As GMA delivers the SONA, CAFA students listen to “state of environment address”

He started his slideshow playing an eco-themed prayer and national anthem in his own laptop. He had all the little props ready in his pockets and from the way he seemed to have memorized his lines, it is clear that his lecture at the University of San Carlos College of Architecture and Fine Arts Theater that day was not his first.

It is easy to say that multi-awarded environmental lawyer Antonio Oposa is our country’s version of Al Gore. He had, in fact, shown his slideshow to practically everyone, from a small gathering of fisherfolk in Bantayan to an international convention in Brazil. That afternoon of 28 July when the President gave her State of the Nation Address at the Batasan Pambansa, Oposa had his own audience of architecture and design students in the CAFA theater.

“While many of our brothers today listen to President GMA deliver his SONA, we prefer to listen to the state of the environment from Atty. Oposa,” said Arch’t Joseph Michael Espina in his opening remarks. Through the support of Espina’s group, the Rotary Club of Cebu, Fuente; the Sugbuana Jaycees; and the United Architects of the Philippines Lapulapu Chapter, Oposa came to USC to speak on “Sustainable Architecture and Green Governance.”

Though admitting before the students that he is more of an “MA” or “morag architect” (like an architect), Oposa presented pictures of environmentally sound structures that he himself designed and built. These include a bamboo house that recycles waste water, a biomass stove, a sailboat with glass bottom for viewing corrals, and a pedal-powered rail car called “Car-ousel.”

Paraphrasing Einstein, Oposa urged the future architects and designers not only to think out of the box but to shake that very same box from the outside. The students can use their expertise to develop solutions with a totally different frame of mind.

“Sometimes words have to be a little wild so that they can be an assault on the thought of the unthinking,” he said. To reverse the problem of what he calls “inertia of collective insanity,” brought about largely by our dependence on cars, he challenged students to consider walking or biking to campus.

“Our insistence at individual mobility has resulted in collective immobility,” he said referring the irony that while the rich take up most road space riding alone in big cars, the poor have to make do with claustrophobic conditions inside jeepneys. Traffic jams are caused by this increase in road density caused by private cars.

But most alarming was his presentation on the state of the nation’s environment. What we do today is really not so much for our own good as for that of our children, Oposa told the audience. “Environmental security is the highest form of national security,” he said to those who chose to ignore the other speech delivered that day.

Check out Oposa’s group’s website: http://www.thelawofnature.org/