By Penelope A. Domogo, MD
Have you ever tried inflating a balloon? Balloons being sold now are already inflated but when we were young, balloons were bought in the sari-sari store deflated. We had to blow air inside the balloon with our mouth, not with a hand pump. By the way, being able to blow a balloon indicates good lung function. To inflate a balloon, you have to blow first with a lot of force to create a small globe. After that you have to blow more gently and slowly till the balloon inflates to as big as it could stretch. You have to be careful at this end point because if you blow more air than its capacity, the balloon would burst. Meaning if you go beyond its saturation point, even a small amount of excess air will make it burst. As a kid, what I would do at this point was blow in gentle spurts, being sensitive to the pressure building up inside, until the balloon was full. Over time and after many busted balloons, I learned to inflate balloons properly and it was fun. That was before I knew that those pretty balloons are hazardous to fishes, to poawer lines and to the environment as a whole. Sigh.
Think of our world as a balloon. Think also that the air we are blowing into it are the following: smoke from burning garbage, plastics, , paper, leaves, rice straws, burning forests, toxins from pesticide and herbicide sprays, vehicle exhaust, smoke from factories and smoke from cigarettes.
Fifty years ago, the Cordillera, as was many parts of the world, was still covered with a lot of forests, and there were no plastics. I remember when plasticware were introduced in my hometown in the 1960s and my mom (bless her) refused to buy so we stuck to our enamel plates and cups which we use up to this day. The only vehicles in our town then was the Dangwa bus and the vintage jeep of our town doctor, Dr. de la Cruz. I should know because our house is beside the road and the good doctor is our neighbor. There were surely less people and those less people had less needs. We burned dried leaves and grasses but we didn’t feel the bad effect. We didn’t realize then that the products of our burning will be accumulating and will have adverse impact in the future. Now we should know. Do you think that because you burned the plastic out of sight, it is not there anymore? Wrong. That plastic or battery and other “garbage” has transformed into a more dangerous form and it is even invisible- invisible air and ash.
It is now 2015. If one travels from Baguio City to Bontoc, to Tabuk, to Lagawe, to Paracelis, one will still see beauty but with some sadness. Where once there were lush forests, there are now gardens, bald areas, burnt areas, and erosions. Trees are being cut down by chainsaws faster than we can plant and grow them. Mossy forests are giving way to vegetable gardens. Plastic wrappers and paper are strewn everywhere. It is warmer than it used to be. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international scientific organization, in its 2014 report stated that “Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. The period from 1983 to 2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years in the Northern Hemisphere…”
This means global warming is accelerating. But we don’t need an international body to tell us that the world is warming up and warming up fast. We feel the heat, we feel the pressure. Plants feel this, too. Our guava tree is still giving us some fruit at this time of the year. We love guava but this is unnatural. Some water sources are drying up. My daughter wrote that when the forests and watersheds have to go in exchange for vegetable gardens, “then our water and oxygen will have to go, too. Then, eventually, we have to go (unless we get to discover how to live without water and oxygen).” Where else do you think can we source oxygen aside from plants? Scary.
Again, the IPCC , in its 2007 report, estimates that future warming is “3.4°C (6.1°F) by 2100, with a likely range from 2.0-5.4°C (3.6-9.7°F)” . This exceeds the 2°C threshold for dangerous climate change recognized by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Other scientists estimate that the point of no return might even be sooner. Rise in global temperature is a measure of the pollution in the atmosphere.
Our world including the ozone layer is a balloon. There is already a hole in it and we are warming it up fast due to human activities. Let us not wait for our balloon to reach its saturation point. Let us not wait for our leaders to act first because we cannot lose time. The little things that WE do and not do EVERYDAY will make the difference– eating plants, not burning, farming organically, bringing our own bag to market, refusing to buy unnecessary things, eating fresh foods instead of packaged foods, putting even the smallest plastic in the bottle brick, teaching our kids our indigenous values of “inayan”, “ayyew”, etc.
Let us not wait for our balloon to burst. Because unlike the rubber balloon which we can always replace when it explodes, our world is only one balloon. **
