01.18.07 kulturnatib

What is your homeland like?

The Asean Summit hosting in Cebu had its uses after all. This does not diminish one whit the monumental hassle and inconvenience it brought to ordinary citizens like me who, during two of those closed-street security exercises, could do nothing but bear the heat and the rising frustration of fellow passengers inside those cannot-be-airconned jeepneys.

At least one of the jeepney drivers had the compassionate sense to wait out the jam away from the crush of vehicles and sought refuge under the shade and the windswept leaves of a tree some two kilometers away. And then, the wait wasn't that long.

The use of the summit for me was that it gave me the space and time to enjoy a book I had picked up from a secondhand book shop in Davao City on a recent trip there. More enjoyable still was that it was just walking distance from our hotel during a day that saw a break in a week-long downpour that had completely doused Davao.

The book, a hardbound, is 'This Place On Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence”by Alan Thein Durning.

Aside from the praises from other authors and authorities at the back of the jacket cover, which is expected, what drew me to the book was in the first pages. The author relates how the seed for the change and the writing of the book – the move from Washington, DC back to Seattle,Washington and the motivations that spurred that move and the experiences that sprang out from it – was planted by a medicine woman of the Banwa'on tribe living near a tributary of the Agusan River.

The seed was in the form of a question, “What is your homeland like?” Durning was taken aback. He did not expect the question. He finally admitted, “In America we have careers, not places.”

From a promising career as a senior researcher with the Worldwatch Institute, Durning decided that his homeland is the Pacific Northwest. He quit his job, packed his family and moved. To stay. In 1993 he founded the Northwest Environment Watch or NEW.

Admittedly the book's focus is on the Pacific Northwest of North America. This is the bioregion stretching from southeast Alaska to northern California and from the Pacific coast to the Rockies. Durning and the NEW believes that this region still has the capacity to carry into fruition efforts at sustainable development.

Just a quarter into the book, it is obvious that the problems he is writing about are similar to our own though particular circumstances, histories and cultures and very different.

Yet, as he says, the solution lies in the paradox that the more we realize that many our most pressing problems – global warming, hunger, plagues, even terrorism – are ultimately global in scope and consequence, the solutions that are possible, sustainable and lasting are local; in conscientious citizens realizing that the only durable answers to global problems can only be motivated by the desire to save their own place, their own locality.

Or, in a slogan popular in the early 90s, “Think Global, Act Local.”

Better still, Durning suggests, “Practice permanence.”

This is a difficult book to summarize in a few paragraphs. But, a few things stand out so far – there are still more pages to go -- and bear mentioning. First, is that responsible population growth must be encouraged with education and incentives. Every educated or even simply aware person knows this. Yet, this book and our country can't be more different. In the Pacific Northwest there is no Catholic Church that stands in the way of a clear discussion on such matters as contraception and family planning, let alone adolescent sex education.

Second, that prices must reflect ecological truth. The reason why most of us do not care about polluting the air is because it costs us nothing, although there really is a cost in health impacts, medicines, etc. The price of gas does not factor in the cost of pollution. There are many other examples to this disparity, Durning argues, the record showing that, as far as energy consumption goes, only rising prices change behavior.

I haven't read yet any document of the Asean Summit save that headline about an anti-terrorism pact. Hopefully that summit, the Asean and we shall look more closely into the question, What are our homelands like?