A WEEK OF misfortune all around, that’s what the week was.
In just a week, everything worse took place all over the globe — massive flooding, heat wave sweeping in unlikeliest places, forest fires — everything that makes man’s fate worse than ever has taken place. Of course, any man’s misfortune is every man’s, regardless where and when. One thing is clear though: much of what’s taking place didn’t just happen overnight.
Over the years, we’ve been inflicted by nature’s vengeful wrath, as if in mean retribution for what we’ve done as its most intelligent, responsible steward for the planetary home we’ve had. It’s just Mother Nature behaving, rather misbehaving, the way it does, purely on account of the errant ways we’ve dealt it in recent modern time’s history.
Last year alone, we went through a roller-coaster of 365 days marked more by further damage to the environment, largely brought about by the unrelenting ejection into the global atmosphere of polluting toxic gas emissions. Super-hurricanes unparalleled in strength, mighty earthquakes of greater ferocity, weather disturbances that pummeled fierce winds and heavily cascading torrents of rainwater on hapless communities — all these have been unlike any other in recent years.
We’ve not been spared at all from nature’s unforgiving onslaught, whether in our side of the Pacific Ocean or elsewhere at the other side of the globe thousands of miles away. In the last three weeks alone, three storms buffeted our northern coastlines, actually skimming like a brushing breeze. But the supervening effects have been palpable. Habagat down West rush upnorth, lashing Luzon and Visayas with torrential rains that drenched much of the lowland areas and caused floodwaters to rise and inundate everything in the usual vulnerable places.
In the last three weeks, the cost has been on the high side, about P1 billion lost in terms of the actual damage to infrastructure, agriculture, and the local economy of the calamity-stricken communities. As clear as day, it’s money that could have given more impetus to livelihood, money that a poor, developing country like ours could use in earning momentary relief from the doldrums of day-to-day living, more so in a TRAIN-induced economic environment. The good news is that the fatality count has not been on the upside. The bad news is that another weather disturbance hovers in our country just a few hundred miles away.
As an archipelagic country perilously situated in the Pacific Ring of Fire, we have had a share of environmental events without peer in recent memory. Over 6 months ago, with Christmastime upon us, two typhoons just days apart ran roughshod over northern Mindanao and central Visayas, inflicting fatalities like no other, leaving a wide swath of devastation that caught governments and people completely flabbergasted.
Of course, never forgotten is the trail of devastation left in the wake of Yolanda, and the continuing disaster inflicted on the afflicted communities, when the cost of rehabilitation made more millions for a few, while the real victims lay prostrate five years after.
It is indeed sad, very sad that compatriots would lose kin and possessions in an instant of suddenness brought about by disrespecting environmental fury. It’s even more disappointing when government officials, national and local, take turns blaming each other for nature’s outburst as if lives would be restored and properties regained when the blame is someone else’s. It’s clearly Mother Earth simply reacting the way it’s been behaving all because mankind has not been resolute enough, determined enough, assertive enough, active enough to halt the continued depredation running across centuries.
Midway this year, we ought to persevere even more as we prepare to meet fresher contingencies, newer challenges with stronger resolve, unerringly believing that climate change by our collective action would abate somewhat from overheating the earth’s temperatures. Time is clearly not on our side, but collectively nations and peoples around the world can bring about radical stout-hearted changes and make industries and automobiles be more environment-compliant, if only to mitigate the misbehaving ways that Mother Nature has been acting up in recent times.
As Patricia Espinosa, UN Climate Change Executive Director, sternly warned, “the thermometer of risk is rising, the window of opportunity is closing.” All through the years, we’ve been told that not much progress is being attained to arrest greenhouse gas emissions to safe, livable levels. Since the Paris global accord has been forged two years ago, purposely for global efforts to bring down emission levels, not much success had been accomplished, from country to country, despite iron-clad pledges to abate the bombardment of the earth’s atmosphere of gases burned from fossil fuels.
We just went on our greedy and wicked ways, simply because the business of gassing up is good for everybody’s business. Once more, we must be kept reminded that it’s time we cease doing activities that worsen the continuing folly of our everyday life, from the machines that we hum to the engine that we rev up on the road.
All that we need to do is to go for clean energy and get to manage life as well-resolved as possible. All that we must do is to get going with our life freed from the clutches of dirty energy, especially at this time when alternative energy sources a lot more desirable for the environment are just waiting to be utilized. All that those of us with affordable resources should be doing is to plough more money into these new energy sources, if not dis-invest from traditional coal-sourced fuels.
The doomsday clock has long been ticking and we’re now at the very edge of the cliff. Unerringly, time’s up.
