Biodiversity Heroes

Written by: Lindo, Jean
Mindanao Times
Thursday, 25 November 2010

TODAY, November 25, 2010, is the commemoration of International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. But this is a big day for Biodiversity in Davao City. While the women will hold a commemorative activity fighting gender-related violence, the Department of Environment, Department of Health and other government agencies together with Davao City Chamber of Commerce, Inc. and the Davao Medical Society will hold a Biodiversity Summit.

Since Biodiversity is the agendum of the day for the city, I will take the liberty of writing about the Heroes of Biodiversity, the people who do real work for the environment. They may be called the unsung heroes, but being unsung is no big deal for people like them. What is big deal is they are being treated as enemies simply because there are people who would not tolerate and appreciate intellectual diversity in the same way that biodiversity should be tolerated.

They do real work. Others do greenwash. Greenwash is the term whereby a product or a concept is deceptively introduced as green even if it is not. An example of greenwash would be the Green Revolution. That program was everything but green and everything but a revolution. It promoted the products of the big corporations which did not promote sustainable agriculture and was, in fact promoting polluting technologies. And it neither promotes change that translated to people’s empowerment, not even for the farmers, nor brings about social equity contrary to what a revolution is.

One such hero was Leonard Co, a brilliant botanist who was killed while doing the work for the conservation project of the Lopez-owned Energy Development Corporation. As the story goes, his team had the military clearance to enter the forest. He was with a forest guard, and guides who were farmers. Leonard was allegedly shot by a group of soldiers and he was even heard by the witnesses begging for mercy. The two others managed to escape the bullets.

I do not know Leonard Co personally, but I just happened to meet the guy while doing his usual work with the plants. I hosted his team while I was a medical student. I had this impression that he was a nerd and I noticed that he was reviewing his own book on plants and was writing his notes using Chinese characters. He studied tirelessly. I was a medical student then struggling with my medical book and retired much earlier than he did. I envied him for his energy, being able to continue reading and writing notes.

When I graduated from the medical school I worked with an Urban-based Community-based Health Program (CBHP), his books on medicinal plants became handy. It had the common name of each plant, the different names called by each plant in the different parts of the Philippines, the scientific name, the active ingredient, the therapeutic dose, the warnings on its toxicities, etc. I thought it was an amazing book and it helped a lot. There were instances when I was called by colleagues who started their residency training program and those who were moonlighting in the non-training hospitals. There were patients that exhibited toxicities. I remember one woman who took too much concentration of adelfa extract thinking that the plant had abortifacient effect. She sought admission at Calinan General Hospital (now Isaac T Robillo Memorial Hospital) then was transferred to the Davao Medical Center (then and now, Southern Philippines Medical Center). My colleague called me up to check for the active ingredient of adelfa which turned out to be digitalis. I called my colleague for her to be able to transmit the information to those managing the patient at DMC. The patient probably died manifesting the complications of digitalis toxicity.

I got to be familiar with the character of the author through a common friend who had the chance to work with him in Baguio. He was always remembered. Here was one brilliant person who contributed a lot in the field of medicine. It was his philosophy that the people should have access to health care and that the people in the underserved areas should have access to the medical knowledge and be able to utilize the plants when health care got to be too expensive and inaccessible to the poor. He was for peoples science. He was one of those group of scientists concerned about the proprietary rights of the people is the communities.

All of those involved in community health development work are still mourning as of this writing. People are raging why this brilliant individual had to be killed as a result of what seemed to be senseless paranoia. He maybe nameless and faceless to his killers, but to the scientific circle, environmentalists, development workers, and the people in the communities, his worth was more than the whole responsible battalion in Leyte. This rage inside me makes me think that if bullets had brain, they probably would have turned the other way. A meatflower, Rafflesia leonardi, was actually named after Leonard Co.

Another individual I would like to write about is an IP (Indigenous People) advocate and an environmentalist. Jean Marie Ferraris, for her great work on the environment and biodiversity had been subjected to harassment. She had been detained along with other environmentalists in Indonesia. Just recently she was again victim of red tagging. I came across a press release by Asian Human Rights Commission which stated that the communist label on an activist is a prelude to murder.

I had the honor to provide anesthesia care to her. I could not imagine why a gentle soul yet so courageous, has to be a target. She is an IP advocate and mining activist. She knows the implications of unbridled mining activities to biodiversity.

On this day when all peoples eyes in Davao are on the Biodiversity Summit at Marco Polo Hotel, I pay tribute to the two exemplary
individuals who do actual work for biodiversity beyond lip service. I swear they are not in this summit. Leonard Co is dead. Jean Marie may be alive but on doubtful security.

They are people who worked beyond conservation. They are gifted with the wisdom that biodiversity is also social justice issue.

Unfortunately, they are also among the endangered species.