January 24th, 12:20am January 23rd, 7:51pm Nick V. Quijano Jr.Out and About

In Tokyo’s western city of Musashino, patrons sip alcoholic drinks inside a trendy cocktail bar offering puke-inducing views of the Musashino Clean Center, a garbage dump. Gomi-Pit Bar (Waste-Pit Bar) intends hopefully to boost awareness of the ordinary Japanese on environmental issues.

If the bar is one of those offbeat Tokyo spaces, it is really not all that weird. In Manila, a number of five-star hotels and restaurants, upscale condos and a gigantic mall offer motley views and smells of the country’s biggest “toilet bowl that has not been flushed,” the Manila Bay.

Many in Metro Manila, including first-time visitors, are well aware nowadays that every time the bay breathes, an unmistakable foulness, best described as one lengthy, smelly fart, indiscriminately assaults noses, whether of rich or poor.

It is welcome, therefore, that government is dead serious about the monumental task of cleaning up the bay. But while government is still flush with the successful clean-up of the Boracay “cesspool,” the Duterte government is cautious this time around. The Department of the Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) promises only its best efforts, even if its chief confidently says the bay will be swimmable by year’s end.

It should also be noted the promised bay clean-up is not some sort of ad hoc effort like what had happened in Boracay. In fact, the DENR is actually remiss about implementing laws on the bay’s clean-up mandated years ago.

Serious efforts to clean up the bay had been started more than 20 years ago by environmental groups who took it upon themselves to file cases against government.

Environmental groups finally gained 10 years ago the imprimatur of the Supreme Court when the High Court gave a “continuing mandamus” order directing the DENR and 13 other government agencies to cough up concrete plans and actions on cleaning up the bay.

DENR Secretary Roy Cimatu, therefore, has his work all set out. In fact, a mandated inter-agency coordinating committee is up and running and has a strategic cleanup plan in place.

Still, as in Boracay, Cimatu’s first moves has been to threaten establishments dotting the bay with closure and heavy fines if they fail to dramatically reduce the wastes they throw into the sea. It is only the beginning of a hard task ahead.

Manila Bay, of course, is far more complex than Boracay. Other than uncaring businesses, there are other major impediments like some 200,000 informal settler families that defecate, urinate and dump their garbage into the bay.

By DENR estimates, informal settler families are the primary source of fecal bacteria. And, in recent tests, the agency says the fecal and coliform level in the bay has reached 1-9 billion most probable number.

Resettling informal settler families, who not only live by the bay’s shores but also along the rivers pouring out pollutants into the bay, is an enormous task, an expensive nightmare even.

There is also the unresolved issue of land reclamation. Aside from Metro Manila cities, the bay is astride three other large provinces. Some of these provinces, like some Metro Manila cities, want to reclaim land as they are running out of large tracts of real estate to spur their development.

At least five firms are seeking government approvals for reclaiming areas in the bay, spanning a total 1,854 hectares, says the DENR. Unfettered reclamation also means more pollution of the bay.

Reclamation, however, is also not only about pollution. Fisherfolk living along the bay, who should be the first to welcome teeming marine life, are deeply suspicious of the bay clean-up. Fisherfolk fear the bay-wide demolitions of their communities and the eventual sacrifice of their livelihood.

For its part, DENR insists reclamation projects can be rejected if these in any way harm the bay. Still, the agency says there is nothing illegal about these reclamations, hence the call also for balance.

Balancing development and environmental concerns is only one of the conventional points of view about pollution and most will intuitively agree achieving balance is correct.

There is, however, an unconventional point of view, which allows for reclaiming parts of the bay even if it means another round of potential pollution.

Now, this point of view will probably arouse indignation and charges of thoughtlessness, sensationalist provocation and controversy-courting. But it is a view which actually has been aired and it comes from expert ecologists themselves, after concluding pollution is everywhere and we are somehow helpless against it.

The point of view is this — unfettered reclamation projects in the bay risking more pollution in fact concentrates pollution only in or near Metro Manila. By concentrating pollution in one place like a big city, some ecologists argue, actually confines pollution in just that one place which in turn helps in controlling pollution in other places!

Large big cities where people live packed together, as the explanation goes, are ecologically the best thing for nature and for the majority of people.

But this view eventually raises a hairy question: Are we all prepared to sacrifice people living in Metro Manila, so that other people in other places outside of the metropolis can breathe?

Should all of us refuse to sacrifice millions of people? Isn’t it then high time we all individually get our act together at lowering the volume of garbage we callously throw out daily and which ends up in Manila Bay?