My niece Stephanie Burkard has just finished her freshman year at Old Dominion University and wrote the following essay for a scholarship contest.  (See the link toward the end of the piece to help her win…)  I post it here with her permission.  [And if you are also a student and have a piece like this that you'd like to see published, send it my way. ]

I picked up Blue Like Jazz this week.  Chapter 2 coincided with some deeper thoughts I’ve been having.  One sentence sums up the chapter.  ”I am the problem” (Miller, 20).

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to change the world.  Well, no.  I’ve thought more about how to change campus.  It’s an easier target than the world.  I also know campus and what I want to change very specifically.  Safety is one.  I’ve only ever heard gunshots twice in my life.  I was in New York City once.  The other time, I was chilling on Beth Anne’s porch on 41st street.  Other ones are tuition rates.  I pay a lot of money to go to school.  Thank you so much, federal government.  Because of your financial assistance, our schools have no problem raising prices for things like i-pads at libraries and pizza parties for the social clubs.  Anyone else get mad thinking about this?  Man, I pay for a lot of pizza with that tuition of mine.  That’s why I spend hours working.  So SGA can throw a pizza party!  Not so I can learn the stuff I’m paying to learn.

Where do I find myself talking about this stuff?  Frustrated.  Nothing changes.  I see no difference in my life.

Let’s get bigger than campus here.  World poverty.  How many people live on less than 2 dollars a day again?  Oh yeah, every other person ever to be born.  We care, so we campaign.  We care, so we write letters to our government.  We care, so we cry when we watch the news.  We care, so we expect others to fix that problem!  They’re the only ones who can do anything about it!  What’s your problem, government!  Stop wasting money and feeding some hungry people!  I am conveniently selfless when it comes to fixing problems.  That’s about 3 % of the time.  The other 97%, I think about me.

Several years ago, my family sat down to watch An Inconvenient Truth.  It’s a documentary by Al Gore about global warming.  Basically, the world is being destroyed by people.  Now, since then, there has been much controversy about the validity of global warming, but anyone who’s sat at the Faith Academy soccer field overlooking Manila by day knows that people are indeed destroying the world.  As I was saying, my family sat down to watch this documentary.  Now, my father is a smart man and he understood a concept most people are not willing to admit.  ”I am the problem.”  My father made two changes in his life that reflected his understanding of this concept.  The first is he changed the shower head in the bathroom to a water conserving one.  The second is he stopped making foam surfboards.  He now makes wood ones which are better for the environment.  Sure, trees are involved, but for every one cut down, many more are planted, at least I believe Dad started shaping with a kit that promised that.

Dad got it.  I am the problem.  It took me a few more years to catch on, but I get it now.  I am the problem.  I am the safety problem at ODU.  I am the pizza party.  I am world hunger.  I am destroying the environment.  So where’s the shower head that I can change in my life?

Everyone has something they can do- recycle (and drive less ;P).  It costs you nothing to recycle other then minimal effort.  Something else you can do too- and all online!  Go to http://www.castleink.com/ and see what ink cartridges on your printer you can use to cut back on your Manila-smog output.

(This is for a scholarship contest.  The more of you who go to castleink.com directly through this note, the more chances I have of winning.  Feel free to share this with your friends.  Thanks.)

via Flickr CC License - click for original

My wife Susanna and I are in the middle of a two week visit to Singapore.  This is an unusually long and delightfully leisurely visit compared with most of my overseas trips.  Because our youngest daughter lives and works here, we’ve come to see and experience her world as well as to share the creation care message in two conferences this week – which is why I’ve been able to experience and explore the city in a more relaxed manner than is usually possible.  These are some of my impressions after five days here – anecdotal, to be sure, but still valuable, I think.

In many ways, this island city-state is everybody’s dream location.  Certainly this is true for those whose lives involve overseas postings, whether they are from the government, corporation or nonprofit worlds.  People native to the region as well line up for work permits and jobs, and the wealth of the citizenry is legendary.  At a dinner two nights ago a Singaporean friend commented:  “A fundraiser that in Australia would net $300 would get $50,000 in Singapore – in one afternoon.”

Built on the tip of the Malay peninsula, the rainforest has been replaced by some of the most modern architecture in the world.  Gadgetry is ubiquitous, from phones and Ipads to high tech expressways with electronic toll systems that are activated only during periods of high congestion.  A superb mass transit system moves thousands of commuters from home to work and back with high efficiency and relatively low cost.  Most people live in high rise apartment complexes because of sheer population density, but even here crime is almost unheard of.  In the city that long ago banned chewing gum, it almost goes without saying that the cleanliness of the streets would make your mother proud.

There is a significant gap between rich and poor, as there is everywhere.  BMWs and Porsches share the highways with motorbikes and pickups filled with day-laborers  on their way home from a day of hard work in hot and humid weather.  These workers are on their way to tiny rooms which, though a far cry from the slums of Manila or Karachi, are certainly less comfortable than where I sit right now.  But still the people come, or try to, from every country in the region.  For many, Singapore at its worst is a paradise compared to the options they have at home.

As the world’s population continues to rise toward a peak of 8 to 12 billion or more within the next generation, Singapore seems to be the perfect example of how to handle lots of people while maintaining a high standard for quality of life.  With an astounding 18,235 people per sq mile, this is the most densely populated country in the world.  Given that a large percentage of the center of the island is reserved for water catchment, the practical density may well be double the posted figure.

Surely this is evidence that people like Cal Beisner and Wayne Grudem are right?

“Long term trends show that human beings will be able to live on the earth enjoying ever-increasing prosperity, and never exhausting its resources.”  Politics According to the Bible, p. 332 (see Living on a Finite Planet)

Beisner and Grudem could point to Singapore and argue that this isn’t even theory – Singapore has done it and there’s no reason the rest of us can’t follow their example.  [This point of view is known as Cornucopianism  - here’s some background information.]

Well, maybe.

Or maybe not.

It doesn’t take long for an observer to realize that the Singaporean miracle has grown out of a combination of unusual geography, a fortuitous if hard-working economy, and strait-jacket political policies that are among the most restrictive in the democratic world.  There can be only one Singapore.   And it would be safe to add that as amazing as it is, this miracle is more fragile than it appears.  It’s economic, ecological and political foundations are crumbling.  It would be surprising, to say the least, if the Singapore of 50 or 100 years from now was the same miraculous place it is today.

More on that in our next post.

Pastor Kevin DeYoung, Senior Pastor of University Reformed Church in East Lansing MI has posted some comments on how Christians can celebrate Earth Day “better”  over at his blog. This is a response to that post.

While I appreciate Pastor DeYoung’s sincere desire to “build a Christian foundation” (his very good image) under the concept of Earth Day, the ‘bricks’ he is using to build that foundation, most of which were purchased somewhat uncritically from Jay Richard’s Environmental Stewardship in the Judeo-Christian Tradition, could have been baked a little longer.

Here are his ‘bricks’ and my thoughts in response:

1)”We must distinguish between theological principles and prudential judgments.”

This argument has been around for quite a while, and still astounds me.  The idea is that while the Bible is clear that we have to care for God’s creation (at least we agree on this basic premise), taking actions in response to threats to that creation is a “prudential judgment” that ought not to be made.

Really?

Because some actions would be “prudent” we ought not to take them?  Environmental concern is the only area in which I have ever heard Christians argue against prudence.  We wear seatbelts.  That surely is a prudential judgment.  We pay a penalty in the present by purchasing auto, property and life insurance to cover ourselves for hazards that will almost certainly not happen to most of us.  Prudence.  We avoid smoking, and in extremely undemocratic fashion we ban smoking by others so that we and our children won’t have to inhale second-hand smoke.   Why?  Prudence – we would rather not get lung cancer or emphysema.  Most of us would condemn a person who doesn’t buckle up, doesn’t buy insurance and exposes his children to cigarette smoke as reckless, foolhardy and negligent.

But acting to care for God’s creation is wrong because it is a “prudential judgment”?  Please.  This is just silly.

2) “People matter most.”

Well, of course they do.

But people cannot live without a wholesome, healthy, flourishing environment.  One wonders, reading a statement like this, what Pastor DeYoung might have eaten for breakfast the morning he wrote his piece.  One would expect it was plant or animal, and probably both.

It is a simple fact that we are part of God’s animal creation:  We need to eat, drink and breathe to live.  We cannot survive without the plants and animals that support us, the clean water they provide, the air they filter for us.  We can’t even eat breakfast without them.  It is also fact that much of the human suffering in the world is directly tied to environmental degradation.  Haiti is exhibit #1.  Add to that if you care to, Kenya, the Philippines, Indonesia, Rwanda, Uganda, Bangla Desh, India, China and the asthma suffering children of America’s inner cities.

The most effective way to love and to care for people is to care for the world in which they live.  This is the premise Care of Creation has been built on.  Perhaps we can paraphrase James here:  Show me how to love people without caring for God’s creation, and I will show you how (better and cheaper) we can love people by caring for God’s creation.

3) “People are producers, not just polluters.”

Again, yes they are.  God gave us dominion over his creation and wonderful creative abilities by which we can work with the stuff of creation and do amazing and wonderful things.  And there is no question that if Jesus tarries and God give us time, it is only by the use of these abilities that we human beings are going to be able to solve the serious problems we have created for ourselves by our abuse of God’s creation.

The problem with the “producers not polluters” principle is that it ignores the problem of sin.  Human beings who are unredeemed sinners are in fact polluters – materially and spiritually.  That’s a theme we repeat often here:  “Environmental problems are sin problems.”  And this idea ignores what I think of as the ‘mathematics of sin’:  More sinners, more sin.  An explosion of people (4 billion of the current 6.8 billion people on earth right now have been born since I was) means, necessarily, an explosion of sin – unless genuine, spirit-led evangelism keeps up.  That is the spiritual reality behind the scientific phenomenon that we call the environmental crisis.

We need to build a better Earth Day.

I agree whole heartedly!  But let’s do it biblically and logically:

1.  Good theology must lead us to reasonable prudence in our lives and in our policies.  The biblical call to mercy argues that we should care about the effects of our consumption on the poor.  Our (biblical, surely) obligations to our own children and grandchildren as well as the rest of the not-yet-born demands that we act selflessly, not selfishly in our use of resources and our management of earth-systems.

2. Love for people must compel us to do all we can to heal and restore the life-giving and life-supporting properties of God’s creation so that there will be clean air, clean water, a healthy climate and food for all.

3. Recognition of the almost infinite capacity for sin and pollution in our own lives and those around us should drive us to repentance and evangelism, as well as to tree planting and watershed clean up.

[This is Part 2 of thoughts coming from my recent visit to the Philippines.  Part 1 is here.]

I’ve been working in the field of environmental stewardship for almost 10 years, and have been presenting the Our Father’s World seminar material in various forms for close to three.  We’ve been in half a dozen states and will be adding several more in the coming year.  The normal subtitle to the seminar is “Why Christians Should Care about the Environmental Crisis”.  It has always seemed to me that this is straight forward enough, given that that is what we’re talking about.  No one who has been to the seminar can or does question the reality:  There is a crisis, it’s real and it’s happening now.

However, we have encountered several instances where our hosts have asked that we “tone down” the title just a bit. It appears that using the word “Crisis” makes people uncomfortable.  Change the subtitle to “Why Christians Should Care about God’s Creation”, for example.  It reminds me of a conversation with a close relative several years ago:  “Ed, you are doing great work.  I guess I agree with you.  But you need to be careful not to sound to alarmist. You don’t want to scare people…”

Which brings me back to Mr. Smith and our parable of the ship that is taking on water.  (Previous post)  There are a number of ways the people in the meeting might react to his announcement:  Can you tell us how bad it is?  How much time do we have?  What can we do to help you, and to prepare the passengers for whatever might happen?  One or two might react with hysteria or panic – but I’d like to think that’s not too likely.  These are leaders who have jobs that need to be done and who are responsible for many others on the ship.

Something I would not expect is that the people around the table would accuse Smith of being an alarmist.  He clearly knows what he’s talking about, and look:  His shoes and his pants are soaked up to his knees.  If Smith says we’ve got a leak, and that this means we have a crisis on our hands, chances are pretty good that we do indeed have a crisis.  Rather than waste time arguing about it, we need to decide what to do.

Which brings me to my recent trip to the Philippines.  I presented the Our Father’s World seminar in Manila two weeks ago, the first time this material has been used in an overseas setting.  As it happened, I arrived less than a month after the city had been inundated by Typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng.  According to some estimates, more than 80% of the city was flooded, including middleclass neighborhoods that have never flooded before.

The President of ISACC, the organization sponsoring my visit, had to ride out the storm on her top floor, wondering the whole time whether that was high enough to allow her to survive.  [Her moving account of the experience is available here.]  Hundreds of people lost their lives.  Opinion is unanimous that the massive damage was due to environmental degradation including deforestation, lake siltation, and the removal of wetlands as well as the unusual intensity of the storm which may or may not be tied to global climate change.

With this background, I wondered whether it was a good time for a seminar, though the event had been planned almost a year earlier.  However, my hosts were insistent:  “We need this message now more than ever,” they said, and the poster they designed expressed their feelings.  “After Ondoy and Pepeng, Hear the call to Care for Creation.”

The difference between this audience and the many I’ve stood in front of throughout the US was dramatic.  Presenting environmental seminars in evangelical churches in the US is an uphill battle.  American participants tend to feel that a five-hour seminar is long, and attendance is always a struggle.  By contrast, the Filipinos expanded the format to two full days (about 16 hours total) and some 75 people attended.  It is of passing interest that although foreigners (read missionaries) were included in the targeted publicity list, the audience  was 95% Filipino.

They listened eagerly, and asked intelligent questions. This material includes theological teaching that is deep and profound in its implications for our understanding of the gospel.  I was impressed by how quickly and completely these brothers and sisters grasped not only the essence of what I was teaching but its far reaching implications for the church. The climate change segment was of great interest, and there were no arguments about the reality of global warming, no cautions about alarmism.

We had time for an hour long breakout session to discuss ways to respond to the call to care for creation under a three part Tagalog slogan:  Pagsisihan! (Repent!) Pagyamanin! (Restore!) Paghandaan! (Prepare!).  The reports that came back from these groups were substantial and comprehensive, leaving me with confidence that this seminar was only the start of what many of us hope will be a significant movement toward creation care among the evangelical community in the Philippines.

Why such a difference between this group and most of those I’ve presented to in the US?

The answer is simple.  Their feet were wet.  They didn’t have to be persuaded that the environmental crisis is real, and they were listening as if this crisis was happening to them – because it is.

For us In the US, the environmental crisis feels like the HIV/Aids crisis in Africa.  It is something sad, but it’s happening to someone else.

Except that it isn’t.

[Want to bring the Our Father’s World seminar to your church?  Find details on how to contact us here!  Bookings are now being made for the Fall of 2010 and Winter/Spring 2011.]

[Urbana is coming – I will be presenting two seminars at Urbana on creation care, details here, and Care of Creation’s new Urbana09 website is here.  Hope to see you there!]

]]> http://www.ourfathersworld.org/2009/11/24/if-we-lose-the-ship-part-2/feed/ 0 http://www.ourfathersworld.org/2009/11/22/if-we-lose-the-ship-part-1/ http://www.ourfathersworld.org/2009/11/22/if-we-lose-the-ship-part-1/#comments Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:54:10 +0000 Ed http://www.ourfathersworld.org/?p=331

My recent experience of presenting the Our Father’s World seminar material in Manila, Philippines, triggered the following thoughts…

There is a story – a parable, really – that I use at the end of my Our Father’s World seminar presentations.  It goes something like this:

Let’s pretend that we’re on a refugee ship of some kind.  We’re part of a Christian ministry, and we’re taking a ship load of refugees to a new land, where they can start their lives over again.  The ship is crowded, and we have a lot of work to do to care for the passengers and to keep things running smoothly during the three week voyage.

We have organized ourselves in to work-teams:  Food service, sanitation, medical, children, and so on.  And to we are in the habit of holding a meeting every morning in the Captain’s conference room to coordinate activities and to minimize confusion.  These meetings are usually pretty routine (Sanitation: “We have two bathrooms out of order today, so please let people know…”; Medical: “Vaccination of under-5’s this afternoon on Deck B…”) but one day we have a new person in the circle.

The Captain introduces him:  “This is Mr. Smith, our ship’s engineer.  He has something that you will all need to listen to.”  And Mr. Smith makes his announcement: “We started to take on water during the night.  As of now, we do not know what is causing the leak, but we do know that it is bad enough that if we can’t get it fixed, we will not make it to port.”

Remember – I’m telling this story to a live seminar audience.  I usually stop at this point and say something like this:  “Okay, let’s hit the pause button.  How does Mr. Smith’s announcement change the conversation around the table?”

The answer that is expected is this:  It changes nothing, but it changes everything.  All of the normal activities of the work-teams have to go on.  People still need to eat.  Bathrooms still need to be cleaned and repaired.  Sick people need to be cared for.  But there is now a bigger, overriding concern – the ship is in danger of sinking.  If the leak isn’t found and fixed, nothing else will matter.

This is obviously a parable:  The ship represents the church, or a church.  The work teams represent all of the many different kinds of ministries that churches participate in, from soup kitchens to prison ministry to youth programming.  And the leak in the ship represents the environmental crisis.

The point of the parable (in case you haven’t got it yet) is really quite simple:  Creation care is different from every other ministry a church (your church) might be involved in, because when the environment is destroyed, other ministries cease.  If we lose the ship, nothing else will matter.

Hurricane damage in Haiti

Case in point:  Haiti.  Most of Haiti’s problems, and they are many, arise from an environment that has been damaged beyond the point of recovery.  Population growth has led to massive deforestation, agricultural decline, incredible poverty, relocation from rural areas to the city, and political unrest and general violence.  Haiti used to be a common destination for summer ministry teams from the US.  Not so much anymore – it’s too dangerous.  ‘Normal ministry’ has had to be suspended because the environment has been destroyed.  If we lose the ship, nothing else matters.

That is how I usually tell this story, and how the talk usually ends.  However, it occurred to me recently that it is possible to imagine another response to Mr. Smith’s report of a leak in the ship.  And that is the subject of our next post.  Stay tuned.

The Philippines recently experienced a major typhoon and massive flooding of the capital city, Manila.  Here’s a first hand report from Melba Padilla Maggay, who is the Director of the Institute for the Study of Asian and Church Culture (ISACC) the organization that will be hosting my visit to Manila at the beginning of November.  I’m posting this with her permission, and asking that you please both read it prayerfully and, particularly if you have connections to Filipinos, that you distribute it so others will understand what has happened.  The recovery will take a long time – keep these sisters and brothers in your prayers.

Hearing the Call of the Great Flood

“Ate, tubig! Dali, may tubig!” I was upstairs trying to finish writing a long-delayed book when I heard this shout from my sister down below. I rushed downstairs and saw water seeping through the door. ‘Where is all this water coming from?’ I asked, fearing that the Marikina River, about a kilometer from the back of the house, has overflowed. ‘From out front,” she said. True enough, the water that came rushing was mainly from the street outside. This means that the water was rushing down from some mountain higher up. The sight startled me.

But there was no time to lose. Within minutes, the water rose to knee-high. We grabbed some food from the fridge, carted up a precious charcoal portrait of my parents and other paintings, salvaged what we could of the electrical gadgets from the kitchen, and tried to lug the chinaware and other breakables starting to spill out of the cabinet. By this time the water was up to my chest. Then the fridge started to float, banging itself against the table and chairs whirling round the living room. We tried to get it up the winding stairs but couldn’t since we were only two tiny women. The one man in the house is my grandnephew, but he was out in school taking his exams. He himself got trapped and had to sleep on the third floor of his school building that fateful Saturday night.

In less than an hour the water hit the ceiling of the first floor and started to seep through the second floor. I realized I could do nothing from hereon and got on my knees to pray. Then a man knocked on the glass of the bay window in my study and asked if they could get in. There were two women with him standing on the roof of my dirty kitchen, one holding a baby. They swam through the flood from the house at the back of mine. I fumbled with the lock of the emergency exit in the bay window but the key has gotten stuck. We got the baby through an opening in the window of my bedroom instead and the three swam to the terrace on the side of the house and got inside. It turns out that their grand lola was still in their house, waiting frightened on the second floor. He went back to fetch her but she wouldn’t hazard swimming through the floodwaters. We figured it was best that she stay put. If the water rose and we all had to evacuate and rescue comes I gave my word we shall not leave without her.

From the study I watched agonizingly as the river swelled, the flood rising inch by inch, up the wall fence. Frantic calls for help were made. I managed to reach the head of the Office of Civil Defense, Anthony Golez, and asked for a boat, a helicopter, whatever. He said sorry, it was not possible for them to help. We tried whoever else we could reach with the remaining batteries of our cell phones. All too soon the cell phones went dead. We have done what we could.

I sat down behind my desk and swept the room longingly with my eyes. Maybe it was my way of saying goodbye to the things I love, — the books that have meant much to me and those I have yet to read, picked up from my various travels; the pictures and paintings, and especially the portrait of my parents done so lovingly by an artist friend. In the event the water finally engulfs us I figured I could manage to take my computer. All the rest will have to go. I put the most important books on the topmost shelves and thought of how everyone could get evacuated, – baby, lola and all.

Inside, in that place where the battle between hope and despair is waged, my faith in the Lord of wind and rain was being tried. I knew that this was nature striking back against all our environmental sins. God does not suspend natural laws he himself has built into creation. We violate these laws at our own peril. Still, I also knew he could stop the rain if he wanted to. I confess the shadow of a half-doubt began to creep when I felt the firewall slightly move with the swirling force of the waters. I prayed that the concrete wall at the back, which served as buffer against the raging current from the river, would not give way. I do not think I have ever implored the Almighty as earnestly and anxiously and tearfully as I did at that moment.

Mercifully, the rain stopped. The water crawling up the roof of my dirty kitchen halted to a standstill. Rescuers came on board a makeshift raft. We did not relish staying the night at the clubhouse as a temporary evacuation shelter. We decided to stay put in the house and trust that the worst is over. We cooked some rice and broiled fish over a stove made out of an old tin can of biscuits, with newspapers as fuel. We chuckled over the ingenious improvisation, glad and thankful just to be alive.

Darkness covered the waters of the deep. Somehow I felt I was being invited to enter the depths of ‘somewhere I have never traveled’, – the immense and fearful mystery of life and death, but also the forlorn helplessness of the poor in our land who always get buffeted by the wild winds of both nature and misfortune. I went to bed thinking of the castaways swept from the river banks, clinging for dear life on some tree or an old tire, or washed away by the floodtide along with the rubbish and rusted tin roofs of what used to pass for their houses. But tiredness and aching arms numbed and stupefied the mind for any more such thoughts. I went to sleep like a log.

Morning was eerily calm. It was also strangely beautiful. Along the river drifted a solitary man on a ragtag raft of banana trunks tied together. From a distance it all looked so picturesque, with the treetops visible on the surface of the now placid waters that have begun to subside. I learned later that many dead bodies were found floating on that river, some swept from as far away as Tanay.

It is now the ninth day since the Great Flood. Mud four inches thick had been cleared from the house. The yard is still full of mud, with mounds of things and furniture piled up in the muck waiting to be cleaned and sorted out. Life is moving on, and I am trying to make sense of what has happened to us.

For the first time, I was a flood victim. I thought this sort of thing happened only to those without means to live in decent places. I was, suddenly, on the receiving end of a thousand kindnesses from friends, kindly neighbors from Couples for Christ, and my own evangelical church who sent food and water, helped clear the mud and debris, checked the electrical wirings and in many other ways reminded me of God’s tender mercies in a time of great testing and vulnerability.

The poor have no access to such help. Even now, thousands are in evacuation shelters, with no homes, no families to go home to, no friends and relatives with resources to tide them over. In short, no social capital like those of us who are middle class and able to pull ourselves by our own bootstraps without waiting for government to dole out help that is too little and too late.

I asked God what all this means for me. So far, the one thing clear is that I am being asked to share in the ‘fellowship of his suffering’, in that great mystery of solidarity where the sorrow and degradation of one human being is the sorrow and degradation of all. Whether we are aware of it or not, we live in the presence of one another. The presence of the vast poor among us says as much about the rest of us as the kind of government we live under.

In a small way, I now know what it must be like for those who are swept to the margins, forced to live precariously in cities with no thought nor place for them, squatting dangerously along esteros, river banks and other waterways. Comfortable people tend to see them as obstructions, clogging our life systems. The truth is that it is a horrendous scandal that so many have nowhere else to go.

There is something very wrong with a society where almost everyone ‘turns away leisurely from the disaster’ as the poet W. H. Auden put it. In our vast carelessness and indifference no one anticipates the coming catastrophe until calamity crashes upon us. It is estimated that about 20 to 25 typhoons batter the country every year. But those whose business it is to prepare for such eventualities, like the National Disaster Coordinating Council, have no plan in place. In its stead is mere technical reflex, like releasing water, uncoordinated, from all four major dams all at once, without thought for the hapless people along the waterways.

It is worth investigating why, after weeks of rain even before Ondoy, no one in Napocor or the National Irrigation Administration who have charge of these dams ever thought of releasing water before it reached critical level. Why did they have to wait until another typhoon came? My own experience gives me the impression that besides environmental degradation, the one decisive factor that made this flooding so devastating is the uncalibrated release of dam water, coinciding with the heaviest rainfall we have seen in forty years. I have lived where I am for nearly 20 years. All through that time typhoons stronger than Ondoy have come and gone. But the Marikina River had not overflowed the way it had in this recent deluge. This disaster is man-made.

To me, the biggest disaster of all is when we once again miss our historical cue, failing to hear the call of what this means to us as a people. One call is that we must change our timeline as a culture; transcend our present-orientedness and anticipate the floodtide of the future. For all who do care that this country should have a future and a hope, we must see to it that all our do-gooding is such that it finally puts an end to the unconscionable helplessness and uprootedness of our people. As a German poet puts it,

“Make it so the poor are no longer

despised and thrown away,

Look at them standing about, –

like wild flowers, which have

nowhere else to grow….”

—– Melba Padilla Maggay, Ph.D.

President

Institute for Studies in Asian  Church And Culture