Rape and Ruin

Friday, 27 May 2011 08:52

Written by Neric Acosta

One does not have to be an ecologist or a marine biologist to react in outrage and disbelief over the flood of headline news this week on the pillage of invaluable marine resources over 7,000 hectares of open sea off the Cotabato coast. Countless rare sea turtles, some over 100 years old, uncommon black coral from age-old reefs found in waters over 300 meters deep, a unique range of multi-colored sea shells, many classified as endangered.

A grade school student who learns enough about biodiversity and earth science will know that the complex ecosystems of the oceans and on land provide us with the sources of life: air, water, food, health. But the destruction and wanton abuse of all these will inevitably spell our own doom and imperil life as we know it as the planet’s most intelligent, sentient species.

The latter point becomes from the broader vantage of ecology questionable, if dubious. All other species take only what they need from nature for survival and sustenance. In the food chains across the animal and plant kingdoms, a balance is struck when prey and predator keep to the limits of consumption and distribution so as to allow continuing abundance and interminable sustainability.

Alas, human beings over the millennia they have inhabited the earth – a blip in the continuum of time in the universe – have seen it fit to destroy and demand without restraint and replenishment – especially in just the last 200 years. When the Industrial Age began and global trade and commerce and the spread of colonialism began ‘shrinking and flattening’ the world, we saw to it that we extracted and consumed not to meet basic needs but create more wants and financial capital – so as to produce and consume and waste more.

Rich biodiversity zones, the last remaining patches and strongholds of life forms that have evolved over the centuries are now being invaded by poachers and voracious interests to squeeze whatever economic or monetary value they can from these irreplaceable riches of the seas. The black market for such treasures and the attendant greed for cash astound the common sense and insult human intelligence that ought to understand that short-term pillage and devastation beggars us all in the long term.

Seven thousand hectares is an area just about twice the size of Singapore – or just about as vast as the aggregate urban centers of Metro Manila. To mine this expanse of nature, plumbing the depths to indiscriminately harvest and haul out troves of marine wealth for a rapacious black market within and outside the country is in itself a staggering thought. The marine life in all the seas encompassing our archipelago are known to be by far the richest, most abundant, and the most biodiverse in the world. The coral reefs in the Verde Passage between Mindoro and Batangas, as with the rest of the Visayas Sea and the Sulu-Sulawesi Sea towards Indonesia, are known to have the highest endemism of coral species, in parts easily 400 times more than any given square kilometer in the entire Caribbean Sea!

With coral reefs come a variety of other marine life – seagrass, seashells, fish and other aquatic life. The reefs serve as the ‘rainforests of the sea’ and habitats for fisheries that supply the large demands for protein in the human diet. But if for a number of million pesos we destroy and despoil, we run every risk of killing the incontrovertible social security system of the vast numbers of the poor. For how can any economic system last when the life-giving sources of land, air and water reach depletion? And widespread hunger and desperation follow?

This is how the news of the rape and ruin of the seas off Cotabato should be read – as a bellwether of our own precarious state of the earth and worse, our ecological perdition. On the same day the black coral loads were seized, another shipment at the Manila Port was apprehended, showing millions worth of illegally-cut wood, some of which are considered endangered species like lauan (Philippine mahoganay), narra, tanguile and other lumber that could only have been harvested from the country’s last and dwindling protected areas.

These incidents are not simply about the rampant violation of environmental laws, or the need to address better monitoring and governance deficiencies. The rape of our forests and seas is about increasingly intense and violence-prone resource wars in a world of exploding populations and unfettered market demands for resources. Competition and control over a rapidly shrinking natural resource base will be amplified over terrestial and oceanic frontiers -- on a greatly-strained climate-upset planet whose carrying capacities to serve or keep seven billion human beings from civilizational collapse pose immense and far-reaching challenges.

But more than degradation and devastation, rape and ruin, is the call to return to basic sanity and reason – founded on a reverence for all life forms and the interconnectedness of all life underwater or on ground. Until we see that a hundred-year old sea turtle or a thousand-year old black coral, which grows only an average of 10 to 20 micrometers every year, are part of the complex web we inhabit, we run the perilous risk of exterminating life on earth as we know it – and of playing out mass self-destruction to the hilt.

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