Government and Industry Awareness of the Risks

The Philippine government and the mining industry are not oblivious to the risks presented by the intersection of mining and natural hazards and these risks are a concern to them. Mining investors are apprehensive that the government's “supportive policy could wane because of populist pressures in the event of a big mining disaster” (Landingin 2008, 9). Should a typhoon or earthquake collapse a tailings dam or if mine-pit dewatering aggravates an El Niño–induced drought, this could generate a backlash against mining that leads to an abrupt cessation of the government's support for mining. This would be an example of how “the enabling power of catastrophes” can “achieve and exceed the political significance of revolutions” (Beck 1992, 78). To both the government and the mining industry, these risks are relatively serious but are, however, quite capable of being overcome by the use of technocratic responses and the environmental effects of mining are more than capable of being managed.

Environmental Impact Assessment: A Tool of Environmental Management?

Introduction to environmental impact assessment

The first technocratic method of environmental management, which could be something capable of reducing the risks of a mining related disaster, is environmental impact assessment (EIA), “perhaps the most widely used tool of environmental management in the minerals sector” (Mining, Minerals, and Sustainable Development 2002, 248).

Mining: An Activity with Substantial Potential for Environmental Harm

The government of the Philippines is counting on the role mining can play as a source of economic development, but it must be acknowledged that mining is also an activity presenting a plethora of environmental, social and economic problems. As Pring et al. (1999, 45) acknowledged, “Few, if any, forms of economic development present the array of potential environmental, social and economic problems of the mining industry.” Discovering, extracting and processing minerals is widely regarded as one of the most environmentally and socially disruptive activities in the world and environmental impacts can occur during exploration, mine development, mine operation and long after a mine has closed down (Bebbington et al. 2008). Modern large-scale mining can alter landscapes, water systems, economies and communities, often permanently (D'Esposito 2005).

Mining's Visual Impacts

The most obvious (and arguably least serious) impact of mining is its visual, or aesthetic, impact. “To conservationists,” wrote Francaviglia (2004, 40), “mining landscapes seem a nightmarish expression of technology run amok.” “Visually, mining produces some of the most dramatic landscapes on earth” (Francaviglia 2004, 42). In developed countries it is common for mining projects to be objected to because they are seen as industrial blight upon the landscape; surface disturbance, dust and vegetation removal all contribute to a general unsightliness of the landscape (Ripley et al. 1978).

Phenomenon under Study: Mining amid Natural Hazards

The last three weeks of November 2004 and first week of December 2004 were a tumultuous time for the Republic of the Philippines. From 14 November until 4 December 2004 the Philippines was visited by four serious weather events: Typhoon Yoyong, Tropical Storm Unding, Tropical Depression Violeta and Tropical Depression Winnie (Yumul et al. 2011). These weather events, and the resulting flash floods and landslides, inflicted havoc on the Philippines killing 1,068 people, injuring 1,163 and causing another 553 to go missing; collectively, these storms caused roughly PHP 7 billion (USD 125 million) worth of damage to crops and infrastructure and also threatened to disrupt the water supply of Metro Manila. When the final damage total was completed the overall damage of these storms was estimated at PHP 11.3 billion (USD 201 million).

On 1 December 2004, while these storms were ravaging the Philippines, the Philippine Supreme Court issued a historic ruling and reversed a decision it had made on 27 January 2004. In its 27 January 2004 ruling, the Supreme Court had invalidated some crucial provisions of the Mining Act of 1995 which allowed foreign corporations to own 100 percent of a mine located in the Philippines. This decision had complicated the efforts of the Philippine government to use large-scale mining as a development strategy.

The Philippines: A Developing Country in Southeast Asia

An introduction to the archipelago

The Republic of the Philippines is an archipelago of approximately 7,100 islands in Southeast Asia (Figure 1.1) located on the western side of the Pacific Ocean between latitude 20 degrees north and latitude 6 degrees south. The archipelago lies east of Vietnam, south of Taiwan and northeast of Borneo and consists of four distinct regions: the northern island of Luzon, the southern island of Mindanao, the long finger-like western island of Palawan and the central Visayan Islands. It has a land area of 300,000 square kilometers with approximately 65 percent of this being taken up by Luzon and Mindanao while only 500 of the 7,100 islands exceed one square kilometer in area (IBON 2002c). Located on the “Pacific Ring of Fire” – a belt of volcanoes running along the Pacific coasts of the Americas and Asia – the islands of the Philippines are mountainous and are frequently described as a series of “half drowned mountains” (IBON 2002c, 8). The majority of the land area of the archipelago consists of land over 350 meters above sea level with fl at land remaining concentrated in river valleys or in small discontinuous strips of coastal plains backed by steep mountains (Newson 1999). Indeed, the topography of the Philippines could be described as an outcrop of mountains emerging from the sea with a small fertile coastal strip and a series of narrow interior valleys (Bankoff 2003a).

Technocratic Solutions as Modernity

The views expressed in the preceding chapter by the Philippine government and the mining industry that technology can prevent any and all disasters is “essentially a western materialistic interpretation of nature, where disaster is seen as a disruption to normal life” (Bankoff 2003a, 177). According to this perspective, disasters are the result of the arbitrary and capricious forces of nature and the logical response to such threats lies with the scientific prediction of their occurrence and the implementation of technocratic measures to reduce their risks. “Disaster prevention, therefore, is seen as largely a matter of improving scientific prediction, engineering preparedness and the administrative management of hazards” (Bankoff 2001, 24). Much like the complete confidence shown by the government in its adherence to neoliberal economic theory, this articulation of complete confidence in humanly engineered solutions to the problems posed by natural hazards exemplifies modernity (Holden and Norman 2009; Holden 2011).

An essential component of modernity is trust and confidence in experts; “modern life [is] dominated by knowledge and science” (Harvey 1990, 15). “The nature of modern institutions is deeply bound up with the mechanisms of trust in abstract systems, especially trust in expert systems” (Giddens 1990, 83). Under conditions of modernity, the world is bifurcated into two distinct groups: experts and nonexperts (Holden and Norman 2009; Holden 2011). The elite of the experts are scientists; they constitute an expert vanguard offering the stark alternatives of salvation through them or chaos.

The Ascendency of Neoliberalism

Modernity: Trust and confidence in experts

The word “modern,” in its Latin form modernus, was first used in the late fifth century in order to distinguish the (then) present, which had become officially Christian, from the Pagan past (Habermas 1981). Modernism is infused with a belief (inspired by science) in the infinite progress of knowledge and in the infinite advancement of humans towards social betterment. “Generally perceived as positivistic, technocentric and rationalistic, universal modernism,” wrote Harvey (1990, 9), “has been identified with the belief in linear progress, absolute truths, the rational planning of ideal social orders and the standardization of knowledge.” In large part, modernism is centered on “the rationality of human beings, the privileged status of science as the only valid form of knowledge, the technological mastery of nature [and] the inevitability of progress” (Warf 1993, 162). An essential component of modernity is trust and confidence in experts. As Escobar (1996, 55) wrote: “One of the defining features of modernity is the increasing appropriation of ‘traditional’ or pre-modern cultural contents by scientific knowledge and the subsequent subjection of vast areas of life to regulation by administrative apparatuses based on expert knowledge.”

Economics as a discourse of modernity

The trust and confidence in experts, which is a hallmark of modernity, applies very much to capitalism. The history of capitalism is intimately linked with the advancement of scientific discourses of modernity in the discipline of economics.

Word of California's exclusion of overseas Chinese found its way to China's ports through the circulation of cultural production at the end of the nineteenth century. Representations of US hostility and Chinese hardship played a crucial role in provoking a Chinese urban public already enraged by images of an unjust world under Euro-American imperialism, and by a Qing state powerless in the face of such perceived injustice. For many, the aggression of American capitalism was increasingly linked to the weakness of the Qing court. Burgeoning was a frustrated public pushing for hopes of a more equal global exchange. Thus while the Qing court and the US were negotiating a renewal of the Chinese Exclusion Treaty in 1905, American goods were boycotted on the streets of Shanghai by an agitated urban public demanding just treatment of their overseas expatriates turned compatriots. Though failing to make much of an impact on US policies, the boycott more or less succeeded in forming an alliance between a Chinese urban public and the Chinese diasporas, a cross-Pacific coalition tightened, if only temporarily, by desires for a fairer global imaginary.

While debates over Chinese exclusion in mainstream American discourse at the time often revolved around the problem of Chinese labour, what was at stake for the demonstrators in Shanghai, however, was the dignity of their national image and its place in peril within a modernising world built on unequal global exchange.

Conceived by Richard Bentley for the amusement of a comfortable and literate audience, Bentley's emphasized British literary reviews, French newspapers and almanacs, and German almanacs.

1. Boz [Charles Dickens]. “Editor's Address on the Completion of the First Volume.” 1 (1837): iii–iv.

Enthused that Bentley's Miscellany was “inundated with orders” and had invited “many of the very first authors of the day” to contribute.

2. [Maginn, William]. “Prologue.” 1 (1837): 2–6.

Proclaimed that the goal of Bentley's Miscellany was to be witty, not to challenge other monthlies or to study politics.

3. [Mackay, Charles]. “Periodical Literature of the North American Indians.” 1 (1837): 534–40.

Centered on Cherokee newspapers, especially the Indian Phoenix published by tribal editors. The Phoenix, published in English in Washington, allegedly circulated among “roving aborigines” and employed printers with the same skills as their peers at English local papers and better than the Germans or Portuguese.

4. Jones, John [Thomas Gaspey]. “Grub-Street News.” 2 (1837): 425–28.

Based on evidence in the State Paper Office, credited George Iland as the father of Grub-Street News, which “fabricated intelligence.”

5. [Beazley, Samuel]. “Lions of the Modern Babylon.” 7 (1840): 80–88.

Mentioned that “one of those extraordinary daily papers with which the modern press teems” highlighted London pleasures.

6. Taylor, Dr. W. C. “Moral Economy of Large Towns: Liverpool.” 8 (1840): 129–36.

Part of a series, this section recorded that workers found the pub “a comfortable place” to read newspapers on Sunday.

With bonds to Ainsworth's Magazine and Bentley's Miscellany, the New Monthly underscored the literary side of the press. Nonetheless, official restraint of its liberty, chiefly by taxation, did not escape observers.

1. C[ampbell], T[homas]. “Preface.” 1 (1821): iii–xii.

Editorial on the New Monthly 's first year acknowledged that “no important periodical publication can be supported by gratuitous contributions.” Readers were not interested in shortened articles, “the scrap-system of literature.” Publishing 1: 145 was a mistake because its exaggerations provoked American critiques of British press taxes. These columns, pirated by Albion's cheap newspapers, reinforced the discontent of the poor.

2. [Curran, W. H.]. “On the Complaints in America Against the British Press.” 1 (1821): 145–55.

Stereotyped Americans in response to an essay by A. H. Everett in the North American Review (#11, 1820) about the British press.

3. C., D. “The Proof-Sheet.” 1 (1821): 232–36.

Distinguished between the printer, “who consummates the author's conceptions,” and the critic, “the malicious and indelicate wretch, who delights to unstrip the dandy.” Aside that John Wilkes was important in the achievement of press liberty.

4. “Germany – Past and Present.” 1 (1821): 294–304.

Saluted the “bold political journalist,” the man suppressed in one German state who opened a journal in another.

5. [Matthews, Henry]. “Jonathan Kentucky's Journal.” 1 (1821): 430–35, 568–78, 693–700; 2 (1821): 104–12, 212–19, 522–32.

Contrasted British and American ideas of press freedom, notably ideas about political libel unknown in the United States.

In critical discourses on the post–Cold War world cinema, there would be no term that has become more influential than the term transnational. The phrase ‘from national to transnational’ is now considered one of the best phrases to epitomise the change in the landscape of world cinema over the past two decades. But at this moment when people began to doubt the celebratory attitude toward transnationalism in the wake of global recession, we might need to look at the phrase closely again to find if there is any missing link or any ‘vanishing mediator’ that we might have neglected between this transition from national to transnational. This paper proposes the buried term ‘postnational’ as this vanishing mediator in order to theorise how this term enables us to understand the way in which contemporary world cinemas can engage in our imagination of new communities characterised by alterity, openness, and incommensurability rather than by homogeneity, stability and exclusion. To illustrate the potential of cinema for opening up ways to imagine such postnational communities, this paper also closely examines one recent film Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, focusing on how the aesthetics of the spectral is crucial to such an imagination. It should be noted that the film appears characterised as transnational in terms of both its contexts of production, circulation and reception, and its textual elements.

The successor of the Prospective Review, the National presented solid evaluations of leading press publications.

1. [Greg, W. R.]. “On the Just and the Unjust in the Recent Popular Discontent.” 1 (1855): 1–30.

Outlined the “many high reform functions and many solemn obligations” of the “periodical press.” Among these were to expose national grievances and, after “conscientious sifting,” individual wrongs; protect the weak against oppression; reveal charlatans, “incapacity,” and “corruption” in government; “allay popular passions” but identify legitimate discontent; save victims; and unmask criminals.

2. [Bagehot, Walter]. “The First Edinburgh Reviewers.” 1 (1855): 253–84.

Classed review writing as “one of the features of modern literature,” demonstrating its “casual character…temporary and fragmentary.” Reviewers had to “instruct so many persons”; all, sure they were “competent to think,” had to learn “to think rightly.” Essays in the Tatler and Spectator were too short to accomplish this goal. The Edinburgh Review introduced longer articles with “suitable views for sensible persons,” chiefly in the columns of Sydney Smith and Francis Horner.

3. [Powell, Baden]. “The Life and Writings of Dr. Thomas Young.” 2 (1856): 69–97.

Cited the articles of Young, a physician and scholar, in the Quarterly Review and the Transactions of the Royal Society.

4. [Greg, W. R.]. “The Present State of France.” 2 (1856): 123–56.

Approved the ‘gagging’ of journalism by Napoleon III because “some of the most widely circulated daily journals” were anti-British or Russian pawns. A free French press would ignite a newspaper war because British gazettes would retaliate.

Balancing entertainment and enrichment, Saint Pauls, initially captained by Anthony Trollope, dissected journalism and depicted journalists.

1. [Trollope, Anthony]. “Introduction.” 1 (1867–68): 1–7.

Characterized a magazine's editor as a “man of letters,” its contributors as those seeking recognition, and its owners as those pursuing profit. Monthlies in 1867 offered “the reading public the greatest part of the literature which it demands.” The periodical press, originally a “humorous essay” alone on a “small sheet,” became a “dry, critical review, joined with the occasional news,” then “august quarterlies” that were often partisan, and finally the “mixed pages of the monthly,” with serialized novels requisite for magazines. Public demand for this light literature did not preclude essays by noted authors. Magazines should not leave politics to newspapers but should eschew literary criticism, all too frequently of books that were an “easy mark for ridicule or for friendly praise.”

Aside that the Tatler was primarily the work of Richard Steele and the Spectator, of Joseph Addison.

2. [Dicey, Edward]. “The Tourist at Home.” 1 (1867–68): 163–71.

Confessed that newspapers repeated some leaders.

3. F[itzgerald], P[ercy]. “The Decay of the Stage.” 1 (1867–68): 173–81.

Averred that press criticism “not altogether intellectual” was gospel to theatregoers.

4. [Dicey, Edward]. “The Trade of Journalism.” 1 (1867–68): 306–18.

Defi ned journalism as an “independent and honourable trade.”

Striving to beguile and benefit the affluent among the middling class, Temple Bar roamed the journalistic world. Information about local, imperial, French, and American newspapers filled many paragraphs.

1. [Jerrold, W. B.]. “The Father of the French Press.” 1 (1860–61): 38–44.

Denominated Théophraste Renaudot the father of French journalism. Before France had a press, newsmongers scribbled for their rich patrons and “hawkers of scandalous and seditious news sold their illegal bits of paper.” Renaudot, a physician, wanted to start “a political organ” with the truth. With the supposed blessing of Armand de Richelieu, the Gazette de France began in 1631. Denis Sallo's more literary Journal des Savants followed in 1665 and Jacques Loret's Mercure Gallant, “social” or “little journalism,” in 1672. Many periodicals emerged in the early 1700s, some “clandestine” that criticized the throne. In 1860 French evening gazettes were “gray little papers” with “scraps of news…lively criticisms on opera or drama…quotations of the Bourse…divers facts,” advertising, and serial romances but not politics because government considered the subject disruptive.

2. J[errold, W.] B. “Madame Doublet's News-Saloon.” 1 (1860–61): 473–82.

Envisioned the eighteenth-century salon of Madame Doublet as a place where “all the clever and daring thinkers and gossips of her day…met to supply the news that the government press dared not print.” News was put in two registers, “one for facts, one for mere rumours,” both more intriguing than the Gazette de France.