Earth day, its two faces

Iloilo City April 22, 2015

Government streamer: motherhood statement for the environment.

Government also celebrates Earth Day by hanging tarpaulin streamers reminding people to protect the environment, holding poster making contest, and the like activities that hardly calls for self-examination to determine its pivotal role in environmental destruction.

Government's other hand of course, continues to grant or approve applications of giant corporations to erect heavy pollutant power plants particularly coal-fired, shear mountains of whatever is left of their vegetation, scrape vast lands of their surface cover to extract minerals, or reclaim wetlands and marshes.

Message of protest from Bayan-Panay

At the Iloilo Capitol, this city, one government streamer hangs at the steel fence and near it flutter the banners of protesters denouncing government for its complicity with destructive activities like erecting a mega-dam on a small Island of Panay.

The rallyists led by the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan denounce the ongoing construction of the Jalaur River Multi-Purpose Project II (JRMPP II), a P11.2 B mega-dam that they say is not an answer to chronic water shortage in Iloilo.

Bayan rallyists: No to mega dam.

At a street-side rally they hold marking Eaarth Day 2015, they warn that the mega-dam puts to risk the lives of communities downstream as it will only aggravate ecological imbalance already taking its toll on the central Philippine island.

It is a huge debt burden that will be paid by taxpayers (not by its proponent-in-chief SP Franklin Drilon) and will expose lives to risk because it is being built just a stone-throw away from the West Panay Fault, which moved in 1948 and devastated much of Panay with an 8-intensity quake.

The Tumandok indigenous people of Panay also oppose it because the mega dam will uproot 18 IP villages without quarantee of compensation and relocation area.

Bwisit nga Franklin Drilon!