Green day to all!

We are not going to crack “green jokes”, guys. On the contrary, what we are going to discuss is a serious matter with key relevance in our times.

With green, we refer to the environment and the various problems related to it. This concern is universal as evident in the range of calamities e.g. flooding, forest fires, globing warming that have proven destructive in the different areas of the world. Everyone is affected by it and will forever live with it. That’s why finding the solution to the environmental problems should be a constant agenda of the world’s governments.

While the existence of the green political parties may be new to some of us, it is a fact that said parties exist in several parts of the world. For instance, we can see them in countries in Europe and the USA. But I am just wondering if it also exists in the Philippines. Or at least if there is a group that made an effort to create a similar movement to set an agenda to solve any, if not all, environmental problems that beset our country today. And had there been any, it is the goal of this article to validate the contention that said groups have not been effective because the paramount concern of protecting and sustaining the environment seems not to have been achieved. Further, we are all aware that illegal practices which are destructive to the environment such as, among others, quarrying and logging are still rampant in the country.

Before delving into the nitty gritty of said political parties, let us first have a grasp of what a green political party really is. The Encarta defines Green Parties as a political movement that emphasizes environmental concerns. Green has long been the symbolic color of the environmental movement. It was first used as the name of a political party by Die Grünen (the Greens), the German green party, in the early 1980s. While protecting the environment may be the central objective of green political activists, they believe this goal can only be achieved if society changes both its values and the way it conducts its business.

What better way to advance their advocacy than to bring it to the political arena? This approach paved the way for the establishment of the different green political parties in the world as recounted in a forum entitled, “The Origins of Green Parties in Global Perspective” of the Heinrich Boell Foundation and the German Historical Institute:

April 1972	-	Australia founded its Green political party, the United Tasmania Group;
May 1972	-	New Zealand founded a nationwide green political party, Values
1973	-	United Kingdom formed its own, People (later Ecology Party and finally Green Party)
1980	-	German established its party, the German Green Party
1984	-	the USA formed its green movement, Committee of Correspondence
6 December 2003	-	The Philippines founded the Partido Kalikasan (Philippine Green Party). Another party also exists, the Philippine Republican Green Party.

It may be noted that it took the Philippines three (3) decades since the creation of the first political green party to formally create its own. No wonder that in a study conducted by the Reader’s Digest Asia, the Philippines ranked 87^th out of 141 nations in the greenest, most livable countries based on social and environmental factors. Of course, we are not shocked by the ranking given the present situation in our country. This brings us back to the question we have posed earlier regarding the existence of green parties and its effect in the country’s environmental condition.

In June 1992, during the Earth Summit, participating governments of the world embraced Agenda 21 (21 refers to the 21^st century) that is, to bring the Earth into a sustainable future. In the Philippines, we adopted and enhanced the Philippine Agenda 21, envisioning a better quality of life for all through sustainable development, anchored on five goal elements: poverty reduction, social equity, empowerment and good governance, peace and solidarity, and ecological integrity. This led to the establishment of green parties in the country, Partido Kalikasan and Philippine Green Republican Party.

The Philippine Green Republican Party is headed by Felix Cantal who run and lost as an independent candidate in the 2007 senatorial elections. On the other hand, the Partido Kalikasan (Phil. Green Party) which was founded on 06 December 2003 and has members nationwide had one of its chapters, the Cagayan de Oro Chapter in Northern Mindanao, participated in the 2004 local election. In 2007 Partido Kalikasan groups in Victoria, Oriental Mindoro and Tanauan, Batangas formed tactical alliance with existing local chapters of registered national political parties who carried their green political agenda. The Partido Kalikasan and the Philippine Greens are both members of the Asia Pacific Greens Network which meet in February 2005 in Kyoto.

Officially, there is no green party registered with the Commission on Election today. In the first party list elections in 2002, Green Philippines headed by Sarge Colambo ran and lost. Following the rules on party list elections, by now the registration of Green Philippines as a party list organization has already expired for not having won for the past 2 consecutive party list elections.

Alongside said parties’ efforts in promoting the rehabilitation and sustainable development of the country’s environment thru taking part in the elections, the Philippine government had also its share in said advocacy. The Ramos administration created the Philippine Council for Sustainable Development (PCSD) to ensure that all government undertakings are consistent with the global Agenda 21 commitments the Philippine government made at the Earth Summit in Rio. The short-lived Estrada Administration re-affirmed PA21 as the country's framework for sustainable development and issued Memorandum Order 47, which directs all local government units to localize PA21 through sustainable integrated area development.

Notwithstanding the efforts of green political parties and the government, we are still plagued by environmental problems. According to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the Philippines is the fourth most accident prone country in the world. The two institutions arrived at this conclusion after finding out that some 5,809,986 Filipinos were killed or injured as a result of disasters or man-made calamities over a ten-year period (1992-2001). Who will forget the horrifying images of social tragedy in history when nearly 500 garbage scavengers who were living literally at the Payatas dumpsite in Quezon City were buried alive when a 50-foot garbage mountain collapsed on their makeshift houses at the height of torrential rains. It was a tragic commentary on poverty in the Philippines, yet the lesson remains to be learned to this day. In addition, quarrying operations resulted in extensive soil erosion on the side of a hill that cost the lives of innocent people such as residents of Cherry Hills Subdivision.

We have established earlier that green parties are there to protect the environment. We have also ascertained that such groups are present in the country. Further, we were made aware of the efforts of the government to push for the protection and sustainability of the environment. However, it is disheartening to learn that the Philippines is still confronted with various environmental problems. This condition supports our initial claim that the different green parties in the country were not effective in achieving its goal/purpose. It could be caused by the poor adherence to the policies during their implementation, the lack of responsible actions of the people. But it could also be said that their efforts may be lacking. Whatever the case may be, for the purposes of this article, we stand firm in our claim that these groups have not been effective and therefore failed to stand as a political party.