Watching The Climate Crisis From Two Ends Of The World

Youth environmentalist and national coordinator of XR Philippines, Tara Santos, talks about climate activism in the Philippines

- Tara Santos

I grew up in the Philippines. There was nothing unusual about me spending a huge part of my childhood in nature, but it was unusual that what I was learning about at school didn’t add up with what I was seeing in my own surroundings.

At school, environment and climate change were mentioned but only as very abstract concepts. I didn’t see how it related to myself and to the world around me. I was taught I needed to reduce, reuse, and recycle; that animal populations were decreasing at a rapid pace; that greenhouse gases were being released into the atmosphere. But I wasn’t taught that recycling was, and still is, inaccessible to most Filipino communities, that indigenous communities are the ones who protect up to 80 percent of our remaining wildlife, and that greenhouse gases aren’t the only things being released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity.

Most education systems teach along the lines of humans being separate from nature when in fact this couldn’t be further from the truth.