environmental cliche

( ..this is after watching Inconvenient Truth of Al Gore and 11th Hour of Leonardo de Caprio cause Mama once told me never to write anything until you know something. tama ba Ma? hehe and believe me, this will bore you hahaha )

in our crowded archipelago, the competition for space has become increasingly intense. allocating land just for garbage seems an awful waste and extremely inefficient. incineration, the enclosed, high-heat burning adopted in many advanced societies, could have been a more efficient method in terms of space. but that option was canceled out by the Clean Air Act, after focused lobbying by environmental activists concerned about incineration's hazardous emissions.

with options for centralized waste disposal running out, it has become fairly clear that only decentralized approaches are becoming feasible—barangay or municipal collection and recycling schemes, community composting, and the like. these would need to be combined with public drives, even government incentives, to buy and use less packaged consumer items. this effort would have to be effective enough to counter the overwhelming influence of advertising.

but there is little potential profit and graft in such approaches. what then is to greatly motivate public officials to change course?

even if they were persuaded, it wouldn't be easy. it would require community meetings and systems management, even door-to-door campaigning to influence individual behavior. this kind of effort in any community could easily be on the scale of, well, an election campaign. then again, someone capable of the logistics and management challenge of a well-oiled electoral campaign should be able to run a grassroots garbage reform drive. As in any election, the battleground for this type of campaign is the hearts and minds of millions of individual decision-makers.

i realized the problem of trash was just as much at its source as it was in its final dumping ground. for every so-called "consumer" after all, there is an individual producer of trash. whatever goes into a household will eventually come out in one form or another. it could either destroy someone else's life or it could destroy yours or mine.

the process that leads to such visions of hell in Antipolo or in Smokey Mountain (who could forget) usually starts in clean, orderly homes. like most household trash producers, we had no idea where our garbage ended up after it was picked up by the basureros. our simple observation that most people had an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude about their garbage applied to us as well.

unlike any other issues more serious than this (is there?), the garbage crisis (not only in congested metro manila but also in different cities all over the archipelago) is something all of us had contributed to directly. we ARE paying the price of abusing nature with global warming, change in weather (or climate) which the people in Africa are the ones who is first (and most) affected, ironically, despite the fact that they are the least contributor of pollution.


nevertheless, one should lessen the expense of using plastics, smoking, etc. REUSE, REDUCE and RECYCLE. cliche as it may sound but its the least we can do to help nature and ourselves.