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
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Glenn Banks
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 …