Secretary of Environment, Gina Lopez, has been the subject of attack by mining companies following her order to close down 23 mining operations which reportedly failed in the compliance audit and her cancellation of 75 Mineral Production and Sharing Agreements involving exploration and mining operations in watersheds.
Watersheds are areas of land that drain rain water down to rivers and other bodies of fresh water. Secretary Gina pointed out that once fresh water is poisoned because of the toxic chemicals used in mining such as cyanide, sometimes even mercury, people will have no fresh water to drink, no vegetation from which to derive food and no fish to catch in the oceans.
The major dailies have carried news hitting her on various dimensions including her education and personal life. News stories even said that mining firms are mulling filing graft cases against Gina. Yet, she would not have been in this bind in the first place if her predecessors had not issued MPSAs on areas covering watersheds which the law prohibits. And if she were corrupt, then she would not have ruffled feathers and fully performed her task of regulating the mining industry.
I have known Gina for quite a time now. She is someone passionately working for the protection of the environment because she genuinely cares about people. She often says every person deserves a quality of life that allows him to enjoy a healthy environment, a means of living that will preserve nature’s riches for generations to come, and access to what are vital in life such as clean water, clean air and sufficient food.
The President himself has called her what she truly is—a crusader. Thus, despite the reality that the government is the most ungrateful employer, and despite her having to endure long hours of work and stress on the job, she does her work with passion. She can take all the flak because she derives strength from the belief that what she is doing will be for the good of the entire country and the Filipino people for generations to come. Some people working in the companies ordered closed are said to be protesting about losing their jobs. They worry about the now but do not realize that if irresponsible and destructive mining goes unabated, they will be left with a barren, untillable land, no safe water to drink and no food to feed themselves and their families.
It is understandable that the mining companies are up in arms and bent on blocking Gina Lopez’s confirmation by the Commission on Appointments. What is at stake is their business interests and investments. Yet, they too must realize that quality of life far outweighs profits in the grand scheme of things. Gina, as I know her, is not anti-mining per se. She—like all of us—knows that there are minerals essential to living. What she is riling about is the irresponsible operation of mines that destroys life in its wake like the open pit type of mining. As a case study made by the Cordillera People’s Alliance said, open-pit mining is the most destructive as it requires removing whole mountains and excavating deep pits. Generally, open pits need to be very big—sometimes more than 2.5 kilometers in depth. In order to dig these giant holes, huge amounts of earth need to be moved, forests cleared, drainage systems diverted, and large amounts of dust let loose. By the very nature of this method, the top soil and vegetation of the land would necessarily be stripped away. In Itogon and Mankayan, Mountain Province, for instance, whole mountains and entire villages were removed from the land surface.
Mining requires large volumes of water for milling and waste disposal. Thus, in the Itogon and Mankayan experience, the mining companies privatized the sources of water, forcing the people in the mining-affected areas to buy water for drinking and domestic use from outside sources. The study further states that while toxic tailings were supposed to have been contained in dams, heavy rainfall and typhoons have caused the dams to either collapse or leak, causing toxic tailings to escape, poisoning the soil and water as far as Abra river. What is now left in Itogon and Mankayan is a wide gorge of barren and poisoned land on either side of a polluted river.
The Cordillera People’s Alliance has made many sound recommendations for responsible mining. One, the international community should develop minimum standards for the protection of the environment and human rights that are binding on all countries and companies, with effective monitoring and sanctions. Two, countries that are home to transnational mining companies should enact laws that will require those companies to operate using the same standards wherever they operate in the world. Home countries whose nationals and corporate entities inflict damage in developing countries should impose a penalty on the offending parties. Three, an international system should be created to allow complaints to be filed by affected peoples. Four, since no monetary compensation could replace the destroyed environment and the traditional of affected peoples, destructive large-scale corporate mining should be stopped. Alternatives such as chemical-free traditional small-scale mining methods need to be promoted and supported, the paper says.
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