PRIVILEGE SPEECH
7 December 2004
Mr. President: I find myself compelled once again to rise on a matter of the highest personal and collective privilege. We have all been united in concern over the catastrophic damage to towns and infrastructure wrought by typhoons Unding, Violeta, Winnie and Yoyong. All Filipinos share the grief of the residents of Real, General Nakar, Polilio, and Infanta in Quezon and of the people of Dingalan, Aurora Province and Mercedes, Camarines Norte. We are all horrified by the destruction in those provinces and in Rizal, Nueva Ecija, and Pampanga. All of us in this chamber join my distinguished colleague from Aurora in mourning the dead, praying for the rescue of the missing, and hoping for the recovery of the injured. We pay tribute, too, to the heroism and dedication of the volunteers who did their duty and in many cases, went far above and beyond the call of that duty in ministering to the needs of their compatriots. From the Philippine National Red Cross to the Armed Forces of the Philippines from national to local government units, from doctors, to dentists, to nurses, from engineers, to laborers, from military reservists, to retired civil servants, from social workers, to relief workers, from the families in all our regions and all four corners of the globe, we have come together to do our part and to give generously in time and treasure to help our countrymen in need. And where we have given, and continue to give generously, at home, the nations of the world have rallied as well to the assistance of our unfortunate countrymen. Mr. President, I know I speak for this chamber when I say adversity has brought out the best in the Filipino. But the time has come, Mr. President, for us in this
chamber to take stock as to why a series of natural disasters has had
such calamitous results. Counting conservatively, there are 628 dead,
718 missing, 579 injured in the wake of four typhoons. The casualties
are compounded by the disappearance of entire towns and the wrecking of
provincial infrastructure due to seas of mud and dead tree trunks from
mountainsides denuded by legal and illegal logging. It was while I was in Pampanga that I was informed of the destruction in Aurora and Quezon provinces. Upon receiving this information I embarked on a visit of inspection by chopper, in the company of the venerable Bishop Julio Labayen. Together we talked to the townspeople of Dingalan. They explained what caused the scandalous number of fatalities in those towns. In the mountains, loggers stacked logs by the mountainsides, and as the rains fell, the logs acted as dams that prevented the descent of the natural cataracts that form in the wake of the rains. The dammed-up waters built up pressure and volume, finally, carrying with them gigantic boulders and rocks, sweeping aside everything in their torrential path. The boulders and logs, cascading in a torrent of mud, uprooted and felled living trees, and swept forward with such speed that no one in their path had a chance. The deluge was so violent and so swift, that those who died in its path had no possible way of being warned of what was coming. Mr. President, as we flew over Infanta, General Nakar and Real, we saw mountainsides, river channels, and the shore covered with mud, rocks, and logs, a limitless horizon of death and destruction. As we flew by the sea, we saw what we thought was one of our nation’s many coastal island. But it was not an island. It was solid raft of felled trees, a mass of tree trunks several kilometers square; hundreds if not thousands of logs, hundreds if not thousands of examples of the destruction and plunder caused by logging. This graphic demonstration of the inexorable ferocity of nature when man’s rapacity has gone too far, brought to my mind the words of the father of the atom bomb, Robert Oppenheimer. When he witnessed the first nuclear explosion at Los Alamos, New Mexico, his mingled feelings of awe and horror arising from playing fast and free with nature were expressed in a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita in which Krishna incarnates as Shiva, who says, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Mr. President, logging is the destroyer of worlds. It is what transformed a series of typhoons into a litany of tragedies. The rivers of mud, boulders and tree trunks crushing everything in their path was as pitiless and cruel as the wheels of the huge car or wagon on which the idol of Krishna was drawn in an annual procession at Puri in east-central India, and under whose wheels worshipers would throw themselves in suicidal sacrifice. That grisly vehicle of death, as my learned colleagues know, was known as a juggernaut. And to this day, a juggernaut is what we call something, such as a belief, or institution, that elicits blind and destructive devotion, or to which people are ruthlessly sacrificed, such as the logging industry. A juggernaut is an overwhelming, advancing force that crushes, or seems to crush, everything in its path, such as the seas of mud that rampaged down the mountainsides of Quezon and Aurora. It was loggers that hewed this juggernaut, who created a merciless engine of destruction; it is loggers, and their coddlers, both in national and local government, in and out of uniform, in the ranks of the establishment and in the cadres of insurgency, who have crafted a relentless and pitiless machine of greed; by plundering our mountainsides they have unleashed a juggernaut of despoliation that grinds under its terrible wheels, our nation, our people, and the possibility of a sustainable way of life. Mr. President, reason tells us that the juggernaut of despoliation must be destroyed. Logging must end. And yet there are still those who hem and haw, who quibble, and pay lip service to our collective horror by saying that this vehicle for the mass destruction of our forests should not be destroyed, it should only be retired -temporarily. Mr. President, we must not retire the machine. We must destroy it, before it destroys what forests we have left and by so doing, destroys us all. This is why I rise on a question of personal and collective privilege. The survival of our people requires that we destroy the juggernaut of despoliation, and with it, dismantle the entire apparatus of official complicity that has eased the deadly inroads logging has made into our remaining forests. The President of the Philippines would have us believe, that action consists in proclaiming a ban –a temporary ban, mind you- on logging. Action of this nature is not only window-dressing, Mr. President, it is official hypocrisy of the most reprehensible kind. For it ignores, indeed, it attempts to cover up, the complicity of this administration in the destruction of our nation’s forest. The administration has claimed great achievements in environmental protection; indeed, it boldly said there was no illegal logging taking place. The hundreds, the thousands, of logs that we saw in Quezon and Aurora are as a hundred, a thousand pieces of evidence that collectively demonstrate the manifestly shameless lies of the administration. The logs that formed a natural dam, and which were carried down by the rampaging waters, were cut by loggers. Whether they acted legally or illegally is a distinction only an administration attempting to exculpate itself from responsibility can make. For when the administration claims it only allows legal logging, it makes a hollow distinction in the face of so many deaths. Mr. President, it is true that there have been numerous studies that show, beyond any reasonable doubt, that our forests have been under siege for generations. In fact the most sustained and relentless attack took place under martial law when, answerable to no one, and refusing to be responsible to the citizenry and their posterity, the dictatorship undertook logging activities on an unprecedented scale. But to apportion blame on the leaders of the past, who richly deserve the condemnation of history for their systematic and ruthless plunder of our nation and of nature, should not excuse the complicity of the present administration in the continuing advance of the juggernaut of despoliation. This administration, Mr. President, until it was faced to reckon with the poisonous fruits of its own profiteering, not only allowed the juggernaut of despoliation to continue its grisly advance, it actually laid down paths to make its advance more convenient, and profitable, for logging interests. It could claim there was no longer any illegal logging because it went out of its way to legalize logging efforts. It acted to facilitate legal paths upon which the juggernaut of despoliation could travel. The paths laid down by the administration were made by the state agency supposedly devoted to hindering the advance of logging interests: the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources. The path took the form of a flurry of Department Orders issued by outgoing Secretary Elisea Gozun last August. Department Administrative Orders number 2004-37 to 50, classified and declared 27,000 hectares of forest lands in Cagayan, Benguet, Zamboanga Del Sur, Cebu, Bataan, Bukidnon, Palawan, Surigao Del Sur, Capiz, Pampanga and Nueva Ecija to be alienable and disposable lands for agricultural purposes. Mr. President, if our country today mourns the consequences of the ecological destruction in Nueva Ecija, Quezon, Aurora, Pampanga and Bicol, this chamber and the public deserves to know that last August, the administration had prepared the way for the systematic destruction of forests in other parts of the country. And the complicity of the administration doesn’t stop there. Aside from generally targeting forest lands for elimination, the administration set about systematically planning the particular ways destruction could be justified. Secretary Gozun also signed Department Administrative Order no.2004-59 which allowed the use and management of our forest lands for what are called “special uses,” a bureaucratic euphemism as neat and clinical as the term “resettlement” used by the Nazis to refer to the liquidation of the Jews. What are these “special uses,” Mr. President? They are the conversion of forest land to the following:
Mr. President, does it make sense for virgin forests to be cleared, in order to build bodegas? Are we so short sighted, so stupid, so voracious for instant fortunes without regard to long term effects to us and our posterity, that our bureaucrats think it makes sense to set aside virgin forest land for motor pools, lumberyards, or ship breaking sites? Why should we exchange the pristine, which is what a virgin forest is, in order to construct an ecological pigsty, which is the only thing a wrecking yard, motor pool, industrial processing site or lumberyard can environmentally be? And can a manual for suicide be written, and declared national policy? And this policy of national suicide proclaimed a rational means of attaining progress? Indeed, Mr. President, should an administration be able to get away with arguing that something is legally justifiable, while ignoring the fact that it is morally and economically reprehensible? Should a Secretary of the Environment and Natural Resources be able lay down, by department order, the bureaucratic means for the increased plunder of our forests? And should the President of the Philippines and her appointees, both past and present, be expected to avoid any responsibility and culpability, for their actions? The actions of this administration, Mr. President, directly contributed to the national tragedy we have experienced, and will result in similar tragedies in the future. A national lamentation over the effects of logging has resulted in frenzy of executive action, from tough speeches, to a logging moratorium, to the appointment of an anti-logging Czar. But the frenzy only tries to hide the complicity of the administration in what has taken place, and cannot excuse its culpability not only for these DENR orders, but for the administration’s violation of the Constitution and the principles of republican government. Section 2, Article XII of the present Constitution states that, All lands of the public domain, waters, minerals, coal, petroleum and other mineral oils, all forces of potential energy, fisheries, forests r timber, wildlife, flora and fauna, and other natural resources are owned by the State. This constitutional policy mandates the State’s full control and supervision over our natural resources, proceeds from the concept of jura regalia. Our natural resources, since they are owned by the state, must be held in responsible stewardship by the state and all the officials who hold authority by virtue of the operations and provisions of the Constitution. I submit, Mr. President, that when an administration sets about facilitating logging interests, its actions make it the accomplice of the juggernaut of despoliation. It was as directly responsible for those who died in the recent typhoons as if it had tied them down and deliberately left them in the path of the landslides that buried entire towns and villages. The culpability of the administration does not end there. Recall further that framers of our constitution recognized the need to protect our forest. According to section 4, Article XII of our present Constitution, “The Congress shall, as soon as possible, determine by law the specific limits of forest lands and national parks, marking clearly their boundaries on the ground. Thereafter, such forest lands and national parks shall be conserved and may not be increased or diminished except by law. The Congress shall provide, for such period as it may determine measures to prohibit logging in endangered forest and watershed areas.” It is Congress, therefore, Mr. President, that has the power to define the limits of our forest lands. And only through legislation. There is a reason for this: our forests are a fundamental requirement for national survival. They are not merely a source of income. They are meant to be conserved, and only used, when necessary, after the representatives of the people, have taken into consideration the basic requirements of life, which includes the preservation of forests. It is because our communities must live with the consequences of government policies toward forest lands, Mr. President, that our Constitution requires Congress, composed of representatives of local communities, and senators answerable to a national constituency, to deliberate on the use of forest lands. Our constitution, in specifying who has the obligation to manage our forest lands, does not say, either implicitly or explicitly, that the executive branch of government may assume the powers of Congress; and furthermore there is no law, passed by Congress, Mr. President, that deputizes the President to act for Congress in this regard. What the Constitution has not disposed, neither the President nor her minions can propose. As if this weren’t enough, the violation of the spirit and letter of the Constitution is compounded by a flagrant violation of existing laws. The DENR violated section 4 (a) of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law or Republic Act 6657. Allow me, Mr. President, to refer to Section 4 (a) of this law, which reads as follows: …… No reclassification of forest or mineral lands to agricultural lands shall be undertaken after the approval of this Act until Congress, taking into account ecological, developmental and equity considerations, shall have determined by law, the specific limits of the public domain. Indeed, Mr. President, permit me to have recourse to an instructive opinion rendered by the Department of Justice on 9 December 1993, in which then Secretary of Justice Franklin Drilon, our beloved Senate President, who, in reply to a query made by then DENR Secretary Angel C. Alcala, as to whether or not the prohibition in section 4 (a) of RA 6657 applied to unclassified public forest, stated that: It is readily apparent from a reading of the above quoted provision of the law that there is no reference to public forest or permanent forest. The provision, it is noted, uses the general term “forest lands” without qualification. A well known doctrine in statutory construction states: ubi lex non distinguit nec nos distinguere debemos. Under this legal principle, there should be no distinction in the application of a statute where none is indicated. (Lo Cham vs. Ocampo, 77 Philippine Reports 636; Palmolive-Colgate Philippines vs. Gimenez, 1 SCRA 267; Libudan vs. Gil, 45 SCRA 19) Significantly, the term “forest lands” is defined in section 3 (d) of P.D.705 as including the “public forest, the permanent forest or forest reserves, and forest reservations.” The generic term “forest lands” in Section 4 (a) of the CARL, should have the same meaning ascribed to it under the Forestry Code which is the governing law on forests. Indeed, the determination of the specific limits of the public domain can only be achieved by Congress when all forest lands, among other lands of the public domain are accounted for. Wherefore, your query is answered in the affirmative.” This learned exposition clearly explains that in the eyes of the law, a forest is a forest is a forest. And if, Mr. President, it wasn’t bad enough that the administration contravened the Constitution, and violated the law of the land, it also went against the provisions of its own executive issuances. For the DENR violated sections 2.1.2 of Executive Order no.318 s. 2004, signed by the President. Section 2.1.2 of Executive Order no.318 s.2004, for the reference of this chamber, reads as follows: Conversion of forest lands into non-forestry uses shall be allowed only through an act of Congress and upon the recommendation of concerned government agencies. Mr. President, By allowing the special uses of forest lands as provided for in DAO 2004-59, the DENR has usurped the power given to Congress to solely define the limits of forest lands and define its uses. It has violated a Republic Act. It has contravened an Executive Order. I must say, Mr. President, that all for its colossal vanity and avarice, the dictatorship was always careful to preserve a veneer of legality. Its actions all made sense according to the laws and constitutional set up of the time, however fraudulently established. But today, Mr. President, ostensibly operating under the rule of law, and with a supposed mandate from the people, this administration not only breaks the law, it contravenes its own instructions. And for what end, Mr. President? So that it may facilitate the juggernaut of despoliation. So that it can pave the way for a future marked by landslides and death in Cagayan, Benguet, Zamboanga Del Sur, Cebu, Bataan, Bukidnon, Palawan, Surigao Del Sur, Capiz, Pampanga and Nueva Ecija on a scale to match, and surely inevitably surpass, the sufferings of Quezon, Aurora, Pampanga, Bicol, Nueva Ecija, and Rizal. All of which are provinces we all love and which some of us in this chamber are proud to call home. Mr. President, Section 16, Article II of our Constitution demands, and I quote, that The State shall protect and advance the right of the people to a balanced and healthful ecology in accord with the rhythm and harmony of nature. This Constitutional guarantee was explained eloquently in the case of Minors of the Philippines vs. DENR, et.al., in which the Supreme Court, through then Associate Justice Hilario Davide, Jr., said: While the right to a balanced and healthful ecology is to be found under the Declaration of Principles and State Policies and not under the Bill of Rights, it does not follow that it is less important than any of the civil and political rights enumerated under in the latter. Such right belongs to a different category of rights altogether for it concerns nothing less than self-preservation and self-perpetuation- aptly and fittingly stressed by the petitioners- the advancement of which may even be said to predate all governments and constitutions…. The right to a balanced and healthful ecology carries with it the correlative duty to refrain from impairing the environment……” Mr. President, the country must realize that the path of destruction caused by the juggernaut of despoliation has been made possible by the continued connivance of the present administration with logging interests. Together with those interests, the administration is trying to pacify the citizenry by proclaiming action when all it is doing is buying time –for the future resumption of logging operation. The juggernaut of despoliation, the relentless advance of the agents of deforestation, also means the dwindling of our fishery resources and the depreciation of our upland soils. Losses to these two resources alone were estimated to be approximately 1 billion pesos for 1996 to 1997 only. The expansion of areas that can be subjected to logging puts in peril of expulsion from their ancestral lands, up to 6 million of our Indigenous Peoples. If the forest cover of the Philippines ranks as one of the 11 poorest among 89 countries in the tropics with a per capita forest cover of about 0.085 hectares, it is because of official assistance extended to logging interests. If our forest cover has declined, as it has declined, from 70% of the total land area in 1900 to about 18.3 % in 1999, or just about 5 million hectares of residual and old growth forests, it is because of official encouragement and protection of loggers. Our old growth forests are estimated to cover less than 1 million hectares today, and are mostly located in protected areas, reserves, concession areas, and cancelled/suspended/expired concession areas. And yet the present administration has been actively seeking to reduce this coverage even further. Mr. President, if our forest cover is expected to decline to 6.6% of the total land area by the year 2010, incidentally the year the present administration supposedly expects to retire to count its millions, if not billions, of blessings, it is because of the present administration’s deliberate policy of assisting the continued depredations of the juggernaut of despoliation. Mr. President, the national outcry, the national concern, the national clamor for action, is something we cannot ignore. I am personally devastated that it has taken calamity after calamity, culminating in these recent tragedies, to convince our people of the validity of what environmentalists have been saying for years. Our environmental officials, hand in hand with our presidents, were content to conduct window dressing by sprinkling seeds on hillsides and distributing saplings in the name of reforestation. Mr. President, reforestation is a panacea; it is a fool’s errand so long as logging continues unabated. The saplings of today will take 200 years of unhampered growth to achieve the same ecological benefits that the trees chopped down by loggers were already giving today. The simple truth is that there is no substitute for conservation, just as there is no substitute for victory in war. I sympathize with the millions of our citizens who have been brushed aside in the past, when they tried to bring illegal logging, and unscrupulous legal logging, to the attention of the authorities. Instead of working for the people and aiding the citizenry, the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources all too often devoted its energies to frustrating environmental efforts. Time and again it showed itself more interested in coddling loggers and ruthless urban developers. The uncooperative, and environmentally subversive tendencies of the DENR are best exemplified by an experience I had with the machinations of the department. On October of this year, together with Bishop Labayen, I convened a multi-sectoral conference to address the issues of mining and logging. The participants resolved to oppose the continuation of logging and mining operations in Quezon province. In November, the DENR organized a counter-conference, in which it sought to obtain, and indeed obtained, the free and prior consent of residents to allow the continuation of logging and mining. Where we worked to arrest environmental degradation, the government reversed our efforts. I am sad to say that those who were persuaded by the government to give their free and prior consent are among those who suffered the most in the wake of the recent typhoons. Mr. President, what government is this, what department is this, that can claim to protect the environment when it took steps to persuade the residents of Real, Dingalen, Infanta and General Nakar, to name just a few localities, to permit the continuation of logging and mining? What administration is this that has the temerity to wring its hands in regret over the fatal effects of its own lobbying? Mr. President, I therefore move that this chamber makes its first order of business to conduct an investigation of all logging operations in the country, and these DENR Orders that are inimical to the welfare of the Filipino people. I move that this chamber investigate the circumstances surrounding the issuance of highly questionable orders issued by the DENR, orders that violate the Constitution, the laws passed by Congress, and the instructions of the executive itself. Justice demands that Secretary Michael Defensor resign the DENR portfolio, without prejudice to his possible prosecution for command responsibility for the recent environmental catastrophes. And so that the DENR will no longer sabotage the Constitutional mandate to protect the environment, I shall be submitting a bill that seeks to divide the DENR into two separate agencies, to eliminate the inherent contradiction between environmental protection and resource exploitation that makes it an enemy of the environment. In such time, I would ask this chamber to deliberate on my proposal to establish a Department of Environmental Protection and a Department of Natural Resources. We can no longer tolerate a department that is half plunderer and half protector. Mr. President, I move that this chamber acts immediately and favorably towards legislation imposing a total log ban in the Philippines for a period of at least 20 to 30 years. By a total log ban I also mean a ban on the felling of trees in our cities, where the efforts of unscrupulous developers and narrow-minded bureaucrats is choking our cities in their own filth just as our rural areas are drowning in rivers of mud. I call for Congress to aggressively exercise its power to define the limits of the country’s forest land, to prevent their further alienation. I move for the deliberation and the passage of a National Land Use Code, and the codification of all environmental laws I call for a paradigm shift in our attitudes toward the environment. We must have a national policy on the conservation and protection of natural resources, particularly for our remaining forest lands that makes a clean break with the current policy of resource extraction and exploitation. We have destroyed our forests, we have emptied our mines, enriching the loggers and the owners of the mines. But no chainsaw operator and no miner has gained wealth or achieved more than a basic level of existence in the wake of the systematic plunder of our natural resources. I call for this chamber to lead our people in achieving the true blessings of social justice and a healthful ecology not just for ourselves, but future generations. Mr. President, this chamber must answer the call of the times, and submit to the imperatives of our Constitution. It must take the lead in destroying the juggernaut of despoliation. We must become the vanguard of ecological recovery; we must be the bulwark of efforts to arrest the tide of destruction that has been threatening to tumble the mountains into the plains, and suffocate some of the most impoverished of our countrymen in a sea of mud and dead trees. We must act, Mr. President, or bear on our hands the blood of the dead and those who will surely die. We must labor mightily for a people who deserve more than the lip service and window dressing and the outright guilt for the miseries that have so recently afflicted our brethren, that are the hallmark of the present administration. We cannot condemn more of our countrymen to being crushed by the juggernaut of despoliation. Thank you. |