Dying Ecology and Human Influences

                “What is happening on the highlands have corresponding effects on the lowlands, and activities on the mountains have great impact in the oceans”.

                Three-fourth of the earth surface is covered by water and only one-fourth is covered by land. But despite  of their huge area, the oceans and seas were not  spared by human selfishness and greed.

                Pollutants, in all forms, had consistently invaded the privacy of the ocean floors and the sanctity of the seabed.. Unseen ecological damage, more serious than ever, had marred the bright colored life below.

                From mining to industrial waste disposals, nature has become the reluctant recipient of human waste.

                For example, mining companies, in constant search for more deposits of precious mineral ores, would have to destroy the scenic beauty of the mountaintops. Bulldozers and gigantic power trucks ravage the serenity of the woods and silence of wilderness in jubilation. Huge rock formations are to be crushed into sedimentary particles and unimaginable waste products are uncaringly released to the rivers until they find their respective resting places in the seas and ocean floors.

                The altered river systems have become the monumental witnesses of this greed and selfishness of human beings, that by their present state, causing unprecedented floods in the lowlands during heavy downpour.

                Further, modern and traditional methods of fishing have to be blamed for the tremendous ecological destruction on a number of ways below. E.g. the daring use of prohibited dynamite fishing in the shorelines had caused massive destruction of the coral reefs.

                Coral reefs serve as natural habitat and protective mantle of ecological organisms under the water. They are rain-forest of the sea and the most amazing place on earth inhabited by creatures making fabulous underwater world of living colors. Nonetheless, it has been at risk of destructive human activities in various kinds.

                Sometimes, on 1988, I was then a member of an ecological organization aimed to preserve and protect the artificial reefs in the country. Though, it was a foreign funded organization, but its vision was very noble: the reinvention of natural ecological balance on the sea by way of creating artificial structures , made of  tire materials triangularly formed and were laid down to the seafloor to serve as habitation of fishes and other organisms below. But to our frustration, even the artificial ones, hundred times stronger than the natural, had not been spared until their complete destruction.

                Indeed, man is the ultimate master of his future.

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