Fireflies in the rain

Credit to Author: Tempo Desk| Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 16:30:57 +0000

SHIRLEY and her husband are part of a fishing community. Typically, a fisherman earns P1,000 a day, but on an exceptionally lucky day, they can make up to P11,000.

You can see why they are against reclamation, but even with two dy­namic, outspoken ladies, Sen. Cyn­thia Villar and Rep. Baby Arenas, championing their cause, Shirley’s and 699 other families in Talip­tip, Bulacan are worried sick. The floods have been waist-high, sev­eral towns being lowland – Obando, Bulakan, Meycauayan. One other thing about Bulacan which I never knew about, they depend on Manila Bay for the fishermen’s subsistence; all along I had stupidly thought that we buy our seafood from Cavite and Pangasinan.

As it happens, Bulacan evokes ex­citement of another kind, for among us crowd-weary city folk, we’re impa­tient with anticipation of a mega-air­port coming up five years from now. We deserved a new airport 20 years ago and now that it’s almost within reach, the world is changing faster than you can spell environment. Glob­al warming, melting glaciers, extreme climates, oceans drowning in plastics, fishkills, not to forget frequent earth­quakes.

We’re learning new words, liquefac­tion, subsidence, storm surge, slow-concept disaster. The ground beneath our feet has softened or is sinking, typhoons grow fiercer, destruction strikes without warning, if long in coming. The world shrinks, build­ings rise vertically, land is reclaimed from the sea, 22 plans alone for Ma­nila Bay. Reclamation’s other name is dump-and-fill.

To build an airport the builders would need 20 million dump trucks of soil or 150,000 chocolate hills (when Bohol has only 12
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