By: Fr. Vinnie Busch

Fr. Vincent Busch, a Columban Missionary in Mindanao has been a leading figure in the Philippines Environmental Movement. Using seminars, articles, and film, and slide show he shares some of his deepest insight into the destruction of Mindanao and the Philippines. Here is a summary of his experience.

A Beautiful Land
Seventeen years ago I planted myself in Mindanao. I faced a new and wondrously diverse community of tropical animals and plants, mangroves and rain forest, reefs and rivers, volcanoes and earthquakes.

What has Happened
In the beginning, the hungry, suffering people of this community led me, with the help of the exodus story, to hear the cry of oppressed human beings. More recently, the degraded seas, soils, and forest of this community have led me, with the help of creation stories in Genesis, to hear the cry of the dying earth.

We Need a Dialogue
I have come to the conviction that life is in its fullness requires a healing dialogue between the dying earth and its suffering people. In that dialogue of life will be revealed. I am also convinced the God of earth and sky listens to the cry of the people in pain and that by listening to the cry of suffering people we come to know the God of earth and sky.

Poor Who Suffer First
The despoiled soils, seas, and forests of Mindanao are dying and the people are suffering the consequences. Like everywhere else on this endangered planet, it is the poor who suffer first. They do not have the political clout or the financial means to escape the hunger, drought and the heat of a baked, treeless and eroded landscape.

Not all Production is Good
The government is committed to conventional economic development. It encourages increased production and consumption, hoping to create more jobs in industry and agriculture. But when increased employment is linked with earth destroying enterprises, new job opportunity will not free people from the death facing Mindanao.

Some Example
For example, there is a beach up the coast from here. Once cooled by spreading Talisay trees, it provided a natural picnic area for the public. Then an enterprising individual cut off the shading branches of the tress and built bamboo huts instead. He rented the huts to people looking for shade, hiring two attendants to maintain the huts and collect the rent. The few who pay the fee are let in; the many who cannot are kept out.
This seaside enterprise employs two people and creates tax payers. But it has taken the abundant shade provided by God’s creation, packaged it in small huts and then proceeded to sell it to a privilege few.
On a larger scale, the beer and soft drink factories diminish the local water supply and then sell their drinks to the water-poor community.
The bountiful food and fuel of the mangrove swamps are destroyed by constructing fish and shrimps ponds that produce specialty foods for the wealthy.
To grow luxury fruit for export, large corporate farms exhaust the soil by raising just one crop.

Failed Hopes
Basic foods have become scarce and expensive because logging and mining operation have degraded rivers, seas and soils. Mining and logging employees, who has hoped for a steady income, discover that their money quickly disappears in buying fish, rice, and even water.

Disaster A waits Us
Creating jobs that destroy natural resources will eventually consume, erode and poison the forest, soils, water and air Mindanao. All this is done in the name of providing employment to help people overcome the hardships of living in a degraded and depleted land.

Mission Today
The poor of Mindanao need and deserve an economic order that collaborates with the work of God’s creation. This collaboration between the earth and the life, work and play of humans is a serious challenge for mission today in the effort to apply the Gospel to the lives of the people.

Christian Communities
Over the past few years I have worked with the Christian communities of northwest Mindanao in developing workshops to help them rediscover their communion with creation. We call one exercise the Good Gift Workshop. Participants are asked to make a drawing of their habitat illustrating the gifts of its different forest, sea, soil, river, and coastal communities.

Gifts
Most groups fill their drawings with those gifts that clearly benefit the human population: the contributions of the forest community in conserving soil, maintaining the water cycle, regulating the climate providing us with medicine, food and building materials.

Forgotten Gifts
Many groups also remember to include those gifts that benefit the larger earth community: a mud whole is a life-saving gift to an overheated water buffalo; an erupting volcano is a island- building gift to the Philippines archipelago. By including these frequently forgotten or unrecognized gifts, the participants create landscape that reveal the close links between the natural elements that keep Mindanao alive.

What We can Do?
Into these landscapes the participants are then asked to sketch their life-giving contributions. Here the group adds to their drawing those human activities which collaborate with the good gifts of other creatures in their locales.
Groups from farming ad fishing communities focus on ways they can restore and defend the fish, trees, and soil that give them food and shelter. They show fishermen building artificial reefs to attract food fish, farmers composting soil to increase their production, and villager, replanting the hills with fast-rowing trees for the timber industry.

Many groups go a step further to include the needs, gifts and beauty of other creatures. They look for ways to protect and enhance the habitat that feeds and shelters the birds of the air and the lilies of the fields.

Faith is Needed Too
This workshop helps them recognize and respect their dependence on a healthy habitat. But there is a faith dimension to the workshop as well.

If we believe the prayer, “Let all creation praise the Lord” (Psalm 150), then we must find way to nurture, protect and enjoy our communion with all beings.