SAVING THE Earth us mostly about what happens when humans abuse nature. In the philippines, the problem has become two-fold. For more than three decades, the country’s environment crisis consisted mainly of the effects of almost half a century of unrestricted logging. Efforts to rehabilitate the uplands have been stalled by bureaucratic ineptitude and corruption. Mining has also contributed its share of blight, but the industry’s area of operations has so far been more limited than logging’s.
While authorities and communities are still wrestling with this “first geenration” environmental crisis, the second geenration of problems has arrived, in the form of pollution, land conversion and the other consequences of economic growth. This double whammy of upland degradation and urban decay threatens to overwhelm the government brueaucracies tasked to deal with both simultaneously. Lacking resources, officials will concentrate only on those issues that the public is most agitated about.
This book seeks both to describe the effects and analyze the causes of some of the greatest environmental afflictions bedeviling the nation. It contains 37 of the best environment reports published by the Philippine Center for Investigative Jorunalism (PCIJ) from 1989 to 1997.
