Wazzup Pilipinas!?
Where does it end?
The unrelenting rains. The knee-deep floods. The drowned homes, soaked belongings, and silent cries for help. Every downpour in the Philippines seems to rewrite the same tragic chapter — only with worse intensity, growing frequency, and a haunting uncertainty: Where does all the water go?
If nature were left undisturbed, the answer would be simple. The water cycle, in its perfect, uncorrupted elegance, should have sufficed.
Water from seas, land, and underground evaporates as vapor, rises to the sky, condenses into clouds, and returns to the earth as rain, hail, or snow. That rain would seep into the ground, recharge our aquifers, nourish our trees, or run off gently into rivers back to the sea. A perfect cycle. A system in equilibrium. No floods. No disasters.
But that’s not the story anymore.
The Broken Cycle: A Story of Greed and Indifference
We didn't just disrupt the cycle.
We prostituted it.
We violated it.
We drowned it in carbon emissions, choked it with plastic waste, and buried its lungs beneath cement and steel. The Philippines is now not only a victim of climate change — we are among its worst offenders.
We cry foul at every flood, yet continue to build over soil that was once our natural sponge. We seal the earth in concrete, develop subdivisions, and pave paradise into parking lots — stripping away the land’s ability to absorb excess water.
And as if that wasn’t enough, we allowed global warming to fester. Glaciers and icebergs are melting, adding massive volumes of water into the atmosphere. Now, the rains pour not just from clouds, but from a warming planet gasping for breath.
Reclamation: The Price of "Progress"
Enter Manila Bay — once a symbol of natural beauty, now a battleground of greed masked as development.
The ongoing reclamation projects, aiming to birth over ten "smart cities", promise skyscrapers and wealth. But at what cost?
Backfill materials are sourced by destroying our mountains and forests, stripping nature to raise artificial land. Trees are felled. Soil is torn. Waters that once drained freely from Bulacan and Pampanga now struggle to reach the sea, blocked by man-made land and choked estuaries.
This isn't progress.
This is ecological murder in slow motion.
Plastic Nation: The Unwanted Crown
Remember when we used to be third in global plastic pollution, behind China and Indonesia?
We’re number one now.
A grim medal on our chest, earned by a nation addicted to single-use plastics, careless waste disposal, and an infrastructure too weak to handle its own garbage. Plastics clog every drainage, every canal, every river, and every soul of this archipelago — blocking the escape route of water and redirecting it to our streets, our homes, and our despair.
And who do we blame?
Us.
Yes — we the people.
We who throw trash like it’s someone else’s problem.
We who ignore warnings.
We who demand change but resist discipline.
We who raise our fists at the government, yet throw candy wrappers in the streets.
We are both the victims and the villains.
So, What Now?
The floods are not a curse — they are a consequence.
The water does not disappear — it is rerouted by our neglect.
The heavens do not punish — we punish ourselves.
We cannot keep treating climate disasters as "acts of God" when they are clearly acts of man.
We need a revolution not just of policies but of mindset.
The next chapter must not be another tragedy, but a transformation.
The question isn’t “Where does the rain go?”
The question is:
“When will we finally take responsibility for where we pushed it to go?”
Stay tuned — because the answer, and the action, must begin with us.
To be continued... in the next chapter: What We Must Do to Stop the Drowning
Follow Wazzup Pilipinas for the next awakening.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
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