Let us Dare and Renew our
1990 CLEAR Commitment!.TWENTY-TWO YEARS after we dared declare our CLEAR Commitment as communicators to work together to help in trying to rescue our only environment, and consequently rescue ourselves as inhabitants of this planet, let us now honor the man who led us in making and fulfilling that historic pledge--
Mr. Vic "Kalikasan Vigilante" Milan, founder of both CLEAR and the almost 22-year-old
Kamayan para sa Kalikasan monthly environmental forum project. Tireless Vic has gone ahead of us to the "Great Beyond." He succumbed to a lingering heart ailment, and died in his sleep about three weeks ago. But Vic O. Milan continues to inspire us to be
active "vigilantes" for the environment.
........
MILANLet's dare promise ourselves to work harder amid this worsened world illness. And let us seek to draw in not only the professional communicators (some of whom still harbor illusions of "media neutrality" on environmental survival) but all the conscious stakeholders who have the capability to communicate clearly to other people and educate them to be conscious stakeholders and active clear communicators as well. It's what the world's environment urgently needs to continue sustaining our survival!
Let us now re-READ and REMEMBER well our...
COMMUNICATORS' COMMITMENT
TO HELP RESCUE THE ENVIRONMENT
(1990)
.......WE ARE SERIOUSLY CONCERNED, as organizations of communicators, and as individual journalists and artists, over the present conditions and accelerating further deterioration of the environment of our country and of our planet, and are aware that widespread ignorance and indifference are factors that abet this alarming situation.
.......WE SHARE with our fellow advocates of environmental protection in the Philippines the conviction that the only effective way to rescue the environment, beyond lip-service and token measures, requires the promotion of the following:
.......a. The unique cultural identity and ethnic heritage of the Filipinos and their spiritual and ecological solidarity with other peoples of the planet,
.......b. Social equity and justice in the sharing of benefits and custodianship of natural resources, such as land, water, forest, aquatic and mineral resources and through the democratization of access to technology and financial resources.
.......c. Ecologically sould economic activities whose primary beneficiaries are poor families and communities which comprise the majority of Filipinos.
.......d. Empowerment of people in communities through more concentration on food, health and ecological security, full implementation of the state policy giving its citizens free access to information and consideration of these means of empowerment as prerequisites for authentic participation in self-government and social transformation.
.......WE RECOGNIZE the stake and responsibility of communicators, both as citizens and purveyors of information and opinion, and we pledge to coordinate and optimize our efforts in helping rescue the environment through the education and mobilization of our people. We are aware that we have to organiza our efforts in order to effectively counteract well-funded public-relations and disinformation campaigns mounted by vested interests that have been instrumental in environmental destruction.
.......WE THEREFORE PLEDGE to mount a sustained and organized consciousness campaign among communicators and, more so, among the rest of the citizenry, to be active in helping rescue the environment, and we sign our names under this declaration of our collective and individual commitment, for the sake of our country’s survival.
This was adopted by the organizing committee of the Communicators’ League for Environmental Action and Restoration (CLEAR) on January 2, 1990 as the basis of unity of all member-organizations and individual members of CLEAR. The CLEAR organizers became the advocacy network’s first set of officers: Vic O. Milan (+), president; Violeta Len Jos (+), executive vice president; Ed Aurelio Reyes, secretary-general; Butch Nava (+), deputy secretary-general; Yasmin Arquiza, treasurer; and Romy Tangbawan, auditor. CLEAR member-organizations include the National Press Club (NPC); Philippine Movement for Press Freedom (PMPF); Philippine Environmental Journalists Inc. (PEJI); National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP); College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP); and the Philippine Union of Broadcasters (PUB). Source:Press Freedom: The People’s Right by Ed Aurelio Reyes (published 1992), pp. 176-77.
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