Don't blame God for landslides, rich loggers and miners are the
culprits
(republishing, copying, no restrictions)
By: Father Shay Cullen
To feel the pain and terrible evil that the corruption of government and the greed of rich loggers visit upon the poor of the Philippines just try to imagine a million tons of rocks and mud burying you or your family in an instant. One minute you are happily joining a meeting with your neighbours at home or in the school then in an instant, you are plunged into a dark dungeon of death.
The sound of the roof crashing and collapsing around you is terrifying. There are cries and screams and then silence. The weak moan of a few begging for help nearby tells you some are still alive in the dark. The metal creaks and only moments remain before you are to be crushed to death by a hundred tons of rocks and dirt. You are saved temporally by the steel frame of the school roof.
All you have is your cell phone, its weak light shows there is still a signal but also how impossible is your plight. Yes you weep uncontrollably and punch out a last message, a plea for help, a faint hope and send the text message as one teacher did to her supervisor as she lay dying, the oxygen running out. "Ma'am, we are still under the school. Please help us Ma'am. This is Edilio Coquilla. Please ma'am." Then begging to be saved - you die. Don't blame God nature or fortune -blame those who had the power to cut the trees and plant the coconuts.
There is now a vanished village of Guinsagon outside the town of St. Bernard, Leyte. The hundreds buried alive, ten meters below, breathed their last and expired and no one could reach them.
Rescue teams rushed to this remote place and they were astounded. It looked like half the mountain had avalanched down to bury the entire population. There were at least 300 children and their teachers in the school. About a hundred women were at a meeting to discuss the future of their village. Little did they know that it was to be no more.
Housewives were preparing the next meal and then it happened. The earth moved, the mountain shook and the rain soaked soil had nothing to hold it back. The deep rooted trees had long been logged out. Nature had been raped, abused and left lying prone to the typhoons and torrential rain that is the climatic lot of this central part of the archipelago. Without nature's network of roots, and rocks disaster was inevitable. The almost rootless coconut trees planted by other wealthy families to exploit the denuded earth were no match for the massive rainfall, the weight of soil and rock and the pull of gravity.
The coconut trees were sitting on what was after three weeks of continual rain a soaked sponge. They aggravated the soil with their huge palms and single trunks swaying and acting like levers in the wind prying loose the soil and stones. Then the swirling spinning rotation of the earth, and the massive pull of gravity it generates, brought down the land in a great avalanche of death and destruction sweeping away and burying everything in its path. No structure could withstand this massive force - it was nature unleashed. But not by any act of God but so clearly the inevitable result of acts of avarice and greed, human plunder and the pernicious abuse of power.
The local people who rushed to the scene saw nothing but a sea of black mud and rocks into which they sunk with every step, the mud sucking and dragging them down. Above the dark clouds were threatening to unleash even more torrents of water. Only a few were pulled free, faint hearted with fright.
Dozens of landslides kill hundreds of people every year all over the Philippines as the direct result of rampant uncontrolled logging and mining activities. Most are never reported. The day after the destruction of Guinsagon, ten people were buried alive in the remote village of Depore in Bayog, Zamboanga del Sur half kilometer for the mining site of the Canadian TVI Pacific.
Don't blame an act of nature, a climatic event, the hand of God. Blame rests is for those who gain their greedy goals of abundant wealth and sumptuous living while the poor wade and wallow in the mud slides of poverty and hardship.
The Department of the Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the politicians and its officials, support by issuing logging permits and licenses to their friends and relatives, crooks and cronies, have to answer for the death of many.
Environmentalists have incontrovertible video evidence that the cutting of old forest rain forest trees is rampant around the Philippines. It is not God that allowed this suffering and loss of precious life but those powers and the pen to sing away the heritage of the nation and bury it with the victims of their contagious corruption. [End]
Fr. Shay Cullen is a Columban missionary: PREDA Centre, Kalaklan, Olongapo City. www.preda.org
