Wednesday, May 14, 2008 Yap: School of the SEAs By Januar E. Yap Meanwhile
“YOU are here not as a journalist,”he says, “but as an individual sharing the same dream.”
If you’re one hardened by the ebbs and flows of presswork, you’ll be taken aback and think the guy’s popped out from a Neil Gaiman book.
We were a few nautical miles off the Santa Fe, Bantayan mainland, and it was drizzling. The man who speaks dons a scuba gear, his mask and snorkel just ready to be slid into action. “If we can just hit the tipping point,” he says. For one moment, you feel helpless conjuring up a James Bond escape sequence.
But the key is for you not to miss a single word he says. Otherwise, it’ll be easy to dismiss it for incoherence. Except that the guy carries a credential heftier than a scuba tank. You will know that he once delivered a commencement speech at Harvard Law School, and you will begin rethinking about being stolen by the bluish sight of the islands far off. Here is a man who means business. And his business is, saving Mother Earth.
“This is not about personalities. Don’t write about me,” he says. But we can’t help it. It was Emerson who said, “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”
And that length goes as far as the creation of a school meant to convert clueless individuals into dream armies, which means: go to the world and multiply and, once multiplied, save the world in return. The whole stretch goes as far, too, as initiating reforms in environmental laws, to unprecedented installation of marine sanctuaries, to law enforcement, to advocacies.
The School of the SEAs, found along the Sta. Fe, Bantayan Island coastline has been miracle millhouse churning out idealists internalizing some of the practical workaday aspects, that is to say modest and within personal means, of being environment-friendly.
Helping him out is a core of dedicated individuals: biologists, lawyers, fisherfolk communities, academics, a handful of well-meaning government officials, journalists, students, etc.
On that day of our visit, the school was graced by Puerto Princesa, Palawan Mayor Edward Hagedorn. He is perhaps the only government official in the country who carried a campaign platform with the environment written all over it. If you go to his city today and witness how criminal it feels to throw a candy wrapper on the street, it is because of Hagedorn, recipient of many international awards just for keeping his side of the Earth spic and span.
We were huddled around a stove hooked to an underground source. Hagedorn was supposed to light for the first time the school’s biogas facility.
He thrusts a flame into the stove, and voila, fire. “Ito na ang proof sa sinasabing ‘shit happens!’” he says. It was fire that gives you the kind of catharsis you felt when you released its energy source at the toilet. It was blue flame, and shit, indeed, happens. And if you give it some serious thought, you’ll give the liquefied petroleum business a run for its money just for clever use of your day’s hard issue.
I’ve done my share in sending out the word four times in this corner of the paper, and still, I haven’t said enough.
There are not a few reasons why the man I talked about earlier said it’s not about personalities. If you put the man to the fore, make him famous, the tendency is that everybody feels the urgency to destroy you, he says. “Tiraduron ka man gyud,” he says. Years ago, he stirred not a few LGU’s into implementing environmental laws.
By the way, there’s a roster of change workers the school takes pride of and whose photographs are properly mounted on the wall of its main edifice. One of them is that of the late Jojo de la Victoria, the slain officer of the Cebu City’s Bantay Dagat.
By the way, the man I talked about is Atty. Antonio Oposa.
