3

Basic respect and appreciation of and love for the natural environment

Deeper Eco-Spirituality

Comprehension and respect for biodiversity in stability of symbiosis

Comprehension and respect for ecosystems as fragile habitats

  1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

.

Reach the People's Homes, Schools and Workplaces! Reach the People's Hearts!

By Kamayan Forum Journal

Editorial of the Kamayan Forum Journal, issue no. 64, June 2007

WE CAN’T afford to maintain the current rate of development of the green movement, more specifically of its snail-paced expansion. We need to motivate the multitudes across the archipelago into mobilizing themselves as active stakeholders within and outside our parameters of organized action.

We have said exactly this in our editorial last month in the Kamayan Forum Journal. And we see a big need to repeat it, and this: “Let each member of each green organization go out of her/his comfort zone and undertake to motivate at least a dozen of her/his own family members, neighbors, friends and workmates to mobilize themselves to be active stakeholders and to mobilize, in turn, a dozen or so each. It can be done. It has to be done. We cannot afford to wallow in defeatist hesitation on this! We have to melt the boundaries between the acknowledged environmental activists and the rest of the population and build bridges of effective communication between these widely disproportionate sets of people.”

Let us now stare at the gap we have to breach between the hundreds or thousands of committed environmental activists and the rest of the Filipino people numbering in their dozens of millions. These are the consciousness and the ethical values gap.

We have been straining our resources to address the information component of the consciousness gap. We have been holding activities and issuing primers and press releases to get our information printed and broadcast by the mass media and we have had reason to celebrate great and modest successes. But the effects of the mess media, although very very important, have had to be filter through the people’s sphere of interest so that they would spot, read and finish the news reports that do get into the newspapers they actually buy, so that they would listen with interest and full attention to items aired on radio and television about our environmental stands and actions.

They must be drawn to own those concerns and own those actions, fully identifying with these stands and actions at least in spirit. For this reason, the consciousness gap can never be fully addressed by the circulation of information, even if we could double or treble our current output. There is the sorely lacking success in education.

It was only very recently that a convergence of various organizations was able to arrive at a very clear articulation of the integration of all issues, major and minor, an integrated call that is unmistakably a life-and-death interest of every Filipino man, woman and child and therefore the motivating basis for every single one of us to be an active stakeholder. This is the call for all to converge for safe food, healthy environment and sustainable economy. If we can really succeed in getting the people to grasp firmly such integration, that would be a significant success in education. After that is achieved, many more people will pay real attention to the items we can get the print and broadcast media to carry.

Education goes to the mind in the latter’s integrative function, more on the level of comprehension and discernment that would be enough to motivate them to self-mobilize for environmental conservation, to self-mobilize for actions that would get them out of their comfort zones, for sustained significant actions that are now urgently needed to address effectively the current levels of environmental crisis we are now all facing. Effective education goes to the heart, and opens, or further opens, the mind. Without this, the people who get to see or hear the results of our media output would be moved just enough to make them shake their heads and say “Tsk! Tsk! Tsk! Grabe!”

In such education, the role of the peers is very important. The impact and other effects even of formal seminars are optimized to a large extent by peer processing. In the absence of these formal learning processes, it is oftentimes purely the peers or peer groups that educate people, on analysis of data and of ethical values involved. The environmental activists should therefore be known and really felt by the people in their teeming millions as their peers, speaking their own language, considering their own problems and contexts, feeling their own feelings.

There should therefore be many more committed activists consciously advancing the environmental cause right in the homes and neighborhoods, in the campuses and workplaces, in the fishing boat fleets and in the market stalls, in the tricycle and jeepney queues -- where the people are. Our environmental movement has to reach the people where they are. We have to reach their hearts!

back to top                      post a comment

 This page of the Lambat-Liwanag On-Line Library is supported by: