Owning the Earth, Stealing the Sky
In a speech attributed to Chief Seattle of the Suquamish tribe in 1848, he profoundly asked: “How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and every humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.”
Chief Seattle was right. When he and his fellow Native Americans questioned the system that was driving them from their ancestral lands and destroying their culture, they saw the roots of injustice. Back then, ownership by rich white settlers in the United States meant dispossession for Indigenous Peoples. The same is true for the Lumad and other Indigenous Peoples in Mindanao. They resisted for a time, but in a world where power decides what is right, conquest prevailed—and along with it, the colonizers’ economic system that placed a price and a title on everything that could be owned, sold, or exploited.
Today, that economic system has gone out of control. Obsessed with growth at all costs, it sacrifices nature on the altar of greed and profit. The right to own has become the right to exploit—regardless of morality, as long as it yields profit. Res Ipsa loquitur—the thing speaks for itself—just look at the global state of our environment.
Indigenous Peoples of North America, deeply connected to the earth, were baffled by a culture that treated land and nature as commodities. How can you own something that will outlast you? You cannot own the land; the land owns you. They even feared that, if possible, the colonizers would one day try to buy the sky.
Here in the Philippines, our own Indigenous Peoples believe land is owned only if it is worked and made productive—otherwise, it belongs to the community. To them, some things are sacred, and by their very nature, should never be owned or sold. These are essentials of life, meant for all. Take air, for example—what if someone invented a machine that captured all the air and sold it? Only those who could afford it would survive. Isn’t that terrifying?
The same goes for water and electricity—basic needs without which no one can live. It was once unthinkable to sell water. Today it is, just as it may one day become thinkable to sell air. In a world where everything is turned into business, who knows what comes next?
Indeed, “our world is not for sale.” “Our water is not for sale.” “Our seeds and biodiversity are not for sale.” This must be our unwavering response to privatization under the destructive ideology of corporate globalization.
As world-renowned environmentalist and ally Dr. Vandana Shiva said, “Corporate globalization is based on new enclosures of the commons—enclosures that imply exclusion and are enforced through violence. Rather than promoting a culture of abundance, profit-driven globalization creates cultures of exclusion, dispossession, and scarcity. It turns all beings and resources into commodities, robbing diverse species and peoples of their rightful share of ecological, cultural, economic, and political space. The wealth of the rich is rooted in the dispossession of the poor—it is the common, public resources of the poor that are privatized, leaving them economically, politically, and culturally disempowered.”
If we must speak of ownership of essential resources—land, forests, water—then we must insist on a moral principle: those who use them must be the ones who own them. For centuries, if not millennia, the Lumad have “owned” and protected the forests, using them sustainably and with deep respect for nature. Yet today, the 17 million hectares of dipterocarp forests that once teemed with life are gone—lost to logging barons who used their ill-gotten wealth to gain political power.
Then came the new colonizers—transnational corporations, in collusion with the powerful—illegally seizing Indigenous Peoples’ lands and converting the best of our lands into vast plantations. These plantations are soaked in toxic chemicals—so toxic it’s as if we’re dumping 2,000 truckloads of poison into our watersheds daily. Seven out of eight of these chemicals are already banned in other countries. And we wonder why babies are born deformed or why cancer rates are soaring? When our agricultural lands are stripped from communities, they are poisoned and rendered infertile.
The same injustice applies to electricity. So-called “electric cooperatives” must confront the truth: it is the member-consumers who are the real owners. Every month, they pay for two things—loan amortizations and reinvestments. Add these up and each member has already contributed tens of thousands of pesos. And yet, no patronage credits are returned to them. Where is the justice in that?
It is now imperative for all of us to correct the social injustices being inflicted upon the people. Guided by the principles of transparency and accountability, the people have the right to know: Why have we lost our ecological integrity, leading to disastrous environmental consequences? Who are those who have profited immensely from exploiting the wealth of our forests?
We must critically examine the dominant development paradigm—one that reduces everything, including life-sustaining resources, to mere commodities subject to trade and, too often, to unchecked greed. Like Chief Seattle, we must begin to ask difficult questions, whether in poetry or protest. The social injustices we face today have shaken the very core of our humanity.
For cooperatives, it is not just a choice—it is a duty to act in accordance with our constitutional mandate, clearly stated in Chapter 15, Article 12 of the 1987 Constitution: “To promote the viability and growth of cooperatives as instruments of social justice, equity, and economic development.”
