"You are not doing enough"

Greta Thunberg

GRETA THUNBERG, born on January 3, 2003, suddenly burst into the scene last August 20, 2018, at 15 years old then and the fight to address climate change has taken on new vivacity. She took time off from school to singlehandedly demonstrate outside the Swedish Parliament because she told the politicians in her blunt way: “You are not doing enough.” Her action was caught by the social media. She protested by sitting outside the Riksdag (Swedish Parliament) every day for three weeks during school hours with the sign Skolstrejkförklimatet (school strike for the climate). She also handed out leaflets that stated: "I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future." By December 2018, more than 20,000 students had held strikes in at least 270 cities all over the world. From that time on she has spoken to world parliamentarians and business people without sparing her words. She told the British parliament in London: "You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to.”

People are now talking of the Greta Thunberg Effect. The movement is snowballing. People are taking drastic steps. When your house is burning you cannot just standby and reason out. You have to act! And that is what people are doing now. Last September 20 the 2019 climate strikes, also known as the Global Week for Future, took place. It was a series of international strikes and protests to demand action to address climate change. The protests are taking place across 4500 locations in 150 countries. It is a continuing strike till September 27. More than 4 million people have participated in the said strikes. Adults are now joining the children in the Climate Strikes. These eventsare part of the school strike for climate movement, inspired by Thunberg.

In the Philippines a total of 17 strikes were registered. Filipino activists also marched in honor of those who were killed for defending the environment. It was reported in 2018 that the Philippines is the deadliest country for those defending the environment.

Strikes are good. This shows that people, even young children, are standing up. However, the governments and big companies are uncommitted. So climate advocacy should move up to the next level. Big companies who are the main polluters should be hit where it hurts them most. They guard most their name and their money. We therefore call for boycott of their products and divestment from the financial institutions that support them. 70% of investments on dirty fossil fuel are support by BDO, BPI and Metrobank. We ask these banks to fund renewable energy which are cheaper and cleaner rather than oil or coal powered plants. We ask Camella  and Ayala to stop converting farms and ancestral domain lands of Indigenous Peoples for their housing projects. We ask San Miguel Corporation to get out of dirty coal and the Kaliwa dam project. We call on DMCI to stop coal mining in Semirara island. If they do not listen we should initiate boycott calls of their products. It cannot be that business and government continue to reap profit while our common home is on fire!

Rehabilitation or Revenge

THE supposed release of Mayor Antonio Sanchez of Calauan on August 20 has kept the news hot on the Good Conduct Time Allowance (GCTA) Law in particular and on the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor), the New Bilibid Prison (NBP) and the Correctional Institution for Women (CIW)  in general. Due to the on-going senate investigation, the spotlight is still on the issue of the incarceration of convicted persons. Many horrors stories have come out about practices of laxity, immorality, and corruption in the BuCor. The blame game has also begun, finger pointing even to the previous administration. The PNoy administration had been in a bad light for blaming the GMA administration for many of the shortcomings and failures of its own administration. The same is happening with the Duterte administration. It has already been three years in power, yet for its shortcomings, it still blames the PNoy administration, as in this case!

In the present investigation – and subsequent confusion – over the issues of the handling of prisoners, the focus is always on those who committed heinous crimes and on the few who had been questionably set free. I say “the few” because the Bilibid facility can have as many as 20,000 inmates. Many are there, by the thousands maybe, who are incarcerated not because of any serious crime but just because they are poor and ignorant. There are hundreds who are sick, disabled and elderly – already in their 70’s and in their 80’s. Hundreds more have alreadyreformed lives. These people deserve to be set free according to the GCTA law. Let us not blame the law, much less those who passed it and even did the Implementing Rules and Regulations (IRR) of the law. The problem of the laws is always on the implementation. The executive branch of the government NOW, and this is to be stressed – NOW – is the one responsible for its implementation, and not the former one.

The talks on the GCTA has bared the mind and the heart of many people. Many interlocutorshave still the mentality that incarceration is meant to punish, which translates, to avenge, to make people suffer. Their vengeful heart comes out. There are two purposes for incarceration: to keep the criminals from further harming others and to give the law-breakers a chance to realize their mistake and be rehabilitated. This is restorative justice. People shout for justice and many times they mean punitive and vengeful justice. They still belong to the old and discredited school of thought. True justice is restorative justice, which includes the rehabilitation of those who did wrong and the restoration of peace and harmony in those who are wronged.

I hope that in the on-going debate on the BuCor, its name may also be discussed, debated upon, and acted on. Itsname is the Bureau of Corrections. Its purpose is to correct. This is why the government maintains correctional facilities. Do these facilities really have programs to correct and rehabilitate people? It is not just enough to lump people together within bars or between high walls. Are there deliberate efforts to rehabilitate the minds, behaviors, and beliefs of the convicts? If all these talks and media coverage can at least call attention to the sorry state of our correctional institutions and bring improvement to the facilitieswhich hold more than 200,000 people all over the country, something worthwhile has been achieved by all this hullabaloo.

Season of Creation

SINCE 2015 Pope Francis has declared September 1 as the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation (commonly known as Creation Day). This had already been established by the Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios of the Orthodox Church since 1989. It opens the Season of Creation which runs from September 1 to October 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, the acknowledged patron of the care for the environment. Since 2001, representatives of several Christian churches, including Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox, are urging the faithful to see September as the “Season of Creation” in an effort to raise awareness about our responsibility towards creation.

In his message for this year’s Creation Day, Pope Francis said:  "Now is the time to rediscover our vocation as children of God, brothers and sisters, and stewards of creation. Now is the time to repent, to be converted…. Because we have forgotten who we are: creatures made in the image of God, called to dwell as brothers and sisters in a common home."

The Church Calendar is divided into several distinct seasons during which we focus on and celebrate certain moments of salvation history, centered on Jesus Christ. Thus, in Advent we await his glorious coming at the end of time as we recall the expectant waiting for his first coming in history. Christmas is focused on his birth, while in Lent we recall his suffering and his death. Easter is the glorious season of his triumph over death and sin. But salvation history does not only start at the birth of Jesus. It starts with creation during which the Word of God too was present, as St. John wrote in his Gospel: “He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race” (Jn. 1:2-4). St. Paul wrote: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Col. 1:15-17)

In the season of Creation, as in all the seasons in the Church Calendar, we thank and praise God for his work of grace. We also we see ourselves vis-à-vis this work of God - how unworthy we are - and we resolve to participate more fully in God’s saving action. So in the Season of Creation we praise God for the wonderful world he has made. God was very pleased with his work.  “God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good.”  (Gen. 1:31)

Unfortunately, we humans have not been good stewards of this wonderfully beautiful world. We have disappointed God’s expectation of us. So in this season we are called to ecological conversion. This is very urgent because we are already in a climate emergency. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on October 2018,  we have only till 2030, if it is business as usual - barely 11 years from now - before we reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, a point of no return for the earth as we know it now. Runaway climate change will be upon us with heat waves, super typhoons, super cold spells, unprecedented monsoon rains, draughts and floods all over the planet.

So all of us are called to act now. A change of lifestyle is called upon each of us which would involve changes in our diet, buying habits, modes of travel, the consumption of water and electricity and the use of such ordinary things as plastics. At the same time we need to lobby government and business to put programs that are eco-friendly and to stop the use of fossil fuel. This will be a hard fight because the biggest business enterprises in the country, and in the world, now are all involved in dirty energy, one way or another, such as agribusiness, transportation, banks, mining, construction and big industries.

But we have no choice. We have only one earth. We have only one home. We need to act now!