Book Review--Barbara Goldoftas, The Green Tiger: The Costs of Ecological Decline in the Philippines

Being an environmental historian is depressing. I don't know what field would depress me more. Maybe if I were a historian of Central America or Cambodia. The stories are often the same. Until a relatively short time ago (sometimes decades, sometimes several centuries), people usually lived in a way that did not completely destroy the environment. Then they acquired the technologies and standard of living that required or led to mass denuding of forests, destruction of wildlife, horrible pollution, etc. Unfortunately, this story is a key element of human existence and its importance grows daily. It's hard to research and write this stuff, much in the same way as it is hard to hear about global warming all the time. Humans have completely screwed up the world and here is the research that shows everyone how it has happened and how our future is going to be tough at best and damn near hopeless at worst.

Barbara Goldoftas, The Green Tiger: The Costs of Ecological Decline in the Philippines is a book that tells this story in a particular place. It's a story that we more or less know before we read it. In 1900, most of the Philippines were covered in forest. For a variety of reasons, almost all of those forests are gone and the rest are in trouble. This leads to all sorts of environmental problems, from people moving to cities and overwhelming sanitation systems to siltation of rivers to deadly floods. There are people working on these problems but they face all sorts of obstacles, from US companies to government officials looking to get rich off natural resources to local people thinking there is nothing that can be done.

Nevertheless, these stories are worth telling and reading. Goldoftas does a particularly good job with her version of environmental catastrophe for several reasons. First, she is excellent at parcelling out blame. We know throughout that there are multiple reasons for these problems and that any solutions will be difficult and complex. She is too smart to assign any one group, company, or institution the lion's share of blame. She does a great job weaving in the history of whatever problem she is discussing at the time, from the legacy of US colonialism to the long-term problems of martial law under the Marcos' regime to Japanese and American consumers whose insatiable demand led to widespread deforestation after World War II.

She also shows the conflicts between local peoples, the goverment, and environmentalists. Local people have long used the forest and given the lack of economic options in the Philippines want to continue illegal logging, hunting, and fishing. These are tricky issues. Environmental protection rarely works when local people feel alientated by these new-fangled protections imposed from the outside. But what happens when what the local people want is continued unfettered use of the land? Goldoftas gives one strong example of how local people were convinced to protect a coral reef and that's promising, but she has many more examples of disgruntled locals, ineffective governmental measures for conservation, and a general sense of hopelessness about positive environmental change.

Goldoftas is actually much more hopeful than I am. She sees the kind of grassroots environmental organizing of the post-Marcos years as laying the groundwork for a more sustainable future. Maybe she's right. But from my perspective, I'm not sure how much of a future there will be to sustain.