Bridging culture and sustainable development

The latest round in the continuing saga behind the plan to build a monstrous 20-storey building just a few meters behind the venerable old heritage asset, thevebu Capitol Building, happened just as I was delivering a speech on culture and sustainable development last week.

The occasion was the 10th Taiwan-Philippines-Japan Academic Conference which was hosted by the School of Business and Economics of the University of San Carlos, under the leadership of its new dean, Dr. Melanie B. de Ocampo and conference chair, Dr. Corazon G. Anzano.

You might wonder why a school or college dedicated to trade and business was suddenly interested in hosting different universities in the three countries as to how culture can be part of sustainable development.

Here’s some backgrounder: On May 5, 2014, the 64th UN General Assembly and UNESCO organized a high-level debate involving all Member States of the UN as well as the UN World Tourism Organization. The meeting “highlighted the paramount importance of culture in the Post-2015 Agenda, or the Sustainable Development Goals. In gist, the United Nations finally recognized the poverty eradication quality education, human rights, gender equality, sustainable environmental management and more liveable and attractive cities.

Recognition that culture — which we anthropologists generally define as the ways people live in society and the institutions, practices, values and norms they develop over time — is of paramount importance in the success or failure of programs and projects addressing the sustainability of nations and communities was finally at hand.

An important component of this is the concern for the past, for conserving and protecting both the tangible and intangible elements of one’s culture, like preserving the vista of a venerable institution like the Cebu Capitol as an indication of one’s sense of pride of one’s place. Such a kind of respect for the achievements and accomplishments of the past one generally finds, of all places, in socialist and communist countries more than in capitalist ones.

A people without reason to be proud of their place and of the history that goes with it, is like a boat full of people adrift in a dark ocean with no way of determining where they have come from and where they are going.

It is only when people love their city or town and respect its historical elements, its past and the many ways it evolved to be what it is, that you find a people with renewed drive to ensure that they only get to do the best and live out better lives compared to other cities or towns.

A people that begin to hate their town or city will also begin not to care, obviously. And will soon show disrespect by, at the most basic, throwing garbage every where and at the most ambitious and so devoid of vision, building structures that mar the dignity of other structures that came ahead, all in the interest of money, money and more money.

Pretty soon, we wake up and lose every single remnant of our past, a people devoid of history, of a ‘longue duree,’ as social sciences are won to say. Look at China or Vietnam, despite their ideology that runs counter to monarchism have endeavored to preserve the imperial dynasties, spending large sums of money to study and exhibit their material remains, both for tourism and also to showcase how old their culture has been.

Imagine a 20-storey modern steel and glass building 15 meters beside the recently-restored Forbidden Palace. That will never happen in China. But in Cebu? Well, it’s certainly happening now. And nobody seems to care.