EDITORIAL - Clean air

On paper at least, some of the more significant elements that make for a successful campaign are present in a youth-led campaign for Clean Air in Cebu City. There is funding in the amount of $73 million from the US government. And there is the idealism of youth.

Obviously, however, there is so much more to the issue about clean air than just money and idealism. The immensity of the problem, we believe, will outlast the kind of money that has been given. And the youth will grow into tired old men long before they lick the problem.

While we laud the effort, we cannot help but point out an infirmity that afflicts it fatally from the start -- there is no such thing as a Cebu City air, whether or not we are talking of clean air or polluted air.

Like all the seas and oceans being connected to one another, so is all the air. There is only one air that envelops the entire world. If we have to have clean air in Cebu City, we have to have clean air in Mandaue City and Talisay City, our two next-door neighbors.

And if we have to have clean air in Mandaue City and Talisay City, we have to have clean air in Minglanilla and Consolacion, their own next door neighbors. Repeat this process until we circle the globe. Then and only then can we have truly clean air, here and everywhere.

But to a large extent, and despite its cosmopolitan pretentions, Philippine society has never attained that degree of civilized behavior that could make us at par with other nations on earth. Poverty is just a lame excuse for what we are. In truth, the culprit is attitude.

We have this attitude that makes us do things because everyone else is doing it, or because nobody is looking and we think we can get away with it. Either way, this attitude takes its toll on the environment and takes time to overhaul, time that may just run out on us.

Of course it would be tempting to patronize our own selves by beating our breasts and proclaiming loudly that at least we tried. Okay, its always good to at least try. But what we can do by trying will always pale in significance to what others can do by actual doing.

Yet here is the United States, whose $73 million we cannot reconcile with the reality of its being one of the major stumbling blocks to attaining global clean air. Up until today, the US still has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol, remember?