Hitching on the disconcerting aftermath of the tragic death of a journalist and its still open-ended resolution, a signature campaign to heighten waning passions, capitalize, cash-in and project residual emotions, perhaps even turn grief into anger and eventually fuel a hate campaign, is being waged in Palawan.
The objective is to garner 10 million signatures. That alone belies its intent and opens up the question of local sovereignty against interventionists where outsiders determine Palawan’s future. Given Palawan’s 2000 population of 737,000, at a national growth rate of 1.9 percent, Palawan would have slightly over 906,000 in 2011, or less than a tenth of the signatures sought.
So why seek intervention, go overboard and foray beyond a local mandate?
In one sense, the hate campaign garbed as a consensus-building, mob-forming exercise incites over 9,093,467 outsiders to tell Palawan what’s best for them.
In another sense, as the tourist arrivals for Palawan number slightly over 260,000 at its highest, targeting 10 million, or 3,900 percent more than the number that has visited Palawan, the campaign seeks the intervention of whole populations that may not have even set foot in Palawan and whose knowledge of the island can fit in a postcard.
The causes that the slain journalist advocated were, indeed, noble and that makes his death more poignant. As investigations unfold, motivations are apparently more complex than the sound bites of an ongoing publicity campaign would have us believe.
Because he was an environmentalist, armchair gumshoes are quick to point to the usual suspects. Unfortunately, his death seems to have both political and personal dimensions imported from beyond the shores of Palawan.
These beg discernment when dealing with issues that go beyond what’s before us. More so when deeper issues hitch on emotional bandwagons only indirectly related to well-aired, media-ventilated and well-funded national publicity campaigns with arithmetically questionable factors.
The criticality of discernment cannot be overemphasized when impressionable minds are targeted, manipulated and then turned by glitzy gimmickry that induces motherhood concepts. Of note, the campaign is not only targeted toward outsiders, it also homes in on impressionable school children for whom issues are readily reduced to dichotomies between black and white.
Who, after all, does not care for the environment? But we must realize these endemic issues concerning tradeoffs balancing preservation and development cannot be reduced to simplistic kindergarten absolutes.
The signatures campaign seeks to impose a ban on mining in Palawan despite the establishment of a Strategic Environmental Plan (SEP) and the Palawan Tropical Forestry Protection Program developed and approved by multilateral agencies and constituencies. The SEP is specifically detailed and designed for Palawan’s sustainable development under the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development—a body tasked to oversee such development.
Despite these statutory foundations for development, culling from published material, we’ve found a good deal of bull and poppycock discharged in the media to either confuse or fuel vicarious aggravation and pollute Palawan’s developmental debate.
Fiction and fallacy are, after all, integral to a hate campaign. We cannot deny their utility. But in this war on truth, fallacies compel reimposing facts and seeking the discernment of falsehoods for over 9 million campaign-recruited pawns and foot soldiers.
Note the following: Founding the signature campaign, one fallacy foists the falsehood that a ravaged Palawan has lost 16 percent of its forest cover.
But the data and the claims to substantiate the signature campaign do not match. Palawan’s recorded forest cover in 1992 was 738,886 hectares, or a coverage of 52 percent. By 2005, recorded forest cover had fallen to 46 percent, a decline of 6 percent as opposed to the 16 percent claim. Mining critics seem to have grossly inflated the count by over 166 percent.
In terms of deforestation rates, 6 percent equates to 5,500 hectares per year. This is a significant improvement to the 20.72-percent deforestation rate recorded prior to 1992, where deforestation at over one-fifth of Palawan’s total area was recorded at 19,000 hectares per year prior to the SEP.
More than percentages, the reasons for deforestation are more important. Mining critics foist the fallacy that mining leads to massive deforestation. Again, the data do not support the claim. Palawan mines are mostly for nickel laterites. Drawn from soil, these impact less on forest cover.
Moreover, hectarage and the number of standing trees comprise forest- cover data. The data show half of Palawan’s forest-cover reduction was due to the conversion of forest land to agricultural use where the latter spiked domestic productivity. The data also show that, more than mining, forest fires, timber harvesting, population encroachment, agrarian reform, land titling and conversion account for the reduction in forest cover.
If critics want to solicit 9,093,467 signatures from people outside Palawan, then the first thing they will have to do is to face the facts. The truth is always a good place to start.
