The Fart of a Fly

There is no Escape

There is no Escape

It took less than ten years for the past to catch up with the present in the life of one environmentally minded family I was tracking from my stationary orbit. Their new habitat in the Philippines suddenly appeared to be under the threat of the curse of lifestyles in big metropolises, but until then unknown in far-flung islands like Boracay: pollution.

It was almost ten years since John, a marine biologist, his wife, and their three children, all teenagers, moved to Boracay. A scientist and writer who had been around the world more than once, he was working in Manila when the gorgeous girl who stole his heart said ‘yes’ to him. From that moment, he called Manila home and lived there with his wife until, with three children, pollution from the rapidly expanding city made life unpleasant and they were forced to look for fresher air. The couple and their three young children embarked on a mission to find a new paradise where they could raise their children and later retire there.

Eventually they found Boracay, an almost unheard of island in the central Philippines in those days. Parts were occupied by a community of the Aetas ethnic group and the rest by settlers from other islands of the central Philippines. It was the paradise John and his family were seeking, exciting for both parents and children. The absence of electricity in the beginning was a challenge but they were able to obtain solar panels that provided light, warm water and electricity for other uses. Later, seeing how much John and his family liked their island, some enterprising families put up quaint thatched roof huts to attract tourists.

The family had their tenth anniversary celebration in Boracay only a month before a seemingly trivial incident took place: John was surfacing after snorkeling down to investigate an unusual coral, when he bumped into something. It was not a lost coconut, nor was it a chain of salps, primitive drifting organisms that look like a bandolier of transparent bullets, which he wanted to photograph and use as a model for a painting on marine life. No, it was something that did not belong there, something that was brought from the city and dumped in the clear waters that surrounded their paradise: plastic—an empty 2-liter plastic bottle of soda floating undisturbed by the marine life and ignored by the few tourists and residents of Boracay. But it was not ignored by John, who saw everything, the present, the past and the future, in that single moment.

He recalled his father’s words to one of his friends who decided that he could not stand living in a polluted city like Sydney any longer. He was moving to Noosa Heads, a tiny paradise town with a small population up north, in Queensland, with miles and miles of blue waters and white sand. John’s father had never heard of Noosa Heads but told his friend that he felt sorry for him if he thought he could run away from a city, any city, not just Sydney.

“In no time your quiet, peaceful, and healthy habitat will attract more and more people trying to run away from life in the city, but the city will get to them again and again, no matter how far they go. You will never solve any problem by running away from it, only by confronting the problem with sound solutions. Then you might, perhaps, one day solve the problem.”

Those words that his father spoke to a friend many years ago, sounded to John as if they were meant for him at a time when he was already considering his options: to stay and fight for a decent, better, and cleaner environment, or to continue searching for that elusive paradise.

Had he not remembered those words, he might have brushed the bottle aside. Instead, he grabbed it fiercely.

The fight had begun.

Very few people know about the early part of that fight; John’s organization of residents willing to do what they could to preserve their way of life while earning income to send children to good schools and make their own lives comfortable; the allocation of some space for rustic tourists’ accommodation behind the beachfront coconut trees to suit the nature of the remote island; careful consideration to placement of septic tanks for toilets, and so on; locations for nature paths; only one road along the island’s interior would be needed.

Of course, it was not long before the wealthy families of Manila who control Philippine life, almost literally, not only in the city but throughout the country, got wind of a new place where they could risk a few million with the prospect of good profits. Some of them virtually own whole provinces and even they are not the wealthiest.

Well, to make a short story even shorter, they found it a simple and easy matter to persuade the local council on the island to accept a few changes to accommodate more tourists, and more discerning tourists at that. The government, despite the protests of the islanders who did not want their island turned into a playground for the rich, soon became adept at ways to interpret the local regulations in favor of big corporations. A spokesperson of the Aetas community was murdered and the Aetas lost their land rights virtually overnight.

Once the door to big business had opened, it was a race for the best land, the choicest parts of the beach, as big, luxurious hotels with golf courses, immense swimming pools, and international casinos rose up like a festering disease all over the island. As you know now, other diseases began to spread due to the water. The island’s freshwater became unfit for drinking and even the seawater surrounding the island became so filthy it was found to be a health hazard, even to stand in.

Among my reading of your literature was the book Animal Farm, which many of you read at school. You might remember the ending, where the pigs deserted the other animals in their joint quest for equality and sided with the human business people. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. Thus do communities observe the interactions between your governments and big business.

***

There is little else I can add to that story of John, the marine biologist. He and his family, seeing their fight lost, feared for their lives and have long gone from Boracay.

I sincerely hope your future does not become like our past. My former planet Unno was destroyed by the inaction of weak governments that bent to the will of big businesses, which continued to do anything to make a profit as the world decayed around them. The total destruction of the planet could easily have been avoided. We realized that only after we, determined survivors—a contingent of migrants from Unno to a new paradisiacal planet in another galaxy—saw what could be done through dedication, research and above all, treating our new planet with love and respect instead of trashing it as an expendable item.

Ultimately, you will realize the futility of running away from the problem or trying to solve it by high-tech or brute force solutions on a planetary scale. You are bound to end with worse problems than before. Or do you think you are ready for that terribly inhospitable planet, Mars?