Inspeccion General de Montes -

was created pursuant to a Spanish Royal Decree. According to the Forest Management
Bureau website, this “was the first Forestry Service in the Philippines whose function was to
determine, through data collection, the extent of the country's forest resources and oversee their
proper utilization.”

the main objective of environmental governance then was “the protection of public health or
welfare and the concern on the environmental condition takes an incidental or secondary
importance…This integrative approach did not come until the early 1970s.

The Failures of Philippine Environmental Laws

Indigenous Peoples’ Rights

While the IPRA were hailed as a positive development in our IP laws, the mining sector was not as
receptive to the CADT and FPIC dimensions of the law and the new requirements that came with it
for mining permit applications. It was viewed as “an additional bureaucratic layer in the so many
permits that they already have to secure from the government agencies, such as the Mines and
Geosciences Bureau (“MGB”) and the Environmental and Management Bureau (“EMB”). The
Chamber of Mines branded IPRA as anti-development.”23

Today, however, many of its provisions remain unrealized. In particular, the exercise of the right to
Free, Prior and Informed Consent (“FPIC”) has been plagued with numerous difficulties and
anomalies.

Logging and Mining

However, the author would argue that, ultimately, the EOs have come too late in the day. In the
most practical terms, they respond to problems that have become extremely difficult to contain,
whose consequences have become so complex and deep-rooted that what we are now engaged in is
largely damage control. And even then, even over a significant amount of time, the harmful practices
and structures associated with the logging and mining industries persist. Illegal logging remains an
elusive – and often violent – threat,26 although efforts to combat it have been considerably ramped
up.27 The same is true for mining, where not only illegal activities are causing major problems,28
but also the unchecked environmental impacts of even legal activities.

We are, in fact, solving problems of decades past, when logging and mining concessions had been
wantonly issued and illegal activities had gone on unchecked, up to the point where their impacts
are now no longer reversible, and the “inertia” of which continues to result in massive and often
unpredictable damage to this day.

Air Pollution