Ben Contreras
THE symposium on Laudato Si’ re Care for our Common Home held at the Xavier University Little Theater on Thursday afternoon offered nothing new about our environmental problems and their supposed Climate Change interventions except perhaps that this time it is initiated by the Catholic Church.
One thing I liked about it was the audience who were mostly students from the university or the youth.
That afternoon, we listened to an issue that has been discussed in many fora in the past: environment.
Calamities have been happening all over the world. Some were what we called acts of God or nature and some, man-made. If we were shocked and horrified by them, they were always short-lived. Why, because we have been too busy looking at the future and what the future can offer us in terms of comfort, convenience and satisfaction brought about by new technology.
Sendong was a disaster the worst Cagayan de Oro City has experienced so far. Pablo hit Davao Oriental; the earthquake in Bohol, and then Yolanda in Tacloban. We may attribute them to Climate Change but they are also results of our abuse of our environment.
These problems were the “future of yesteryears” when the senior citizens were like the students, carefree and who simply looked forward to the future and what the future can offer.
When we watched movies about the back then, they were merely science fiction to us. But the science fictions of yesteryears are the realities of today. At what cost? The destruction of Mother Nature.
Today, technology makes everyone wonder. Innovations never stop. And the clamor for more continues. Faced with the current environmental problems, I feel that are young are more pre-occupied with other activities than the protection of our environment and the stoppage of activities that destroy our mountains, rivers and atmosphere.
If we don’t wake up and do something to help, our young who will be the seniors will be repeating what we are doing––talking about the damage caused by our neglect in protecting Mother Nature.
How many movies have you seen that are just science fiction today? Believe me, your science fiction today will also become the reality tomorrow.
Let me mention one movie I saw where human beings live in capsule-like homes floating in space. Has the Earth, our home, been destroyed by war or natural events? And there was one instance when one was keeping something held in secret; a small growing plant.
Yes, it’s a science fiction movie today. Would it be our future? It depends on us. Our youth hold the future while we, the seniors, gently slip into the past. Certainly, we do not like that, right?
What can stop the future from becoming like that? Knowledge! Our young need to know their home, what’s keeping us together and alive, and what is destroying our home and us, human beings and other creations.
We don’t need to stop technology from developing new products. We don’t need to stunt development to offer us comfort and convenience. But we need to balance everything we do to maintain our ecosystem and our biodiversity or face the consequence when food and water can be scarcier and costlier than gold or any precious stone.
Our young are the future. And as these problems are presented to them, they need to do something to prepare their children and their children’s children for a world we want, not the one damaged as we see it today.
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