promises and commitment to act on RA 9003 by this current city administration has held back the fines for now.

Constantly throughout the book Shooting Stars, Tony Oposa refers to our country as Perlas. He reminds us that “somewhere in the great ocean, there is a group of islands so rich and so beautiful it is like pearls of the sea… perlas del mar. And we are the people of Perlas. If the land is rich, the sea is even richer. We are the center of the center of marine biodiversity on earth.”

Our Negros Island finds itself in the center of the center. Does this not make your heart swell to live in this beautiful jewel of an island? I am always amazed at the beauty and abundance of Negros Island. Going towards Valencia, the Cuernos de Negros mountain range rises above, sometimes with huge cumulus clouds in the background, bright in the sunlight.

Although not all is well in paradise. But this incredible wealth is little known to the people of Perlas, Tony writes. Sadly, they have done everything to destroy their coral reefs and marine wealth – all in the name of progress.

What do we understand by progress? How do you measure it? Consumption is the measure and model of ‘economic development’ for the world, he writes.

A Filipina I once met in Europe, who had been based some years in Singapore, told me: “The economy of Singapore is based on consumption.” I couldn’t understand why it had to be so.

If developing nations aspire to progress, should it follow the model of consumption and waste by the ‘developed’ countries? To consume is to ‘use up’, another synonym for waste, Tony writes.

Food for thought: Economics means the most efficient use of scarce resources. That makes today’s standard of a developed economy an oxymoron or a contradiction of terms.

Tony Oposa encourages us… no, he urges us to paint the future…as walk into the world we want.

And what is that world? What kind of a world do we want to leave for future generations…our children and our children’s children?

I know my dream for this my beloved City: A safe Dumaguete where one can walk, and ride a bicycle under tree-shaded lanes. (Oh, how walkable in distance it is from the public market to the boulevard, to Silliman.) I dream of a good plan for public transportation so that we won’t need to take the car. I dream of public parks and playgrounds for each, or at least a cluster of barangays. I dream of clean rivers and a clean sea. In short, that we become the Perlas del Mar that Tony Oposa dreams about.

What you can do or dream you can, Begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Author’s email: [email protected]

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