The Earth, Where the Brave Are Buried

It was his idealism, his commitment to saving the earth and his love of nature that brought Gensun Agustin, 30, of Buguey, Cagayan, Northern Luzon, the Philippines, to an early and unnatural death at 4 PM last 1 March 2010. He was laid in his beloved earth, the earth that had given him life and for which he had fought and died as a campaigner for the protection of the environment. Earth Day ought to be a remembrance day for all those who have given their lives to save and protect the land and the people whose lives depend on it.

Gensun loved the sea, the sand and the mountains and when he saw the sand and the beaches of Buguey being seriously damaged by the extraction of huge volumes of black sand and the precious black magnetite, he acted to save them. The sands are being excavated and shipped in barges to waiting Korean ships off the Cagayan shore with the connivance of a powerful political clan in the province. We dare not speak or write the name lest another hail of bullets will end this writer’s life too as it did that of Gensun as he rode his motor bike home that fatal day. Two men riding another motorbike overtook him and opened fire. A beautiful mind, heart and spirit were wiped out, ended by the evil-doers in greedy pursuit of perversity and power.

Magnetite mining consists of scooping the black sand with bulldozers, payloads and trucks, or sometimes dug up by paid workers or villagers with spades and wheel barrows. Environmentalists fear that the extraction of magnetite, which binds the sand together, will undermine the entire beach structure and raising sea levels and raging typhoons that will cause massive erosion. They can see that with the beaches lowered the sea will rise inland flooding the rice fields with salt water and covering roads and destroying bridges, schools and houses.

There is something perverse happening when a very physical part of the Philippines itself, its beauty, its environment, its heritage is dug-up by a powerful family and shipped out to a foreign land to enrich a single family and the business people of Korea and when the protectors of the earth are shot and killed. The brave Mayor of Buguey, Ignacio Taruc, for whom Gensun worked, leads an anti-mining organization and has been threatened and harassed himself when he protested the destruction of the beaches and their fragile ecosystems.

Another brave anti-mining environmentalist Ricardo Ganad was brutally murdered in Oriental Mindoro last 10 February and many others throughout the Philippines. Since 2001, over 800 murders of human rights and environmental advocates have taken place. Many of them were connected to anti-mining campaigns.

Those most affected are the indigenous people who have retreated to their ancestral mountain domains as land grabbers encroached on their lowlands. These ingenious people struggle to survive and preserve their traditional way of life and customs. They are under increasing pressure by mining companies owned in many cases by wealthy colonial era families backed by foreign mining interests. The rich families control the Congress and make laws for their self-interest and their foreign cronies. The 1995 Mining Law is an example and they have military forces to impose their will. Unjust as the 1995 Mining Act is, condemned by the Philippine Bishops, and many international development organizations, mining is spreading into the ancestral lands and bulldozing over the rights of the Filipino people who suffer the landslides, pollution of rivers and coastal areas, the destructive logging, the loss of habitat and rain forest.

Well that's what we are up against on Earth day in the Philippines - the willful destruction of our beautiful coasts, fish stocks, hills, mountains and rivers with nothing but loss and dire poverty for most of the affected Filipinos. But take heart, there is a strong resistance but it is met with deadly forces. But please join and support the thousands of brave environmentalists in the Philippines and around the globe working, living, and dying for their just cause - saving and preserving the Earth. It’s the only one we've got.