ESSC shares an excerpt from a short talk by ESSC Director Pedro Walpole, SJ with other Jesuits on the last day of their villa in Baguio City from 26 to 30 March 2012.

Living the message of Christ s not just faithfulness and love of neigbour, but as the passion and death of Jesus reminds us, it is to bring our sufferings, the unbearableness of life to Christ. We do not mature nor are we transformed just by doing good things, but we need to face the impossible and offer our sufferings.

This is the last evening of our short stay here in Baguio, and as we look around in our environment, there are 10 things I view:

1. We are beginning to segregate waste but still have to connect with the garbage landslide of last year.
2. The cutting of pine and consumerism of Shoemart continue in tandem, and the change in habit is hard to hasten.
3. From the mountain ridge of lower Santo Tomas, urea is the dominant smell for more than two hours of a five-hour walk and our vegetables are embraced in a cloud of pesticides, preserving the pretense of good food. (About 300 hectares of forests is lost each year to vegetable gardens.)
4. Only from the top can we see the urban hill sprawl and the water problems of Baguio City and its surrounding areas in Benguet province. They are vast, and not simply technical. They involve priorities and attitudes that we have not made yet into social values.
5. Benguet has the worst forest cover in Cordillera: 99% uplands with only 20% cover, including 1,642 hectares of mossy and closed canopy, 6,336 hectares of open canopy, and 42,286 hectares of pine. The dams of Ambuklao, Binga, and San Roque all drain from the uplands of Benguet and Pangasinan, two provinces with poor natural vegetation. (Tawi-tawi has the greatest upland and lowland cover - what contradictions!).
6. Mining remains hidden, but the violence it brings through unjust economic structures of privilege, social pressures, and lasting degradation are as yet unchecked.

Looking more broadly, there are also the following points to think about:

7. Peace and Indigenous Peoples, culture, and the land are still undervalued in the Philippines.
8. Disasters, euphemistically referred to as natural disasters, are designed to grow.
9. On a daily basis, local action will not overcome the status quo: 80% of cancers are of environmental origin; food production, population and state functionality are a returned global concern; resource wars over water, minerals, and now land, challenge our perception of a new world, with climate change as a given for the next 30 years.
10. The present broad sketches and plans to develop and transform the political and economic responses to global accountability, are at present clearly inadequate though understandably so. The real crucifixion of land and life is inevitable, given the way the way things are.

All these 10 points call for faithfulness in doing little things, having small commitments to the environment and developing new habits. Reflecting deeply on the challenges, we are strengthened in facing the sorrows. Even in being beaten by the disasters of this world, we are learning to adapt and transform our lives and living.

There are no quick, easy, or even hard answers to the problems of the next generation. But what I see, not merely in science and technology, but also in people, assures me of the goodness of creation and people in our responses.

For those of us who do not experience the depth of the ecological crisis, these may all appear doomsday and hot air; it is anything but. It is the challenge of faith, accompaniment, and transformation all over again.

Given these 10 points, I remain deeply consoled as I sense the transformation that is building and envisage the time of others ahead.