Philippine E-Journals

Diversity in Biodiversity: Fragments and Actors in Conservation as a Social Movement

Antonio J. Montalvan II

Discipline: Social Science, Ecology

 

Abstract:

The sights and the sounds have become all too familiar: environmental activists hoisting a banner on the side of a ship to expose it for its cargo of toxic chemicals; lumads lying-in on the Sayre Highway in Malaybalay to block the passage of logging trucks that have plundered their sources for traditional medicine; placards in Brazil bearing the face of the Amazon martyr Chico Mendes; cassette tapes of a local band playing music that memorializes the death of Fr. Nery Satur of Bukidnon. Environmental advocacy is a global commotion that has encompassed national boundaries, political persuasions, and ethnic cultural lines. It uses the most mottled set of media, from the glossy pages of the National Geographic, to cinema, to mimeographed leaflets, to simple posters written in pentel pens. It attracts the most diverse peoples, from the rich and the famous, to pop and rock stars, to politicians, to religious personalities, to indigenous peoples, political bystanders, revolutionary has-beens, and also-rans.