The Ecological Debt: What Humanity Owes the Future

Aside from the mango tree, my parents planted Narra, Gmelina, and Mahogany. These were the fast-growing species heavily promoted by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) in the 1980s. They also planted fruit trees like santol and avocado. My parents are long gone now, but the trees remain. Their descendants—our tribe—still share in the bounty of their fruits, their beauty, and their cool breeze. More importantly, we inherit the lesson of how to care for the earth.

Did my parents expect me, decades later, to idle away the hours under this canopy? Perhaps not. Yet no place on earth feels quite as peaceful. It has been thirty years since they left, but the farms they built and the ecological symbols they inspire endure. Their labor once fed the human body; today, it feeds the soul of nature. Theirs was a love that keeps on giving.

I once had a boss, a civil engineer, who used to say, “All things are created twice.” He meant that a drawing must always exist before a building can rise. My own writing table here has never passed the drawing stage—not on paper, anyway. It exists only in the jumbled spaces of my brain.

Yet, even without a proper desk, the shade of these trees under a searing midday sun offers an open invitation. The life-giving air they emit coaxes me into a conversation between man and nature. Here, I have promised myself more than once to try and count the costs of living for oneself versus living for others. I am certain any accurate tally is impossible. Civilization has consistently failed to give back what it takes from the planet.

In my younger days, I worked on the Community-Based Resource Management Project (CBRMP). Our goal was to help communities build the technical capacity to manage their environment and mitigate soil and sea degradation. The higher vision was that these well-managed natural resources would sustainably support local livelihoods.

The project was supported by multilateral agencies like the World Bank, alongside national entities like the DENR and the Department of Agriculture. In our refresher workshops, we shared basic ecological knowledge with farmers and community volunteers. Much of it they already knew instinctively. We talked about how a tree gives shade, absorbs carbon dioxide, produces oxygen, and provides habitats. We discussed how it interacts with soil, water, insects, and microorganisms.

We also revisited a lesson that is as old as time, yet remains incredibly tough to act upon. It is the simple diagram of the water cycle I first saw in grade school. The sun evaporates seawater, creating clouds that move with atmospheric pressure. These clouds drop rain, soaking the mountain ridges. What the forests cannot store drains into the valleys, swelling the rivers. Finally, the rivers return that volume to the sea, enriching it with sand, minerals, silt, and mountain debris.

Today, this natural cycle still grinds onward. However, it has been severely disrupted by ignorance and greed.

In my home province of Eastern Samar, as well as in Northern and Western Samar, commercial loggers and mining companies have caused massive deforestation. This destruction created immense wealth for the outside world, enriching logging empires and foreign mining interests. Yet it left our local communities impoverished.

Because our upland ecology has lost its capacity to hold water, rivers now rise to unprecedented levels during heavy rains. Entire barangays along the riverbanks face a greater risk of being swept away than ever before.

Every living thing that depends on the rhythm of the water cycle is now vulnerable. Wildlife suffers from degraded habitats. Farm productivity declines due to soil erosion, forcing farmers into desperate, unsustainable practices just to survive.

For decades, the Taft River in Eastern Samar was ecologically dead. This was the direct result of copper and pyrite mining upstream in Hinabangan, Samar (on the western side of the island). Toxic, acidic runoff contaminated the river basin, causing catastrophic fish kills and devastating local farmland. It left a multi-generational ecological deficit. No one has truly calculated how a corporate atrocity in the uplands completely breaks the spirit of the lowlands and the coast.

The CBRMP’s community-led, ridge-to-reef strategy remains a solid approach to fixing these issues. Unfortunately, that is not where the money flows. Sustainable stewardship routinely yields to fragmented engineering fixes, like standard flood control walls.

In the mid-1990s, I served as an Executive Assistant to then Eastern Samar Governor Lutz Barbo. One of my tasks was to coordinate national government functions, including devolved DENR responsibilities. During a provincial site immersion, we visited Homonhon Island in Guiuan and saw the aftermath of a massive forest fire that had razed endemic hardwoods to the ground.

Some local officials claimed a farmer accidentally started the fire while gathering firewood. However, other residents suspected foul play, pointing to empty gasoline cans dumped near a mining company’s depot.

Whatever the spark was, Homonhon and nearby Manicani Island have since been heavily mined for nickel and chromite. Extractive companies have taken far more than ore; they have shipped away our very earth and topsoil. Some observers even note that these extracted quarries are being used to build artificial land features in the West Philippine Sea.

Today, the degraded landscapes of Homonhon and Manicani stand as an urgent warning. They remind us of what happened to the Republic of Naoero—once known as Nauru.