(By: Sr. Rosemary Bacaltos, RGS - Baguio Community)
As in the past years, Mountain Maid
Training Center’s Integral Development Program includes presentation about
Earth Day to our MMTDFI staff and workers – student workers, out-of-school and
mother workers. This year about 300 of the MMTC workers attended a short
presentation on Earth Day, its beginnings as a movement in the U.S. to raise
public consciousness and concern for living organisms, organizations, the
environment and public health, deep concerns that Rachel Carson brought out in
her book, Silent Spring, way back in
1962.
With the alarming rise in air and
water pollution, oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage,
toxic dumps, pesticides, loss of wilderness and the extinction of wildlife,
U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, pushed for environmental protection into the
national political agenda, and founded Earth Day. In 1990, Earth Day went
global, and helped paved the way for the first UN Earth Summit held in Rio de
Janeiro in 1992.
In the presentation, several factors
were cited that contributed to the degradation and ravages inflicted on the
environment that have created climate change and global warming. One of this is
commercial meat – methane gas emitted by cows and other animals, consumption of
more energy (16 times more than its vegetable equivalent), water (11,000 – 19,000
liters of water for every .45 kg of beef, 75 kg. CO2 from one hamburger), corn
(25 tons of corn every hour, that could be fed to people), waste product (130
times the amount of waste that people produce – bubbling with chemicals and
disease organisms that are poisoning rivers, killing fish and getting into
human drinking water.
The presentation closed with this Food
for Thought (from John Robbins’ book, Diet for a New America)
“If we violate nature’s law by
eating food that is processed, cured, embalmed, chemicalized, radiated,
genetically modified an devitalized, the result is an imbalance – DIS-EASE.” The
other Food for Thought was shifting from animal-based, processed to plant-based
food.
Earth Day observance at MMTC is
connected to ongoing, sustained practices and activities such as tree-planting
on June 24 Arbor Day, organic gardening in the compound with the use of
vermicast from our vermiculture, the practice of 3 R’s – reduce, recycle,
re-use.
 |
 |
 |
Photos taken by Noime Kidange |