We are at the tipping point

Well, this year began just like any other except with the COVID pandemic still haunting us, but lo and behold, heat waves have engulfed many parts our planet. Extreme heat is taking its toll on human lives and species.

Yet climate skeptics, lusting for greed and power, continue their destructive ways with atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions rising unabated. Forests continue to be felled like chopsticks. Entire mountains are balding like a haircut. And our seas and marine environment are being mined. Our coral colonies in the South China Sea, the richest and most diverse in the world which replenishes the Pacific Ocean day in and day out, are being destroyed by island-building Chinese.

Overfishing in the Scarborough Shoal and Spratly Islands are destroying the marine environment. Don’t they know that our planet is dying? Don’t they know that Climate Change is real?

This September, we will attend the World Conservation Congress in Marseilles, France and yet all the controversies continue. Conservation has become a business ever since the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where big business, particularly the extractive industries like Shell Gas and Oil and ICMM Mining, controlled the summit.

We need to reclaim the global commons, said the late Elinor Ostrom in a conference in Whakatane, New Zealand, from transnational corporations. In our country, we face a water and food shortage as the government’s Build Build Build strategy has cemented the noble landscape.

COVID, like all viruses, will pass but Climate Change will not. It’s man-made greed and destruction. We are at the tipping point and climate calamities will show no mercy. The future of our planet and civilization is in peril and we are partly to blame for not doing much to save Mother Earth.

One thing I noticed though is the lack of concern of our youth and people. Sadly, they don’t care. Our government has done nothing and their lust for power is an insult to 114 million Filipinos.

If only I have the power, I would make a sea change and conserve our planet. – Antonio M. Claparols, president, Ecological Society of the Philippines