Communicator's Commitment to Help Rescue Environment

COMMUNICATORS’ COMMITMENT TO HELP RESCUE THE ENVIRONMENT (1990)

WE ARE SERIOUSLY CONCERNED, as organizations of communicators, and as individual journalists and artists, over the present conditions and accelerating further deterioration of the environment of our country and of our planet, and are aware that widespread ignorance and indifference are factors that abet this alarming situation.

WE SHARE with our fellow advocates of environmental protection in the Philippines the conviction that the only effective way to rescue the environment, beyond lip-service and token measures, requires the promotion of the following:

a. The unique cultural identity and ethnic heritage of the Filipinos and their spiritual and ecological solidarity with other peoples of the planet.

b. Social equity and justice in the sharing of benefits and custodianship of natural resources, such as land, water, forest, aquatic and mineral resources and through the democratization of access to technology and financial resources.

c. Ecologically sound economic activities whose primary beneficiaries are poor families and communities which comprise the majority of Filipinos.

d. Empowerment of people in communities through more concentration on food, health and ecological security, full implementation of the state policy giving the citizens free access to information and consideration of these means of empowerment as prerequisites for authentic participation in self-government and social transformation.

WE RECOGNIZE the stake and responsibility of communicators both as citizens and as purveyors of information and opinion, and we pledge to coordinate and optimize our efforts in helping rescue the environment through the education and mobilization of our people. We are aware that we have to organize our efforts in order to effectively counteract well-funded public-relations and disinformation campaigns mounted by vested interests that have been instrumental in environmental destruction.

WE THEREFORE PLEDGE to mount a sustained and organized consciousness campaign among communicators and, moreso, among the rest of the citizenry, to be active in helping rescue the environment, and we sign our names under this declaration of our collective and individual commitment, for the sake of our country’s survival.

This was adopted by the organizing committee of the Communicator’s League for Environmental Action and Restoration (CLEAR) on January 2, 1990 as the basis of unity of all member-organizations and individual members of CLEAR. The CLEAR organizers became the advocacy network’s first set of officers: Vic Milan, president; Violeta Len Jos, executive vice-president; Ed Aurelio Reyes, secretary general; Butch Nava, deputy secretary general; Yasmin Arquiza, treasurer; and Romy Tangbawan, auditor. CLEAR member organizations include the National Press Club (NPC), Philippine Environmental Journalists Inc. (PEJI), National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP), College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP), and the Philippine Union of Broadcasters (PUB). CLEAR has a mutual membership relation with the Philippine Movement for Press Freedom (PMPF).

Source: The book “Press Freedom: The People’s Right” by Ed Aurelio C. Reyes, pp. 176-177.

Retyped for information campaign by: Gregorio V. Bituin Jr.