Commons

It is nearly certain Boracay Island will be shut down probably for six months, maybe for a year. Three government departments have suggested it. President Rodrigo Duterte has pronounced it. It may be a painful thing to do, but a necessary one too.

Enforcing regulations and dismantling the hundreds of structures that violated those regulations can probably be done without closing down the island. This is what business operators on the island want.

We know where they are coming from. They are fighting to keep tourist revenues flowing even as they cooperate in repairing their sins.

But what about letting the island heal? This is a paradise exploited to the hilt. The beaches are dirty; the sea is toxic. Wetlands and forests have been stolen. The place is crammed with hotels and restaurants way beyond its carrying capacity. The island is on the brink of death.

Cultural revolution

Closing down Boracay should be the start of a cultural revolution. It should signal not only that nature must be respected; the commons must be held sacred.

Filipinos have a weak sense of the commons. This is why our homes are so clean and our streets so filthy.

We do not respect the public space. We dump trash onto the rivers. We dispose of our garbage by throwing them out to the streets. When there is open land, squatters promptly occupy it. Where there is public space, it is soon stolen.

Boracay is the icon of a weak state and a failed civic culture.

When it became the tourist draw that it is, the local authorities promptly failed exercising control over their jurisdiction. Illegal structures sprouted. The beach was colonized. No one wanted to pay to be connected to the sewage system. They flushed their dirty water out to the sea.

All regulation evaporated as tourism money flowed. Commercial establishments crowded each other out. During high season, the island is as congested as Divisoria. There is no sense of planning here, no evidence of a governing aesthetic in the chaos of structures crowding the island.

The beach is beautiful but the island is forlorn. It has become a tourist trap. Its sole purpose for being is to separate the tourist from his money. Any sucker who goes to Boracay today volunteers to be shaken down.

This congested island imports its water and then flushes waste water to the sea. Little wonder the place has developed a distinct stink. It is only a matter of time that an outbreak of some disease happens here. This is such an unhealthy place.

As the public sector failed to defend the commons, private enterprise just ran away with the island. Boracay is really the icon of everywhere in this country where the commons was stripped, the community simply burst unplanned and the environment brutalized with impunity.

Being iconic, this is the place where the line should be drawn. It should be drawn with emphasis. Yes, it should be drawn with impunity.

This is what all our other tourist towns should avoid becoming. Boracay is the place where the standards will be set – and enforced unremittingly. No prisoners must be taken here.

Let the other tourist towns, with all their corrupt officials, sit up and pay heed. What is done in Boracay will send the message: You can be closed down too.

If that message is sent, with the convincing underscoring, we might see regulations finally enforced everywhere. Talk tough; do tough.

Duterte is just the man to do this. When he began his much maligned war on drugs, he told the police to give the enemy no quarter and the syndicates no rest. He wanted to get this done quickly and with full force until the human rights activists began mourning criminals losing access to due process.

When a Filipina was found in a freezer in Kuwait, he imposed a ban on deployment of workers to that country. He has refused to lift that ban until Kuwait guarantees humane treatment for our workers.

When yet another bus crashed last week, he ordered the transport company’s franchise cancelled and asked the police to arrest the owner. Despite the high season for travellers, he ordered all the 181 buses of Dimple Star grounded.

Now lets see how the usual obstructionists might try to stop him from protecting the environmental integrity of our tourist towns.

Public space

When Bayani Fernando was MMDA chairman, he tried to preach the gospel of protecting the public space from private encroachment. Like Jesus at the Temple, like a zealot unleashed, he chased away vendors from the sidewalks and sent in the wrecking crews to tear up all hindrances to pedestrian movement on the sidewalk.

For Fernando, the sidewalk epitomized the frontier where the state must draw the line for the greater good. He literally drew that line along the sidewalks, indicating the spaces that cannot be encroached upon. The maintenance of order in the public space emanated from beyond that line. The credibility of the state, the guardian of the commons, rests on that line being respected.

I live in a public housing estate that is a microcosm of the larger society. In this small community, unit owners fence in public space, dump trash on the corridors and abandon decrepit vehicles in the already crowded parking areas. A third of the residents do not pay condominium fees necessary for security and ground maintenance.

A new elected board of directors is trying to do a Duterte to reverse the decline of our community.