Ivan Emil A. Labayne examines the 2018 Loakan, Itogon landslide in the Philippines through the lens of John Bellamy Foster’s ecological Marx. 

There is a common tendency to name a singular event or instance as the originary cause of a series of events. There is danger in this approach, as beginning with an already-existing mess of things and trying to bring about order by locating their primary cause, the first nudge that caused the entire set of dominoes to fall over, obscures the more complex roots of the situation. A better approach is to start with a singular event and then to work backward; to trace the events that brought it into being. This latter approach of tracing backward is more productive, beginning with a singularity—a fallen dictatorship, a disastrous landslide, an uncovered crime—and proceeding to trace the multiple events that led to and shaped it. 

Taking off from the landslide that hit Brgy. Loakan in Itogon, Benguet—the site of a project I worked on under the TUKLAS¹ program—in 2018, this article will employ an approach closer to the second one. Specifically, it banks on a dialectical materialist framework to connect a singular landslide incident to long, uneven, and complex histories of colonization and a changing natural environment and modes of livelihood. These in turn will be linked to the broad issue of climate change—a facile term for a huge phenomenon that is manifested and confronted in various ways—and the attendant yet tenably more recent discourse on resilience. The paper wagers that the indigenous people of the Cordillera, and particularly of Loakan, Itogon have already been practicing resilience, long before this term became vogue in the humanitarian and climate change discourses. These practices can be surmised to be tied to their apprehension of their environment and the way they relate to it—mainly through sustaining their livelihood by way of agriculture. Changes in the way humans relate to their environment bring with them changes in the physical landscape and then the environment itself, both contributory to climate change. Using Karl Marx’s concept of the “metabolic relation” not just between man and nature but also between man and society, this article aims to historicize the way these relationships have been marked less by rapport than by a rift. 

The Loakan Incident: Victim-blaming and Invoking Resilience

Beginning with the 2018 landslide in Loakan, Itogon, brought about by Typhoon Ompong (international name Mangkhut), I find it necessary to invert the sequence of analysis; that is, begin with the idea of resilience before tackling the larger issue of climate change. The logic for this decision can be explained by the turn of events after the Loakan, Itogon landslide: the familiar theme of ‘resilience’ was invoked even as the President made careless remarks blaming a priest since some residents sought shelter inside a church.² In a characteristically irrational and baseless manner, Rodrigo Duterte said that the church’s structure would not have crumbled had the priest there been replaced. As dead bodies piled up, the bigger picture was ignored and focus was instead placed on passing the blame or hastening the immediate relief efforts. 

Located in Itogon, Benguet, Northern Philippines, Brgy. Loakan typifies a basic contradiction in Philippine society. It is rich in resources but these are not fully cultivated, and if so, it is a few–and worse, essentially outsiders–who are at the helm of development, following the logic of privatization. Hence, profit motives mostly trump community interests; the decision-making of businessmen from the outside preponderate over that of the community. Combined,  agricultural (758 hectares), aquaculture and fisheries (2.6 has.), forest and agro-reforestation (815.41 has.), forestland (356.2406 has.) and grassland/open lands (2,692 has.) types of land make up nearly 80% of the barangay’s total land area (5964 hectares) (Municipality of Itogon). Industrial land (176.7264 hectares) accounts for just barely 3% and yet the barangay’s primary economic activity is mining, dominated by the Benguet Corporation Inc. (BCI). Interestingly, mining is not included under the “Economic Development (Entrepreneurship, Business and Industry Promotion) ” part of the Brgy. Profile; instead, a few housing projects or inns and restaurants are mentioned (Municipality of Itogon). Widely operating in even small portions of Loakan, BCI hugely profits from the vast mineral sources, with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism reporting that BCI posted a P115.74 million net income last 2019 (2021). In return, BCI gives little to the barangay, especially in terms of long-term and sustainable economic development; worse, its large-scale mining contributes to the destruction of the natural landscape. Thus, the big, private mining company from outside pushes Loakan and its people not just to economic but also environmental insecurity. 

This is the overall situation that our team met as we chose to conduct our cultural workshops in Loakan: a barangay with a long history of mining and a recent memory of fatal landslides. We were gaining momentum in implementing our project–arts and cultural workshops as psycho-social intervention–when Ompong battered Northern Luzon in September 2018. When retrieval operations were halted two weeks after the typhoon, 94 people were confirmed dead in Itogon, 16 of which were from Barangay Loakan.³ In a statement, the Cordillera People’s Alliance briefly historicized the event and linked environmental disasters with “corporate plunder” in Itogon.⁴ The statement recalled incidents in 2009 and 2016 when Typhoons Pepeng and Lawin, respectively, damaged the area. In 2009, it was Sitio Luneta that was badly hit, and the Ambalanga and Liang rivers that “have been poisoned and became mere waste canals.” In 2016, the strong rains “caused a breach in the drain tunnel and a leak in BCI’s Liang Tailings Dam where 50,000 metric tons of leakage flowed and further contaminated the Agno River”.⁵ Eerily, one Tailings Dam was visible from the barangay hall of Loakan where we held many of our activities. During break time, workshop participants would point to the dirtied Dam and tell stories of how it used to look different.

In contrast to the typical invocation of the idea of resilience, often framed as if inherent among Filipinos, the CPA’s statement held “large-scale mining” accountable for the fatal landslides. Though it only scratches the surface, that attribution is nonetheless necessary, inviting a deeper probing of the relationship between climate change and historical and social changes, specifically in local communities such as Loakan.

Intertwined Histories: Colonization and Resistance

Lulu Jimenez’s “The Struggle of Mining Communities in Itogon” is a valuable resource for making sense not just of the 2018 Loakan landslides but also of the deeper histories of, and links between, mining and natural disasters in Benguet. The article is journalistic in approach and delivery, endowed with relatively accessible language and rich in data and references. It provides a quick rundown of events pertaining to mining activities and struggle for livelihood “since the beginning of recorded history”.⁶ Not surprisingly, the incident which the article first mentions was in 1623, and occured in the course of the Spanish colonization. More notable, however, is its focus on the communities’ concerted efforts to repulse outside forces who have repeatedly taken aim at their gold-rich lands. This tug of war between colonizers and indigenous peoples is reflected as well in Geography Professor Lou Ann Ocampo’s statement that “the gold-rich Itogon is host to the first modern mining in the country which started operations in 1903, but indigenous mining was being practiced even before the colonization period”.⁷ The year Ocampo marks as the start of mining’s modernization in the Philippines already falls under the American colonial period, marking the continuity, if not intensification, of outsiders’ forays into mining. 

Back to Jimenez, her article employs the familiar Foucauldian conception of power, stressing the way it is “exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations”.⁸ This opens up the possibility for the notion that ‘Where there is power, there is resistance,’ since it locates power in a field of relations, signaling its fluidity and negotiability. But this should not be read as dissolving the inequality, the disparities in power that are usually mobilized to foster exploitative relationships. The fact that the indigenous communities have consistently risen up against the colonizers should point less to an abrupt equality in power than to the steadiness of contestations. As Foucault articulated elsewhere, in a conversation with Gilles Deleuze, “No one, strictly speaking, has an official right to power, and yet it is always excited in a particular direction… it’s often difficult to say who holds power in a precise sense… but it’s easy to see who lacks power”.⁹ Precisely because of the location of power in a social field, it can be postulated as something up-for-grabs, so that even those who are exploited and lacking power—societies marginalized—can make a run for it.

Jimenez focuses on the conflicting interests between colonizers and indigenous people, if only to highlight the earlier successes of the latter in defending their lands and livelihood. Two incidents during the Spanish period—one in 1623 and the other in 1759—resulted in the natives triumphantly driving away the foreign intruders, mainly through armed struggle. More successfully, however, the Americans eventually managed to “open and operate a dozen large mines without much opposition from the indigenous communities, who were then preoccupied with the development of their agricultural resources and had no inkling of how large mining would impact on these”.¹⁰ But the struggle persisted, this time tarrying no longer on the entry of big mining companies but the extent of their operations. Jimenez reported that in 1921, the Gumatdang people “fought to prevent the Benguet Consolidated Mining Company (BCMC, now BC, Benguet Corporation) from installing a hydroelectric dam on the Muyot creek”.⁵ The starkness and consistency of these oppositions are articulations of an undeniable clash of interests. Roughly: large-scale extraction that benefits mostly foreign economies on the one hand, and on the other, more subsistent ways of relating to natural resources, supporting the livelihood of local communities. 

This paves the way for Marxism to weigh in on this history, centering on the “metabolic relation between man and nature” which Marx first propounded in Capital, and which John Bellamy Foster elaborated in Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. The under-appreciated, final chapter in vol. 1 of Capital, “The Modern Theory of Colonization” will serve as the basis for tying the metabolic rift to the colonial history of the region.

Colonialism, Capitalism and Climate Change

In the last section (“Large-scale Industry and Agriculture”) of Chapter 15 of Capital (“Machinery and Large-scale Industry”), Marx cited two results of the concentration of the population in urban centers: first, “it concentrates the historical motive power of society” and second, “it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing”.¹¹ Put simply, this metabolic relation is akin to the symbiotic relationships in nature, one of the several types of natural bonds mentioned in science elementary textbooks. In this formulation, humans not only make use and take advantage of natural resources; they also nourish this source, directly and indirectly creating the conditions for nature to be generative. 

In Chapter 14, “The Division of Labor and Manufacture,” Marx named the “separation of town from country” as “the foundation of every division of labor which has attained a certain degree of development, and has been brought about by the exchange of commodities”.¹² A feature of early capitalism, intense urbanization came after the development of modern means of production, shifting the emphasis from agricultural to industrial production. A crucial invention that facilitated the shift was Watt’s double-acting steam engine, which was less dependent on “local circumstances” and rural conditions (ex. the proximity of bodies of water).¹³ Thus, it had “universal technical application” and could be operated in urban places unlike water-wheels. The divide between town and country—from capitalism’s early stages up to now—is also symptomatic of the unsustainability of this system. John Bellamy Foster elaborates Marx’s idea of “metabolic rift,” where the soil is deprived of “systematic restoration” and robbed of its “constituent elements”.¹⁴ Under capitalism, “the soil is to be a marketable commodity” even to the point of depleting its natural capacities for nourishment or introducing harmful chemicals externally just to jack up its productivity. 

This artificial method of forcing productivity is emblematic of capital’s avarice for profit — whether in the form of immediate returns or sustained sources of revenue. Most of the time, however, sustained income for capitalists means not just immediate exploitation but also deprivation of resources for future generations. As Marx ends Chapter 15: “all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility…. Capitalist production… only develops the techniques and degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker”.¹⁵ With this deft stroke, Marx was able to paint a picture in which both workers, comprising the majority of the population, and the soil/earth, man’s “natural workshop”.¹⁶ are exploited by capital. 

Making the case for the existence of ecological awareness in Marx’s writings, Foster cites Marx’s idea of  a “chain of human generations.” For Foster, this idea rhymes with the “present-day notion of sustainable development, famously defined by the Brundtland Commission as ‘development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs”.¹⁷ Here, sustainability is at odds with the interests and directives of capitalism, notorious for its rampant abuse of available resources only for the sake of excessive and profit-driven production. Marx, Foster tells us, “was aware of the enormous waste generated [within industry], and stressed the need for the ‘reduction’ and re-use’ of waste”.¹⁸ No doubt, this reduction and reuse were envisioned to align with the objective of bringing back to the soil the nutrients it needs to continue being productive, a vital step toward sustainability.

Finally, how do all of these relate to colonization—Jimenez’ starting point in historicizing Loakan, Itogon’s getting mired in a series of disasters? In Chapter 31, Marx saw “the different moments of primitive accumulation” in the following: “the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection,” all relying “in part on brute force”.¹⁹ The violence inscribed in the colonization process, just like capitalist relations in general, is inflicted not just on the colonized but also on their land and territories. Jimenez’s documentation is rife with evidence for that claim, with the incursion of Benguet Corporation serving as the post-colonial version of the Spanish and American intruders. Yet that documentation is rife with hints of collective or community resistance as well. In these forms of resistance, the idea of resilience can be latched on, effectively expanding this concept, going beyond personality traits and inherent qualities.

Resilience in the Concrete: Reviving Indigenous Traditions, Rebuilding Livelihood

During our implementation of the cultural workshop project under TUKLAS, we devoted one day to an exchange with the elders of Loacan. On that day, not just the youth and children participants, but also us, outsiders to the community, managed to learn from the elders. Practicing a dialogic approach to the meeting, everyone was encouraged to share their insights and experiences or ask questions to enrich the discussion. 

That meeting only affirmed the need to support the increasingly popular call to revive Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices (IKSP). Historically marginalized and ignored due to their supposed opposition with Western modes of rationality and science, IKSP is being resurrected as a result of the long process of decolonization and increasing awareness of the faults of Western triumphalism. The elders mentioned their previous ways of determining forthcoming disturbances in weather, or in natural condition in general. There was the sudden proliferation of a bird called beshing, or a frog called piyat, small in size but loud in croaking. There was a similar impulse in another TUKLAS-supported project, this one implemented somewhere in Mindanao: something about collecting and trying ways by which an indigenous group there anticipate and respond to potential disasters. Here and there, these practices and belief systems are still persisting; apparently no longer tight and coherent, but perhaps just awaiting revival through education and practice. 

An indigenous lens is less likely to stoke the fire of ambivalence surrounding our attitude to nature. As Jonathan Murdoch puts it, “modernity is founded upon a moment of systematic misrecognition: we must speak as if nature and culture and distinct realms but act as if they were not”.²⁰ That is, on the one hand, we convince ourselves of the separation of the two, so we can delude ourselves regarding the status of nature as “pristine,” “pure” and “unadulterated.” Yet our practice easily belies this attempt at self-delusion, as we continue to parasitically and exorbitantly squander nature’s bounty. The perverse twist here, a dialectical one that refuses an either-or dilemma, is that nature and culture really are bound together. The problem lies in the kind of relationships that exist between them. Texts and living materials on IKSP reveal the possibility of alternatives: a more attached and conscious relationship with nature, with communal lives and livelihood seen as deeply integrated into it so that there is little want to ravage it. Here, the relationship between resistance and resilience should be clearer. Resilience can be reconceptualized to go beyond the currently dominant attitude that it is inherent among Filipinos; it is something that is worked on, put into practice with the recognition of what engendered the environmental destruction to begin with. In turn, resistance resides in and links with this recognition: tracing the problem to its colonial roots, while not failing to mention both the indigenous order the colonizers ruined and the indigenous efforts to protect their way of life. Current efforts like the revival of IKSP concretizes the grasping of this relationship: informed by local and indigenous worldviews, more sustainable practices and ways of relating to the environment have existed in the past and they can be reactivated now while also revealing the inappropriateness of outsiders’ impositions. 

In our feedback session with the youth participants, some of them lamented the loss of older practices like sharing among neighbors (one retorted something like Lahat na lang binibili/ “Everything has to be bought today”) and the rarity of holding cañao rituals. A more contentious topic revolved around the supposed conflict between mining and agriculture as sources of livelihood. While some wistfully express the wish to revert to farming, others are wary of the temporary suspension of pocket mining operation, associating it with their family’s source of income. Seemingly, there was an inability to disassociate the large-scale mining that gradually led to the landslides and the pocket mining that brought food to the table. It should not be an either-or problem when it comes to mining and farming. Both can be sustainable and harmful, depending on who is carrying them out, how they are done, and who benefits from their returns. 

Even in the form of vague articulations, our children and youth participants were at least able to imagine alternative scenarios: one where people cooperate and live together peacefully, neither just getting by in life nor accumulating great riches at the expense of the environment and everyone’s safety. The children then—not as the idealized projections as bearers of a hopeful future but as involved partners in a project—were able to hint at the possible shapes resilience can take. Meanwhile, countless reports and documentation, just like that of Jimenez, locate the possibility of resilience in collective action–resistant and proffering alternatives. Perhaps in coupling dedicated education of the future generations with sustained organization of communities, resilience can be formed more concretely. In that way, there can be more sustainable relations not just with the earth but with one another—tenably a precondition to better face natural disasters, focused no longer on recovering afterward but creating healthful conditions to prevent them beforehand.

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1. In full: TUKLAS Innovation Labs, a project funded by a consortium of four non-government organizations to encourage community-led innovations on disaster risk reduction and management.
2. Bajo, A. F. (2018, Sept. 16). “Duterte blames priest for Benguet church building collapse.” GMA News Online. Retrieved from https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/news/nation/667974/duterte-blames-priest-for-benguet-church-building-collapse/story/
3. Cimatu, F. (2018, Sept. 30). “Retrieval operations end at Itogon landslide site.” Rappler.  Retrieved from https://www.rappler.com/nation/213209-retrieval-operations-end-itogon-benguet-landslide-september-2018
4. Cordillera People’s Alliance. (2018). “Hold Benguet Corp accountable for the lost lives and livelihood! Stop man-made disasters caused by large-scale mining!” Retrieved from https://cpaphils.org/hold-benguet-corp-accountable-for-the-lost-lives-and-livelihood-stop-man-made-disasters-caused-by-large-scale-mining.html
5. Ibid.
6. Jiminez, L. (2018, Oct. 28) “The struggles of mining communities in Itogon.” Northern Dispatch. Retrieved from: https://nordis.net/2018/10/28/topic/mining/the-struggles-of-mining-communities-in-itogon/
7. Ocampo, Lou Angeli. Indigenous knowledge and risk perception of socio-natural hazards among small-scale gold miners in Itogon, Philippines. 2019. Liege Universite, PhD dissertation. Pg. 4.
8. Gilbert, J. (2008). Anticapitalism and culture: radical theory and popular politics. Oxford: Berg. Pg. 136.
9. Kay, J. (2006).  Intellectuals and power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. libcom.org. Retrieved from https://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze
10. Jimenez, 2018.
11. Marx, K., Engels, F., Mandel, E. & Fowkes, B. (1978). Capital: a critique of political economy. (Vol. 1). London Penguin in association with New Left Review. pg. 637.
12. Ibid., pg. 472
13. Ibid., 499.
14. Foster, J. B. (2000). Marx’s ecology: materialism and nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
15. Marx, pg. 636.
16. Foster, pg. 170.
17. Ibid., pg. 164
18. Ibid., pg. 169.
19. Marx, pg. 915.
20. Murdoch, J. (2006). Post-structuralist geography: a guide to relational space. London: SAGE Publications. Pg. 108.