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William Adan .

NAAWAN, Misamis Oriental — Nature, whether in foul or good mood, does not discriminate. It provides the soothing morning sunlight, the cool and refreshing rain shower and the lovely rainbow to the young, the aged, the good, the bad and the ugly. When it is mad, nature violently strikes at everyone along its path, too, no matter if one believes in God or not. Those sparred miraculously from the wrath and rages of nature are precisely around to goad us to reflection – on what is going on around us and on the high price that we pay when selfishness and greed dominate our individual and collective life.

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Typhoons are almost generally predictable anywhere in terms of their strength, frequency of occurrence, the period of occurrence, and their paths and destinations. The weather forecasting and communication technologies now in use could actually help avert or reduce the impact of this natural disturbance. Unfortunately, the advantages of weather forecasting and advances in communication are cancelled out by man-made destruction of the environment that results to global warming and climate change, whose consequences are predictable only for their increasing ferocity.

Thus we witness and suffer extreme weather conditions – freezing long winter and scorching endless summer simultaneously in different parts of the planet, mind blowing hurricanes, flash floods amazingly even in the desert, and devastating earthquakes everywhere.

If nature has gone very wild of late it is because it is being teased and provoked by human greed and iniquities. We have not been, collectively speaking, a good steward of the environment – of the resources that God has put in our charge. We have not been a good steward even of ourselves. What we have sown is what we are now reaping.

The call of the times is for us to put our act together, to be back and friendly to nature  if only to heal and save this our only planet.

 

(William R. Adan, Ph.D., is a retired professor and former chancellor of Mindanao State University at Naawan, Misamis Oriental. -Mindanews)

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