The Earth Does Not Owe Us Safety

I remember the news trickling in, the way the earth gave way in Benguet and Cebu — houses swallowed, lives buried beneath rubble that was once the land we called home. It’s easy to point fingers at mining companies, at open-pit scars carved like wounds across the mountainside. But what about us? What part do we play in this quiet violence?

Mining is a cruel pact. We dig not just for gold or minerals, but for the promise of progress. We tell ourselves the earth will forgive us, that the price we pay is worth the convenience and wealth it offers. But the land does not forgive — it remembers. The landslide is not just soil collapsing; it’s the earth’s way of whispering a bitter truth: we are strangers here, not masters.

The calls to ban mining are calls to respect a fragile balance we have long ignored. Yet, the complexity of survival in a place like the Philippines makes this no simple moral judgment. The people who rely on mining for livelihood are caught in the same web of contradiction: survival tethered to destruction.

Is it arrogance to think the earth is ours to carve, or desperation dressed as necessity? The truth may lie somewhere in the tangled roots of this paradox. We want to belong to this land, yet we tear it apart to belong anywhere else. The violence we inflict on the earth is a mirror reflecting the violence we carry inside — the impatience, the greed, the hope for more.

The land teaches a quiet lesson: safety is not a right, but a fragile grace. Every mountain we scar, every forest we clear, we trade a piece of that grace. The real rebellion, then, is not just in banning mining but in learning to listen — to the earth, to the people, to the stories woven in mud and stone.

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