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[av_heading heading=’PEOPLE POWWOW ‘ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=’30’ subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=” av-medium-font-size-title=” av-small-font-size-title=” av-mini-font-size-title=” av-medium-font-size=” av-small-font-size=” av-mini-font-size=” admin_preview_bg=”]
BY HERBERT VEGO
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Tuesday, December 5, 2017
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THREE years have passed since this news report broke out: The Boracay jetty port would be dredged and expanded to facilitate berthing of cruise ships. Well and good, thousands of foreign and Filipino tourists deserve world-class treatment.
The delay in implementing that project is bad enough. But the more pressing problem there is its substandard behind-the-times road network. The roads are so narrow that four-wheel vehicles from opposite directions must move turtle-slow to avoid collision.
Each rainfall results in flooding, exacerbated by the clogged drainage system.
In contrast, the privately-owned resort hotels and restaurants look majestic.
But what the visitors long for is the white-sand beach. Unfortunately, it is no longer environment-friendly, what with waste water from certain buildings flowing directly to the sea.
Boracay is not the only “paradise lost.”
Whether fact or fiction, Adam and Eve did not have to apply artificial fertilizer to tend their orchard.
It is no doubt in the hope of regaining that lost paradise that concerned farmers today practice organic farming. We would like to think that we have learned from past mistakes.
Unfortunately, some of us retain bad habits. We always see people spitting or throwing rubbish on the street. Despite anti-smoking ordinances, smokers still smoke in public.
A domestic helper who had just arrived from Hong Kong told us that on her first day there, she found no garbage on the streets. She learned from her employer later that littering was punishable by a fine of one thousand HK dollars.
She told us that it was only during a Sunday stroll at Central Park, favorite pasyalan of Filipina domestic helpers, that she saw the area strewn with chicken bones, candy wrappers and plastic pouches. Two Hong Kong cops nearby did not mind and were looking the other way, she said, “probably for fear of being mobbed by thousands of us Pinays.”
Environmental sanitation is a way to protect us from harmful consequences. And yet we do not learn from experience. How many times have we seen on TV that scene of garbage floating on knee-deep flood and knocking on a door while a voice was booming, “Ang basurang itinapon mo ay babalik sa ‘yo”?
The future of this generation and future generations will depend on how we take care of the ecosystem, which is now in disarray due to accumulated mistakes of many generations.
Incidentally, there are sincere environmentalists who deplore persistent use of coal by modern power plants. On that I beg to disagree. The “clean-coal technology” that runs today’s coal-fired power plant traps carbon and other pollutants. That’s why we see no black smoke billowing out of the coal-fired power plant in Iloilo City.
Unfortunately, the government always appears reluctant to implement environmental reforms that could diminish tax collection. Remember when in 2006 Energy Secretary Rafael Lotilla personally received for the government a “hybrid” from Honda? That unit had two engines: one gas-run and the other battery-powered. Eleven years have passed, but we have yet to see the green light flashed for mass importation of that kind of car.
It was our fellow Ilonggo, Roberto “Panchito” Pucket of Solar Electric Corporation, who initiated importation of China-made electric jeepneys more than a decade ago. But it’s only now that the present government would like to “modernize” by phasing out 15-year-old motorized jeepneys to give way to e-jeepneys. However, objecting operators see them as “unaffordable” (costing around P1.5 million) and probably “ill-intentioned” to line the pockets of certain government officials.
Let us call that “culture of opportunity” for these government men, but not for the jeepney operators. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
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