Mining and natural hazard vulnerability in the Philippines: digging to development or digging to disaster?

Mining and natural hazard vulnerability in the Philippines: digging to development or digging to disaster?
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DOI:
10.1080/00049182.2015.1108242
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发表时间:
2016-01
影响因子:
2.4
通讯作者:
Glenn Banks
Glenn Banks
中科院分区:
法学3区
文献类型:
--
作者:
Glenn Banks

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这本不同寻常的书探讨了菲律宾政治生态中两个热门问题之间的联系:大规模的矿物开采和易受自然灾害的影响。两位作者着手探讨“在一个饱受自然灾害困扰的国家推行以采矿为基础的发展模式所固有的困难”(1),特别是“灾害是否干扰采矿、恶化穷人的条件并制造灾难”(2)。这是一个有趣的论点,由两位作者撰写,他们对菲律宾采矿业进行了十年的研究,但通过试图将这两个重要领域联系在一起,由此产生的大部分论点似乎都站不住脚,而且这两个领域之间的实际联系几乎与每个问题的发展和轨迹无关。试图围绕政治经济学/生态核心将这些问题编织在一起,形成了一个结构,其中提供了关于菲律宾采矿、菲律宾新自由主义和采矿的政治经济学、采矿的环境影响以及菲律宾危险的性质(包括台风、地震、海啸、火山和厄尔尼诺事件)的介绍性章节。后一章列出了在全国范围内暴露于每种危害的严重程度,并覆盖了采矿项目的地点(实际的和拟议的),以突出它们之间的重叠。这项工作绘制了一些有用的地图,但就建立采矿和灾害之间联系的论点而言,它不太成功,因为57个采矿项目和勘探目标分布在一系列地点,每个危险的省级风险水平各不相同,而且这种方法假设菲律宾80个省的每个省都有高度的内部同质性。这意味着,采矿的局部影响和灾害风险以及土著和贫困的集中(同样,都是在省级一级展示的)之间的联系,如果有什么不同的话,是被演示格式所掩盖的。本书的下一部分有几章,考察了应对与采矿相关的风险的技术官僚形式(如环境影响评估、技术和治理),以及这些方法在菲律宾采矿背景下的弱点。民间社会对这些风险的高调反应(抗议和地方和省级暂停采矿),以及采矿业的普遍存在,(根据提交人的说法)在菲律宾国内提供了一种拒绝现代性的形式。最后两章汇集了前几章的讨论,并得出结论认为,采矿确实是一种有缺陷的发展模式(原因包括其对环境的影响及其与自然灾害的相互作用、对邻近社区的贫穷影响以及在几代人之内和世代之间不公平地分享惠益),然后提出两项倡议,作为“采矿驱动的发展模式”的替代办法的基础:土地改革和可持续利用自然资源以满足当地需求,这两个问题在菲律宾由来已久,民粹主义得到大力支持。然而,尽管有这些花言巧语,但这两项措施在实践中都不容易实施,而且以前的历史表明,不能保证它们能更好地“为缓解如此多菲律宾人所面临的贫困提供实质性的空间”(227)。人们对这场讨论很感兴趣(尤其是围绕叛乱和采矿),但也存在重大差距,这让这一论点的大部分基础变得不清楚。…
This unusual volume explores the links between two topical issues in the political ecology of the Philippines: large-scale mineral extraction and vulnerability to natural hazards. The authors set out to explore ‘the difficulties inherent in attempting to pursue a mining-based development paradigm in a country beset by natural hazards’(1), and specifically whether ‘hazards interfere with mining, worsen the conditions of the poor and create disasters’(2). This is an interesting argument, written by two authors with a decade of research into the mining sector in the Philippines, but by trying to tie these two substantial areas together much of the resulting argument appears thin, and the actual links between the two areas are almost tangential to the developments and trajectories of each of the issues independently. The attempt to weave these issues together around a political economy/ecology core produces a structure that provides introductory chapters on mining in the Philippines, the political economy of neoliberalism and mining in the Philippines, the environmental effects of mining, and the nature of hazards in the Philippines (taking in typhoons, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and El Niño events). The latter chapter maps out the severity of exposure to each of these hazards across the country, and overlays the location of mining projects (actual and proposed) to highlight the overlaps between them. This exercise produces some useful maps, but in terms of building an argument regarding the links between mining and hazards it is less successful, as the 57 mining projects and exploration targets are spread across a range of locations with variable levels of generalised provincial-level ‘risk’from each of the hazards, and is an approach that assumes a high degree of internal homogeneity within each of the 80 provinces in the Philippines. This means that the links between the localised effects of mining and the risk of hazards, along with the concentration of indigeneity and poverty (again, all displayed at provincial levels) are, if anything, obscured by the presentation format.The next section of the book has chapters which examine the technocratic forms of response to risk associated with mining (such as Environmental Impact Assessment, technologies and governance) and the weaknesses of these approaches in the context of mining in the Philippines. The high-profile responses of civil society to these risks (protests and local and provincial moratoriums on mining), and to the presence of the mining industry generally, provide (according to the authors) a form of rejection of modernity within the Philippines. The final two chapters bring together the discussion in the preceding chapters and provide a verdict that mining is indeed a flawed development paradigm (for reasons that include its environmental effects and their interaction with natural hazards, the impoverishing effects on neighbouring communities, and the inequitable sharing of benefits within and across generations) and then provide two initiatives as the basis for an alternative to a ‘mining-driven development paradigm’: land reform and sustainable use of natural resources to meet local needs, both issues with long-standing antecedents and strong populist support in the Philippines. Despite the rhetoric, though, neither would be easy to implement in practice, and previous history shows that there is no guarantee that they could any better deliver a ‘substantial scope for ameliorating the poverty encountered by so many Filipinos’(227). There is much of interest in the discussion (especially around insurgency and mining) but there are also significant gaps that leave much of the basis for the argument unclear …