The celebration of Clean Up the World Weekend 2010 (17th-19th September) reminded us of how the late Filipino writer Nick Joaquin, writing under his pen name, Quijano de Manila, once described Manila: “like a public urinal.” The capital of the country, the Pearl of the Orient Seas, may not be the dirtiest in the world. But it’s squalid and it stinks. People pee, spit and throw litter where they please. If the citizens don’t give a damn about cleanliness on land, how can they be expected to keep the seas, rivers and bays clean?
What an irony. Filipinos try to keep their homes spic and span, paying special attention to the toilet lest visitors leave with less than positive impressions of the family. Cleanliness, however, is a domestic virtue in this part of Asia, not a public one. Take the street where we live, in a middle-class village in suburban Manila. It’s littered with dog poop because the dog owners don’t know any better or simply don’t care about what the neighbours think. We’re taking it philosophically, though. In a city that’s as clean as a ditch, what’s one more dirty road?
For sure, overpopulation, poverty, lack of discipline and the non-enforcement of city ordinances all contribute to the squalor and the sordidness. But there’s a more important thing at play here. It is the Filipinos’ seeming inability to think beyond the interests of family and clan. This makes it well nigh impossible to develop a sense of national community by which the average person will desire to keep the environment clean because “it is ours, not mine alone.”
Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said in a promotional video for the Clean Up the World event: “It is people, it is communities that make the difference.” That is only partly true. What ultimately make the difference are the values of a people and the community. Overlook this, and the call to save Planet Earth will become a mere slogan and the dumping of wastes, on land and at sea, will continue. ~Barista Uno
