CABANATUAN CITY—Six more top-level officials of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in Central Luzon have been replaced and given new assignments, including one who was given a province-wide position in the latest reshuffle ordered by Secretary Gina Lopez.
The six were community environment and natural resources officers Alfredo Collado, Jimmy Aberin, Ricardo Lazaro, Gerundio Fernandez and Florencio Lalo and Mariano Miguel.
Collado, Cenro of Camiling, Tarlac was designated as the new provincial environment and natural resources officer, replacing the caretaker Cherry Claudio who temporarily took over following the retirement late last month of Leovino Ignacio.
Collado, previously assigned in Casiguran, Aurora was replaced by Miguel.
Aberin and Lazaro, Cenros of Baler and Cabanatuan, respectively, swapped posts while Lalo, Cenro in Dinalupihan, Bataan took the post of Fernandez, Cenro of the Science City of Muñoz in Nueva Ecija.
Collado was the second Cenro to be promoted to Penro following the designation of Nicomedes Claudio as chief of the provincial DENR in Aurora.
The latest revamp brought to 10 the number of DENR officials replaced since last month.
Earlier, Lopez replaced Joselito Blanco and Raul Mamac, DENR provincial environment and natural resources officers of Aurora and Bataan, respectively.
Blanco was replaced by Claudio and Mamac by Raymond Rivera, Cenro based in Masinloc, Zambales.
Retained as Penros were Celia Esteban of Bulacan, Rafael Otic of Pampanga, Emelita Lingat of Tarlac and Laudemir Salac of Zambales.
Among the Cenros, retained were Ariel Mendoza of Bagac and Florencio Jalu of Dinalupihan, both in Bataan; Roger Encarnacion of Guiguinto, Bulacan; Romel Santiago of Bacolor, Pampanga and Marife Castillo of Olongapo City.
A DENR official who sought anonymity, however, said the revamp was caused by feng shui, known locally as “punsoy,” a Chinese philosophical system of harmonizing everyone with the environment.
Lopez, reportedly a devout believer in geomancy, was a yoga missionary at a young age.
Feng shui was widely used to orient buildings—often spiritually significant structures such as tombs, but also dwellings and other structures which are determined for being an auspicious site by reference to local features such as bodies of water, stars, or a compass.
The practice was suppressed in mainland China during the state-imposed Cultural Revolution of the 1960s but since then regained popularity.
The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience states the principles of Feng shui related to living harmoniously with nature are “quite rational,” but does not otherwise lend credibility to the nonscientific claims.