Legislaciones y los Convenios Ambientales Internacionales

‘Precise definition o f misery> is insufficient because it cannot perceive the dignity>

o f the people. It overlooks the laughter^, the struggle, the prayers, the music o f those whom it regards as statistics. ’

— Dorothee Soelle, ‘Celebrating Resistance’ (1993)

LONDON, AROUND 1994, was probably the best jumping-off point for a fieldwork in the Southern Philippines. Although the geographical and physical distance between the two places was immense, the relationship between the Philippine protest movement with the UK-based advocacy groups was intimate. Thus, aside from providing the healthy atmosphere for academic discussion, my stay in London gave me access to much of the relevant material on the legal, environmental and cultural issues on the case. This context also shaped the framework for my research. Most of the material and reference persons that I encountered at this early stage dealt with the politics of environmental change and indigenous people’s rights, I took seriously the research agenda of political ecology. Soon, however, I had to integrate the cultural agenda as suggested by anthropologists. In addition, I followed my own existential and philosophical concerns. This Study charts the formation of this pre-fieldwork conceptual framework.

1. LUMAD VOICES, LONDON VIEWS

My fieldwork, in a way, started in London. It was from a Minority Rights Group report (Rodil 1993), displayed by the Intermediate Technology Bookshop at Russell Square, that I learned about the Philippine National Oil Company’s construction of a geothermal power plant right at the heart of the remaining rainforest of Mt. Apo

National Park. The Philippine Resource Centre (PRC), a London-based nongovernmental organisation, was then the nucleus of international network for Philippine social concerns. Aside from producing an information and action pack (PRC 1994), PRC published a newsletter called Our Common Ground. PRC provided me with NGO updates mailed or e-mailed from its Manila office. The Manila office, in turn, was received information from the Task Force Apo Sandawa (TFAS), the Legal Resource Centre (LRC-KSK), and other concerned groups in Manila, Davao and Kidapawan. PRC and other agencies like the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR) facilitated the visit to London of a number of speakers from the Philippines who shared invaluable information that was difficult to locate back in the Philippines. Among the guest speakers who came to London was Era Espaha, a Manobo spokesperson of the campaign against the PNOC power plant. Her interview, published by London-based newspaper The Filipino, provided personal touch to the dominantly NGO language. I would later meet Era in Mt. Apo and, most importantly, her sister would later become my research partner for the whole of my fieldwork.

The international advocacy provided strong links between local voices and global venues for co-operative action. Thanks to this networking, I got access to material which otherwise would not have been available elsewhere. For instance, I watched two video-documentary films on the issue, ‘To the Last Drop of Blood" produced by Old Street Films (London, 1992) and ‘Apo Sandawa: Sacred Mountain" produced by protest groups in the Philippines (TABAK 1994). (To my surprise, none of those I had dealt with during my one-and-a-half year fieldwork in the Philippines had ever seen them.) From the London School of Economics, I got hold of the rare eight- volume Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of the PNOC (1991) of which even the Protected Area Management Board (PAMB) in Davao City had no copy. My visit to the office of Survival International made me realise how far the campaign had gone.

In addition, my contact with the magazine The Ecologist facilitated my one- month exposure to the Narmada Bachao Andolan in India where I met the noble leader Medha Patkar. A side trip to the Akha villages in Northern Thailand just before beginning my work provided other perspectives on the plight of indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia. These experiences prepared me physically and psychologically for the

Mt. Apo struggle. My fieldnotes on the struggle of the Mt. Apo Lumad actually started from among their London counterparts.

What image of the struggle did I capture from the various materials and communication that I have encountered? The most dominant icon made about Mt.

Apo was that of the crying mountain, violently punctured by a metallic and monstrous PNOC drill. The campaign slogan was ‘Save Mt. Apo’. The campaign literature during the first five years since 1989 presented a strict polarisation between the government and indigenous peoples. The geothermal project was called an ‘assault’

on the sacred mountain (Kinaiyahan 1989). It was a devastating instance of

‘development aggression’ (TABAK 1990), something close to ‘ethnocide’ (MMNS 1993) against which the mountain had to be ‘defended’ (Fay, Royo & Gatmaytan 1989/1990; PRC 1994) because PNOC was ‘a demon’ ‘wreaking havoc’ (Manlongon 1989) on the lives of the Lumad and their environment. The indigenous peoples, in turn, were hailed as ‘original environmentalists’ (Tauli-Corpuz 1992) and faithful descendants of their ancestors (Agbayani 1993). A book, greatly inspired by the Lumad struggle, enthusiastically described it as a model for other environmentalist groups to follow. From the beginning of the book, we read:

The resistance of the Bagobo and other Lumad—and the confrontation—escalated. Two thousand Lumad from nine tribes met and signed a D'YANDI, an intertribal blood compact to defend their area from the project. It was an historic occasion: only the third Lumad D'YANDI since the thirteenth century, and the first time in history for all nine tribes here to gather as one. Their solemn words made the event all the more momentous: ‘For us...the land is our life;

a loving gift of [The Creator] to our race. We will die to defend it, even to the last drop of blood.’ (Broad & Cavanagh 1993:34)

I was personally drawn to the general thrust of this campaign. Nevertheless, some descriptions of the situation, as I shall outline below, made me suspect that the situation was more complex than it had been publicly portrayed as being.

My search for a framework to understand the complex land struggle of the Lumad in face of the PNOC had led me to consider very seriously the political ecology agenda for Third World studies as sketched by Raymond Bryant (1992; see also Bryant, Rigg & Stott 1993). Bryant's seminal article offers a broad survey of relevant literature and identifying central analytical issues regarding the ‘socio­

economic impact’ and ‘political ramifications’ of environmental change in the Third World. Nevertheless, I must immediately register my complaint, even at this point,

that the article leaves out so much of the ‘cultural’ sphere which social anthropologists would insist as important (Croll and Parkin 1992; Milton 1993).

Initially, then, my task is to adopt the political ecology agenda but with a sensitivity to local idioms, images and processes.

My earlier interest in philosophical, poetic and liberationist issue (cf. Alejo 1990, 1993) draws my attention to questions of collective action, passion, and sources of strength especially of the subordinated groups in the process of their struggle. I am interested, in other words, in the ‘remaking of social analysis’ (R. Rosaldo 1989) which integrates the force of emotions (M. Rosaldo 1980; R. Rosaldo 1989) and passions (Robertson 1984; Crawford 1994) especially those connected with pain and suffering (Kleinman 1992). I want to learn how to undertake an anthropological analysis that does not ‘flatten out’ the ‘brute fact’ of hardship and hide it under the cover of statistics (Hastrup 1993); one that sees in the agency of the poor something more than mere resistance (Kaplan and Kelly 1994), and one that recognises local knowledge, unexpected creativity, and human energy (Turton 1984:63; Turton 1991:168) which, like pain, sometimes eludes prosaic articulation (Turton 199la:6;

Hastrup 1993). How, then, do I locate this philosophical focus within the political ecology framework?

First, I shall use Bryant's research agenda to review the existing literature on the Lumad land struggle and energy generation in Mt. Apo. I hope to identify the initial research target along the way. Second, I shall trace the trajectory for further study hinted at by Bryant himself, for which an anthropological job is needed. Finally, I shall introduce my own reflection on the possibility of expanding the discourse of struggle, by taking seriously both the collective experience of suffering and the cultural resources of the subordinated people and their supporters.1

Acton

Survival

tor tribal p e o p le s

m

Ur gen t Ac ti on Bulletin of Survival International, the worldwide moveme nt to support tribal peo ples.

April 1992

L u m ad p e o p l e s at a 8 , 0 0 0 s t r o n g rally in p r o t e s t at t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n of a h u g e p o w e r plant o n their l a n d s .

Philippines

Drilling v i o l a t e s