ISO 14001

There seems to be a bit of confusion about what the standards really are.

Newly appointed DENR secretary Gina Lopez announced that she wanted to “evaluate if the country is safe from mining.” We are not sure if that is what she meant, as opposed to “safe for mining.”

At any rate, she later said: “If you are really responsible, then you really have to have the highest standards.” That could take us down a slippery slope.

This week, Lopez cancelled the mining permits of four firms. We are not sure if permits were temporarily cancelled pending further investigation or cancelled for good. In the present circumstances, no one really knows.

A new order appears to have descended upon our mining community. In this new order, the only thing clear is that everything has become unclear.

It should not be.

Most of our largest mining companies subscribe to an ISO certification. The certification (ISO 14001) prescribes an effective and efficient process for auditing the performance of a mining enterprise.

ISO 14001 specifies the requirements for an environmental management system. It indicates good management and control of the environment as aspects of operations in line with global best practices and standards.

In requesting for ISO 14001 certification, a company undergoes assessment, training, documentation and process audits. There is near-continuous monitoring of operations as well as site audits every six months.

ISO 14001 is not static. The standard undergoes periodic revision in the face of technological advancement in the industry.

Notwithstanding, Sec. Gina Lopez has called for an entirely new audit, presumably of all the mines currently in operation. What this new audit will be composed of is anybody’s guess.

The Chamber of Mines of the Philippines (COMP), the umbrella organization of mining companies in the country, expressed concern a new “comprehensive assessment” would only cause more delays. Recall that during the Aquino years, the administration made much noise about a “new mining policy” without arriving at a clear definition of what this was about.

Recall that the Mining Act of 1995 governs the industry in this country. After a decade of delays at the Supreme Court, the Act was cleared of any constitutional infirmities. It is deemed one of the best mining legislations anywhere.

Nevertheless, the mining industry never truly emerged from the doldrums mainly because of strong environmental activism and the largely undefined roles of local government authority as well as such pieces of legislation as the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act.

There are, to be sure, sloppy practices in our mining industry. These practices are associated largely with small-scale enterprises and informal mining activities such as we see in the Tampacan area.

In these cases, strong action by the DENR is called for.

Unsafe and unsound mining practices put people’s lives at risk. They give rise to rampant smuggling of minerals. They promote criminality.

Gina Lopez might do well to concentrate on the makeshift mines and the fly-by-night operations. This is where the most harm is done.

Those mining enterprises properly governed by ISO 14001 are largely heavily policed. The only thing that grips them is uncertainty over the drift of our mining policy – which, hopefully, is not what Gina’s actions are all about.

Rage

The last week could mark a historic turn in US politics.

Racial violence is nothing new in the US. But from rare, the violence became intermittent. Last week, the violence simply bloomed.

The week began rather inauspiciously until two shooting incidents, in two separate cities, happened. The two incidents were, well, special.

The victims, both African-Americans, were not resisting arrest when fired upon by policemen. One was reaching for his driver’s license when policemen blew his arm away.

Then Dallas happened.

From the various accounts of the incident, it appears a single gunman started taking out policemen. Five uniformed policemen were taken down. Six others were wounded.

The gunman, trained in the arts of war, positioned himself well for this attack. He carried enough ammunition to sustain a long engagement. It was only after the police pulled in a robot and detonated it close to the suspect that this episode finally ended.

This gunman was African-American. He has no medical history to speak of. He was not a man of violent temper.

Only one thing distinguished him: a fascination for guns.

When this man set out on his mission – very likely to seek vengeance for his “brothers” – he was not about to return. This was a mission of death.

The deaths of the policemen, the death of the gunman, all the other traumas accompanying this event solve  nothing. All the violence the past few weeks, and probably the months ahead, solve nothing.

At the bottom of this wild cycle of violence, I suspect, is not race but guns.

The apparently racial content of the violence is a subset. The bigger set, the one that includes the mass shooting that happened targeting all races and age groups, is the one induced by the accessibility of guns.

Orlando, Florida was not about race. It was about gender.

The many school shootings were not about race. They were about the particular vulnerability of schoolchildren.

The mass shooting at San Bernardino was not about race. They were about ideology.

Yet all of them became possible because of the accessibility of guns. All of them became possible because it was so easy in the US to purchase guns over the counter.