What the muck!

The Bicol region — blessed with rich, volcanic soil — is quite the greenest province I know. In the old days, one could fling the seeds of watermelon, chico and papaya in the backyard and watch them grow into saplings soon after.

But that was before the big floods covered most of the land in the region with muck, whether literally or figuratively. In many neighborhoods after super typhoon “Rolly” (Goni) hit Albay back in November 2020, for instance, it took a long time for many places to turn green again. For a time, the surroundings looked drab and sad, as if all the joy had been sapped from this sunny, spice-loving province.

Back then, “Goni” triggered an avalanche of volcanic mud that buried 300 homes, killed 13 people and left three missing” in Albay. Eyes turned to the quarrying operations then being conducted in the province, which some later described in a Mongabay article as “excessive,” “rampant and poorly regulated.” Residents affected cried foul over the alleged “mismanagement or even illegal quarrying operations.”

Ensuing investigations revealed that “15 quarry operators were violating their licenses. Nine had mined beyond their designated coverage areas.”

Perhaps, such loose local rules led to an avalanche of another kind — one that got quarry operators jumping from “only 25 in 2017” to “more than 100.”

A disaster-prone country, the Philippines has seen countless natural hazards — from severe tropical storms like the latest one, “Kristine,” to droughts, floods, landslides and volcanic eruptions.

For places like Bicol, which is often hit by typhoons and is home to active volcanoes, agriculture is among the most affected. Vast fields of rice, in fact, continue to be submerged in the wake of “Kristine.”

While modernity had eaten up many of the green fields that we knew decades ago, the sad part is that whenever floods come, those rice fields and other agricultural crops are flattened, taking time to recover.

Filipinos are a resilient lot, that is already proven — but sadly, we are not a very inquisitive lot. We sigh and complain and retreat in despair, but we never question why these calamities continue to whip us to the ground while government budgets keep growing and growing.

But “Kristine” brought us back to this question anew. Some Bicolanos, yet again affected by the hardships of enduring a super typhoon and the destruction and floods it brings, wondered aloud about what happened to that flood control budget supposedly bannered by House Appropriations Committee chair and Ako Bicol Partylist Rep. Zaldy Co.

The solon, whose Sunwest Construction and Development Corp. once figured in the quarrying issue in Albay, said in response that the province has “among the smallest allocations for national road infrastructure and flood control,” and that the reported P9-billion budget was nonexistent.

He explained, in reports, that this administration has tried to control these allocations so that, for flood control for example, projects would be aligned with food security and public safety goals. He called this “responsible infrastructure spending.”

Still, the question remains: When? When will the people see the fruition of these goals when typhoons have battered the country one after the other?

How will our government — going on three years into the Marcos Jr. administration — prioritize these plans?

On his recent visit to Kristine-affected Naga City, President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. “suggested revisiting the Bicol River Basin Development Program (BRBDP) to avoid a repeat of severe flooding in the region during weather disasters,” one article said.

The BRBDP was a project in the 1970s, when his father Ferdinand was president. The project was dropped after ’86 with the change in administration. “We have to revisit it now. Iba na ang conditions ngayon (The conditions have changed), with the advent of climate change,” Marcos Jr. said in a briefing in Naga, reports said.

Times, indeed, have changed, with climate change the biggest change of all, one that should be driving leaders today to come up with solutions under exacerbated conditions. There is no point in raking in billions to the detriment of our land. After all, what future is there for anyone should we degrade the only planet we call home?