Mauie Flores

Three days before Typhoon Ketsana (Ondoy) hit the country and devastated our beloved town of Cainta, my son spoke about protecting the environment in their school's Young Environmentalists program. I am glad that, for two successive years now, the school has been teaching environmental protection to the boys through this program. Let me share to you what he wrote and spoke about that day.

Protecting the Environment, Protecting Our Health
by: Ralph Alexander Flores, 3-Kindness

Protecting the environment does not only make our Earth healthy, it makes our bodies healthy as well.

As we know, everything we take in is provided by nature. We get our food from the various plants and animals that nature gives us. We get water from the reservoirs that are connected to the lakes and seas. We breathe precious oxygen from the air in our atmosphere. Everything we need, we get from the environment.

If our environment is unhealthy, everything we get from it becomes toxic and unhealthy, too. When farmers use pesticides and other harmful chemicals on plants, there may be a possibility that we will get sick from eating them. The abundance of processed foods has made our tummies weak.

When rivers and seas are polluted with garbage, the fishes tend to eat the garbage and we may end up eating them, too. Our drinking water also becomes polluted with all these garbage.

The air that we breathe becomes polluted with the smoke coming from factories and automobiles. This polluted air has made most of us asthmatic and less resistant to diseases.

Don't you notice how children living in city are more prone to sickness than children living in the provinces? Children living in healthier environments are luckier that they get to enjoy cleaner air and water and more organic food.

If you think that protecting the environment only means saving our Earth, think again. The truth is, by doing so, we are also saving ourselves.

Every word in this 1-minute speech is true, don't you think? It's unfortunate that, although young children are becoming aware of our current environmental situation, some adults don't give much thought about it.

And as if Mother Earth wanted so much to remind us how pressing the matter is, she sends in Typhoon Ketsana to the Philippines three days after and Typhoon Parma that almost didn't want to leave. Not to mention that a week before that, I received news from friends in Australia about a dust storm. (Hail rained down from the sky a week after, by the way.) Then, simultaneous to our typhoons, Indonesia was hit by a strong earthquake and Samoa with a tsunami. "Is the world coming to an end?" I was thinking about this while listening to my transistor radio and lying down on my bed in our candle-lit bedroom during the post typhoon blackout.

Do we really need to be reminded this way? Do you want to suffer as much as we did? While there's no more time to point fingers on who's to blame, I think there's still time to reverse climate change. It can be as simple as waste management and supporting eco-friendly materials to as bold as lobbying for strong climate change legislation. Bloggers like me, on the other hand, take action by participating in today's Blog Action Day.

Learn more about how you can get involved. Visit www.blogactionday.org today.