Eileen Legaspi Ramirez Reflection on Taliptip field visit

SD 302 Dr. Rosalinda Ofreneo

2013 data from Philippines Mangrove Ecosystem: Status, Threats, and Conservation1

The indispensable function of mangroves may have only belatedly surfaced in the
public consciousness but it is a significant step forward nonetheless. Yet
piggybacked on the broad notion of forests as the Earths lungs, this fairly newly
acquired sensitivity still cannot sufficiently arrest the precipitous decline of this
resource. Still very much under threat from conversion (to agricultural use), human
settlement, deforestation due to harvesting of firewood/building materials, flooding,
erosion and sedimentation2, the Bulacan coastal mangrove project we recently
visited demonstrates how intertwined questions relating to the environment, social
development, and governance inevitably are.

Our experience was primarily filtered through the narrative lens of Education for
Life alumnus and now Bulakan municipal government employee Mang Jimmy (Jose
Jimmy San Jose)how he had been born into a fisherfolk community, ended up
among other things, collecting fees and doing regulatory checks on the fishponds on
Taliptip River, to eventually helping organize a church-based community
organization affiliated with the local network of Bulakan fisherfolk. Mang Jimmys
personal story is a case in itself, rising as he has from the ranks to speak, through
self-education to faith avowedly propelling a desire to see through the uphill work
of staying this sanctuarys total demise. He candidly shared how he finds himself
awkwardly positioned in the midst of a territorial quagmire, what appears to be his
strong ties with the DENR and PENRO and their local dynamics with the municipal
office obviously influencing how the precious 24.65 hectares of mangroves in Sitio
Wawang Capiz, Taliptip have come to be managed thus far.

In many ways, his predicament and subsequent resorting to what I understood as

downplaying the centrality of his position as elder leader in the local fisherfolk
organization, Kalipunan ng mga Mangingisda sa Bulacan, parallels how these
particular mangroves in Taliptip are themselves indeed part of a larger ecosystem3
of relations not just benefitting Bgy Taliptip but extending to the other 15 coastal
barangays in Bulacan. The local organization in many ways is like the project, a
carbon sink and fishery breeding ground that exists within a larger universe of
dependencies. Current environmental education has already made it clear how this
relatively pocket mangrove bodes farther reaching implications for both nation and
the global climate, and human survival as a whole. With mangroves now also
serving as emerging eco-tourism attractions as well as shoreline buffer structures
during storms and enabling erosion control, their precarity becomes even more
pronounced in light of poverty figures and disaster projections in the near future.
Fairly belatedly taken up, reforestation on a national scale only earnestly begun in
2008, replanting efforts only indicating 40-50% survival rates. Despite the internal
tanglings, the LGU has stepped in and pursued in tandem with the mangrove
reforestation, other pertinent measures such as tree planting in upland areas to
prevent further soil erosion, as well as the dredging of rivers and tributaries. Apart
from tending to the regulation of fishponds which cause narrowing of water
channels, the concentration of fish feed and fish waste effluents, another parallel
concern is destruction wrought by industrial effluents in the local rivers as these
flow into Manila Bay, manifesting interdependencies even further.

As of 2010, the province had 585 hectares of mangroves made up of 9 different

major species and 13 minor species/associated plants. Also as of 2010,
approximately 43,000 individuals living on the coast were dependent directly and
indirectly on the mangrove system as they earned their living through fishing, fish
processing, fish vending, fish culture and/or as fish workers4 usually in fishpond
operations. The mangroves in this specific case are also sources of nipa hut
materials, fish, prawns, crabs, shellfish, clams, nipa vinegar, and syrup5.

Globally, scientists have noted how living organisms dependent on relatively

stabilized temperature conditions have been shifting to cooler sites, and this has
already led to unexpected changes in interdependencies of species, humans
included6. Already, poor farmers have been seen to shift to fishing, thus still
gravitating within the two most abject sectors of the labor force. The expected
movements of resource-needing populations will of course increase pressure on
such eco-systems which are not only food sources but are critical elements in the
atmospheric scenario upon which humans are not so flexible to in regard to
questions of health/sanitation, disease, poverty as related to climate change.

As of 2010, Bulacans population was growing at 26% with a harrowing increase in

poverty incidence (from 6.9 in 2009 to 7.3 in 2012). As we rode across the Taliptip
River, we saw for ourselves how the chloroform pockets (with houses dislodging
human waste directly on the river) that Mang Jimmy warned about were barely a
boat ride from where the sanctuary began. And so while the admirable community
effort behind the eco-park is promising, there will continue to be a need for decisive
action in simultaneous poverty alleviation and community mobilization. Anyone
would be hard put to deny the correlation between sustainable living and
sustainable resource management in this exemplar initiative where competition for
water rights through pens and poor access to health and education services will
continue to impinge on the future of mangroves and the people living off and around
them. Failing to tend to the ecosystem of needs will work against the communitys
vision for the mangroves and continue to consign the poor to marginalized lives,
leaving them to the farming and fishing traditionally taken on by the poorest in the
populations across the country.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258925724_Philippines%27_Mangrove_Ecosystem_Stat
us_Threats_and_Conservation accessed 6 Dec 2017
2 Baltao, Dino et al. "State of Mangroves in Bulacan in State of the Mangrove Summit: Northwestern

Luzon Proceedings (published by the Ateneo de Manila University Department of Environmental

Science, July 2015). Also found on p. 17 of
https://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/index.php/smnl/article/view/SM2014.00106/2203 accessed
5 Dec 2017.
3 Baltao, Dino et al. pp 16-18.
4 Ibid, p16.
5 Ibid.
6 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/life-on-earth-is-getting-a-major-redistribution-and-

the-consequences-are-serious