I should tell you more about Sta. Fe, Bantayan’s School of the Seas, but in another time. It has a house rule that says you need to remove your watches because in there you’re supposed to forget time. You just have to let, to use an Emersonian quote, “the universe pass through you.”
While the universe was trying to pass through me last week, I suddenly got a phone call at 7 a.m. from Jurgenne Primavera. In case you missed some news, Madame Jurgenne, as I call her, was one of the Filipinos who made it to Time-CNN’s 2008 list of heroes for the environment, specifically under the category of scientists and innovators. Her groundbreaking researches revolutionized the science in aquaculture and she had been a strong advocate for sustainable fish farming and mangrove culture.
Last week, I met her, of all places, in Ticao, Masbate, one of the country’s most vulnerable islands in the season of climate change. Very casually, she was talking about why some mangrove-planting activities failed, and she said because some species are compatible only to specific substrate. It’d be like transplanting your great kamunggay in the Sahara. But let’s go back to the phone call.
The officials of Bohol, she said, have recently signed an MOU with a Korean investor for a bioethanol research project. This is supposed to be good news, except that the scale in which the project will be undertaken had the hideous face of a polar shift. Or perhaps, had the hideous face of Joker of the Heath Ledger kind. I promised her I’ll try to go through the MOU. Something about the call made me opaque that the universe couldn’t get through me anymore.
A section in the MOU says that the Province of Bohol will commit a minimum of 25,000 to 100,000 hectares for the aquaculture site of the bioethanol project for fifty years. Bohol, it also says, will “undertake to work for the extension” of the project for 25 years. That will give it a sweeping 75 years, enough to turn Bohol into an ecological mutant. Given the cholesterol and sugar level of Bohol’s officials, the project will definitely outlive them.
I am not sure at which point now has the research gone on algae as a profitable source of ethanol, a renewable energy form. I leave that to experts. But two details in the MUO strike me: the 100,000 hectares of seas around Bohol and 50 years.
Let’s take the 50 years first. Our Constitution allows the State to go into agreements on the use of our natural resources, but “such agreements may be for a period not exceeding 25 years” and “renewable for not more than twenty-five.” If she hears the news, my grade school math teacher will give Gov. Erico Aumentado some good pinch in the groin. Or send the MUO signatories, mayors and all, sitting on the air.
Bohol has 643,000 hectares of seawater, and the MUO commits about 100,000 hectares to the project. I do not know how the LGU’s will share the pie, but remember that our fisheries code reserves 15 percent of municipal waters as marine protected area. But given that the committed area spares the 15 percent, its scale may alter significantly the ecosystem in these areas. It’d be like ripping an entire patch of vegetation on harvest time. Harmful or helpful, when you strip a significant portion of vegetation, and even periodically, it’d be like Pacquiao giving a foe a good dose of body blows onwards to a KO.
I understand environmental groups are mobilizing to file a Writ of Kalikasan case against the signatories of the MOU. By the way, environmental lawyer Antonio Oposa and volunteer lawyers have filed the first ever Writ of Kalikasan case at the Supreme Court last week against the national government for non-compliance of a 21-year-old law on water catchment. Meanwhile, let’s do tarsiers-in-barong-spotting.
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