Editor’s Note

Can mining be skipped?

No, if you ask the proponents. Yes, if you ask their opponents.

But there’s a range of mining advocates and mining opponents, and their sorts of advocacy or opposition come in different shades, from bold to gray. So you then ask, which sort and for what reason?

Let’s start with absolutes. Mining is unknown in primitive societies just as it is unavoidable in modern societies. Nearly everything that makes modern life possible and enjoyable—from highways to mobiles phones—-have direct or indirect connection to what we dig up from under the earth’s surface.

To say so doesn’t help us advance much in the debate.

Somebody else has to do the mining any which way it’s done. If not us Filipinos, it will be another, maybe Chinese. Those who don’t mine their own backyard will be piggybacking on somebody else’s: one is surely appropriating the carrying capacity of another. And we all suffer the effects, eg environmental depletion and pollution, to a lesser or greater extent.

Which brings us down to the more relevant questions of context.

Can the Philippines skip mining and still realize sustainable development? Or to be more specific, can and should we skip large-scale mining as advocated by government? Can we support that kind of mining if it can really be made responsible and if it were proposed not by a neoliberal government like what we now have but by a new and more accountable regime?

These are the kind of questions we want to pose and hope to answer. The study we are presenting here is being offered as one input to the ongoing national debate. We hope it can contribute to our collective enlightenment.