Environmentalism
for me could be the greatest expression of humanism. For we only not
care for humanity on the immediate present, but it also addresses its
concern for the welfare of humanity in the future too, which indirectly
concerns all of us living right now.

More
than concern for human welfare, environmentalism’s greatest concern is
for the abiotic (non-living components of the environment such as the
air, water, soil) and other species dependent on our ecosystem, which
translates compassion in a larger scale.

I
can argue more of the reasons why I’m saying that Environmentalism is
one of the greatest forms of humanism but let us put some action on this
as a dedicated group promoting humanism in our country.

November
has been assigned as the Environment Awareness Month by our government.
There will be other celebrations too concerning the environment that
will happen this month namely the National Clean Air Month and the
National Climate Change Consciousness Week that will be observed on
November 19-25.

HAPI
will be launching activities that will engage us more to our advocacy
in different ways. These activities include the following:

PET Bottle drive: A
campaign for everybody’s participation in collecting plastic bottles
and containers to be dropped off to assigned members’ houses starting
today until the end of the month, by which after all plastic bottles
collected from the participating members will be sold and go to HAPI
funds as donations under the names of the members who participated in
this. The more bottles collected, more incentives will be given to the
member (e.g free HAPI ID/ membership due for the year etc). Full
mechanics will be announced in a separate event.

Lectures and forums:  To
help increase environmental knowledge and awareness. This will either
be a day or a series of lecture that will cover wide perspectives and
issues. Ranging from analysis of why people behave the way they do
towards environment to the science and economics of Climate Change.

Carbon Foot Print Awareness: An on line campaign for the HAPI members who cannot join the 2 activities above.  We
will be launching CFP reduction commitment forms that will start off
from how one can compute for his/her daily carbon footprint ( or
activities/consumption that translates to carbon emission in the
environment) and help consciously reduce them. This is seemingly a small
way, but it can do help our atmosphere and our air quality now and in
the future.

As
the Director for Environmental Protection of this group, let me take
this opportunity to invite all HAPI members to participate in the said
activities for the environment.  The environment concerns us all.

WRITTEN BY: Jennifer C. Gutierrez, HAPI Executive Director