by Alan S. Cajes, PhD
The environmental crisis confronting the Philippines
is often framed as a problem of weak awareness, insufficient concern, or
inadequate technical knowledge. This framing is misleading. The country does
not suffer from environmental ignorance. Filipinos are deeply familiar with
floods, storms, degraded coasts, declining fisheries, polluted air, and
thinning forests. What the nation faces is a crisis of alignment—a deep and
persistent mismatch between the way its political, economic, social,
technological, ecological, and legal systems operate and the way natural
systems function and respond to pressure.[1]
Across these domains, institutions operate according
to logics that are internally rational yet collectively destructive. Political
cycles are short; ecosystems recover slowly. Economic metrics count income but
ignore depletion. Social necessity pushes people into fragile spaces.
Technology advances faster than institutions can absorb it. Ecological buffers
degrade faster than policy processes can keep up. Legal commitments outpace
enforcement capacity. Environmental decline emerges not from a single failure,
but from the friction between systems that never fully synchronize.
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[1] A “crisis of alignment” means the systems designed to protect people and promote development are not aligned with how nature actually behaves—its timelines, thresholds, feedback loops, and limits. Until these systems are recalibrated to match ecological reality, environmental decline will continue even if people care and laws exist.
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