These days we often hear people say:
“The earth is one. Human beings are brothers and sisters.”
-Yoshikazu Fukaya

We often hear it but we are quick to brush it aside, aliens walk among us. Sometimes, it is also believed that they often visited us. Elizabeth Kolbert in an Article at The New Yorker asks, Have We Already Visited by Aliens? And she said these in the opening paragraph of her article; On October 19, 2017, a Canadian astronomer named Robert Weryk was reviewing images captured by a telescope known as Pan-STARRS1 when he noticed something strange. The telescope is situated atop Haleakalā, a ten-thousand-foot volcanic peak on the island of Maui, and it scans the sky each night, recording the results with the world’s highest-definition camera. It’s designed to hunt for “near-Earth objects,” which are mostly asteroids whose paths bring them into our planet’s astronomical neighborhood and which travel at an average velocity of some forty thousand miles an hour. The dot of light that caught Weryk’s attention was moving more than four times that speed, at almost two hundred thousand miles per hour.

Weryk alerted colleagues, who began tracking the dot from other observatories. The more they looked, the more puzzling its behavior seemed. The object was small, with an area roughly that of a city block. As it tumbled through space, its brightness varied so much—by a factor of ten—that it had to have a very odd shape. Either it was long and skinny, like a cosmic cigar, or flat and round, like a celestial pizza. Instead of swinging around the sun on an elliptical path, it was zipping away more or less in a straight line. The bright dot, astronomers concluded, was something never before seen. It was an “interstellar object”—a visitor from far beyond the solar system that was just passing through. In the dry nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union, it became known as 1I/2017 U1. More evocatively, it was dubbed ‘Oumuamua (pronounced “oh-mooah-mooah”), from the Hawaiian, meaning, roughly, “scout.”

These sighting the 1I/2017 U1 was recorded and documented, it was not a simple “seen” phenomena but subjected to the rigor of Scientific Methods from people who does not exaggerate tales.

As a boy, my Grandfather Gregorio used to point me to the night sky where we can see Stars which are MOVING, he calls them Satellites. As ayoung boy too, the SKYLAB was a fearsome reality, we were told at any moment that unfortunate satellite would befall our heads and our homes .

Looking back, the Moving Stars can be Interstellar Vehicles and we were just unaware that it was such.

Many of us would brush aside and negate what could be an inconvenient truth . We are just one of those Intergalactic Worlds that exists in the Universe. We just don’t know it, but we are simply a sort of clan, siblings and brothers of Earth. The sooner we realize this, the sooner that conflicts would dissipates and that peace among Brothers and Sisters of Earth can come.

Saving our habitat is not just a concern but a responsibility of all. It has been a subject not just of discussion but of policies formulated both in the international and national arena. With international and municipal laws enacted, people are expected to not just observe but to abide by such laws.

In the national front, the statutes enacted by congress are adapted through the passage of enabling laws enacted by the local legislative bodies, from the provincial, city, municipal and the barangay levels. With such legal framework, there is great hope and expectation that our mother earth will be amply protected, preserved and conserved for the present and future generations.

Unfortunately, we are not just hapless observers of the wanton disregard of our environment but are equally irresponsible and remiss of our obligation as stewards of mother earth. Verily, the laws and regulations to protect the environment are followed more on the breach than compliance. Well, that mayhap is the very reason laws are made for. It is very appalling that environmental laws are violated mostly by corporations that are the polluters of mother earth.

We are mere end-users of products that are in plastic containers instead of glass. Worse, the products are now in small sachets to cater to the poor consumers who cannot afford the high prices of such products such as soy sauce, processed vinegar, shampoo and other products that can be repacked. Old people could only remember the days when they can collect glass gallons from soy sauce and glass mugs from coffees.

What is appalling is that the poor end-users are the ones identifies as disposing plastics to the environment. The poor who live in the communities are obliged to do the garbage collection, segregation and disposal under pain of stiff fines and penalties. The task of community cleanup had been lodged upon government agencies that are mandated to protect the environment. These agencies that were compelled by a Supreme Court ruling to cleanup Manila Bay, had to set aside a chunk of its meager budget just to comply with the ruling now dubbed as the mandamus doctrine and the odd label of the mandamus agencies.

The efforts to cleanup Manila Bay became an undue burden on the national budget and the limited budget of the mandamus agencies. The polluter corporations would come out as heroes taking social responsibility by doing their share in cleaning the environment they polluted in the first place.

On the local level, the duty to protect the environment had been used palpably as a political show of the powers that be brandishing their might over political rivals allegedly polluting the localities, purposely missing to ban and nab the real polluters.
comments to alellema@yahoo.com