goldigging the gold

I find it deplorable that the issues confronting the environment places so little percentage on the forums attended by presidential aspirants of 2010. Much of the discussions presented tend to overemphasize the reshaping of political propagandas, instead of giving a profound solution to some of our more urgent claims, particularly the environment, from its eventual disintegration and loss. The understanding that the problem of safeguarding an effective way to combat the concerns of anything “environment” is in providing the land with self-serving profiles and face-value politics, amenities that have nothing to do with bridging the gap between a utilitarian community and a sovereign government. 

The bleakness of the incoming dispensation, confounded even more by Congressional bickerings, puts the entire premise of environmental issues in a fragile mode, precariously threading within the bounds of unfulfilled promises and traditional politics. Those who opt to wait, myself including, for an effort to bring to fruition the restoration of a neglected environment are, by far, the only ones whose waiting virtue is available at our disposal since the whole nation has focused its attention either by monitoring the movements of the president, or simply keeping a meticulous eye on the Lower House.

The Caraga region, to put it more bluntly, is among the top five of the country’s poorest. The only business venture in the region that still thrives within decades of lurking under the shadows of poverty and want is its mining industry. With the whole world obsessed in trying to resuscitate itself from recessions after recessions, the mining mania in the region emanates even stronger, enticing a lot more unsuspecting residents to invest on an alleged relentless flow of gold reserves hidden in those areas, where recession is just an empty mercurial word if and when a measly ore is uprooted out of the bowels of that unearthly land. Such a dire situation that is constantly keeping tabs with the region’s growing economic breakdown.

It stabs the heart of someone to witness exploitation penetrating at the core of our illegal small-scale mining workforce, which is slowly becoming an “institution” for those who wanted to run the cocktail race and shoot the big time, before all these messy tunneling wears their collars out and there is not much left to do. To see them digging the earth unprotected from the hazards of chemicals and other mining fixtures that continue to haunt the charts of the region’s medical practitioners, who, like our fossil fuel, are slowly running out of time, patience, medicine, manpower and even beds to accommodate the unrelenting mortality rate of mining- related incidents.

Even professionals such as doctors, businessmen, those who hold a considerable influence in the region, those who we thought would shun away at the mere mention of mercury and other shady dealings of some of our very own small-scale miners, are also deluded into thinking that by offering their cars, their breakfast table and even their wares to those mining spin doctors they can also benefit from that sheer, who-knows “luck” out of being supportive to that gold.

At times this gold obsession would turn utterly spiritual, like there is something in that gold glittering that would bring a guaranteed charm to those who willfully support its cause, and danger to those who try to resist it. The danger, of course, is in trying to survive the extortion and coercion of the aggrieved party who, most of the time, is the ultimate undertaker of that mining mafia.

Maybe we should reexamine the ascendancy of that decade-old Mining Act of 1995, from its introduction to its transitory provisions. This Act, over the years, is fast becoming a eulogy to those who suffer under the pangs of unsolicited mining, of spurious diggings that culminate in an abrupt erosion of lands, in impulsive tunneling that seeks to become a mass grave site to those tired diggers, some of them even too young to vote and can only speak in a crooked, native tongue. The Settlement of Conflicts, which incidentally is Provision No. 13, an "unlucky" number, stands witness to those countless casualties not only in our region, but in the entire island as well.

Although I am not a supporter of former Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro Jr., but his steering message at that 8th Mindanao Island Conference of the Provincial Board Members League several months past gives me and us a hint of, at least, containing not only our perennial peace problem, but also our unrelenting viciousness of illegal small-scale mining transactions when he said that the country needs a “strong dose of practicality, pragmatism and political realism”. I wonder if Teodoro was able to reiterate that in one of their forums on national TV. It would have been the last straw that broke the camel’s mounting back.

If only our mining entrepreneurs have that strong dose of practicality by working only within the bounds of their capability and not continually exploiting those "uneducated" native diggers, if only they have that sense of pragmatism enough to understand that the mining industry works only within a specific duration of time and availability of ore, and if only they can practice a viable political outlook with respect to ancestral domains and human rights, that gold would not have been too wasted and too bloody to those Pantukan residents several months ago.

Until such time that these political pa-pogi points on TV would break on through intentionally to the other side of that discussion, and start digging not those dark tunnels, but the plight of our mining industry, large or small, and reach out to those neglected statistics in our society by drafting and eventually enacting its laws, we can't safely say that the country is digging its way through to that long delayed progress and not simply digging that dirt gold, and digging it again and again.