Grassroots: Earth’s Last Vanguards

Grassroots:  Earth’s Last Vanguards

By MICHAEL A. BENGWAYAN Ph. D.

The villagers of Marilog and Pacquibato in Davao surviving on logged-over parched hillsides may have never heard of the word desertification but they know better than any agriculturist that their soil is exhausted.

That the land is dry. That hunger is on their  heels. And that death stalks the land.

Women on the banks of Marble River in Kidapawan, North Cotabato may not know what an infant mortality rate is. But they know all too well the helpless agony of holding an infant as it dies of diarrhea.

Forest dwellers in Lusod, Kabayan, Benguet may never have been told of mass extinction of species occurring in their Mount Pulag but they know far better than any biologist the death feeling as they watch their primeval homeland raped by commercial farmers and tourists.

These women and men understand global deterioration in its rawest forms.

To them creeping degradation of ecosystem has meant  diminishing source of food and medicine, declining health, failing livelihoods, and longer workdays.

But they are not standing idle to watch death reap them away.

In villages, tribal homes, shanty communities, people are coming out to discuss and respond to the tightening ecological conditions confronting them in the midst of climate change.

Viewed in isolation, their initiatives may look modest. But in fact, collectively, it is the best approach to fighting global warming—25 mothers plant trees around their kaingins, 100 children reforest a balding hill, a gang of farmers collect wildlings and replant these atop a spring gushing with crystal clear water and a group of NGO volunteers prevent erosion of a mountain..

All over the world, you can see these images. From a global perspective their scale and impact are monumental.

Indeed, local organizations are the frontline in the worldwide struggle to lessen environmental degradation.

While scientists, politicians, policy makers, funders and technocrats crow, grandstand and puncture the air with rhetoric, hardly experiencing or walking their talk.

Although individual groups are little known outside their locality, the overall movements they form is a latticework of human organization, so effective that if only coordinated with a fine mix of rigid institutions of leadership and coordination, can be like a colony of ants or a hive of bees all focused with one mission.

Farmers groups, mothers clubs, student groups, religious groups, peasants unions, tribal networks and neighborhood organizations—these are grassroots.

These are hope. And in saving Earth, they may be the only ones left effective.  

Compared to powerful alliances often tainted by countries and organiizers' hidden motives and bureaucracy.