LIKE many human rights activists I was thrown in at the deep end. The declaration of martial law in the Philippines in 1971 totally changed the political scene there.
People who had worked for social change were immediately suspect and liable to be arrested, thrown into goal, tortured or even summarily executed. Students were high on the military's target list.
In this climate of fear, human rights were very much on my agenda when I worked as chaplain and lecturer in anthropology at the Mindanao State University in the 1970s.
Human rights work can be very practical. For example, when a student was arrested it was crucial to get down to the detention centre with a camera to photograph the student and the arresting officer. Speed was essential - the sooner the local human rights lawyer was informed the better chance the student had of not being moved for questioning or even torture. It was important to educate people about their basic human rights. At times it had to be subtle, like organising a festival featuring songs and poems of freedom and hope. On other occasions it was very overt. I can still recall the metallic clank-clank of a hand-operated mimeograph machine as students took turns running off copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the 30th anniversary in 1978. The connection between human rights and the environment was not apparent at that time. The link dawned on me when I moved from the university to work with a tribal people in 1980. The T'boli had lived in a sustainable way in the rainforest of southern Mindanao for over 1,000 years. However, by 1980 the fabric of their society was unravelling as a direct result of three decades of deforestation and land grabbing by outsiders. Logging companies stripped many hills bare, and once the top soil was washed away by monsoon floods food production fell. The forest no longer provided a rich and varied source of food. Poor diet led to sickness, high infant mortality and a significant drop in life-expectancy.
Any attempt to improve the lot of the T'boli had to include measures to protect and replant the rainforest. This was not easy.
Politicians and senior military personnel who had benefitted from the logging business wished to see it continue. They had little concern for the environment, since neither they nor their children lived in the area.
The Catholic church campaigned for a total logging ban. One missionary, Fr Karl Schmitz, a Passionist priest, used his pastoral visits to villages to organise the tribal people to protect the forest. As a result, he was murdered by a paid assassin in 1987. It was a chilling moment for all involved in environmental campaigns in the Philippines.
At a global level it took the death, in Brazil, of Chico Mendes in 1988, in similar circumstances, to demonstrate that human rights and environmental issues are inextricably bound together. Mendes was internationally known for his campaign against deforestation in the Amazon.
Ironically, he did not set out to be an environmentalist. His aim was to protect the rights of his fellow rubber trappers to earn a livelihood from the Amazon forest. To achieve this he had to stop rapacious cattle ranchers burning the forest each year.
The ranchers saw Chico Mendes as an enemy and had him murdered. An Amnesty International report in the wake of Mendes's death recorded that over 1,000 people were murdered in land related incidents in Brazil in the 1980s.
There were only 10 convictions. Local police did not pursue culprits because they were influenced and sometimes bribed by the ranchers.
In the Philippines, I learned that ecological devastation and human rights violations are closely linked. Those who campaign on environmental issues whether in the Ogoni area of Nigeria, the Narmada dam in India or those who oppose toxic waste sites anywhere in the world are often harassed and denied basic human rights.
Unfortunately, the increase in environmental awareness has not halted environmental destruction. Forests are being torn down, topsoil eroded and species driven into extinction at an unprecedented rate. Rivers, seas and oceans are at crisis point.
The Nations of the world have been unable to address the global warming phenomenon. Against this background those who benefit from the present unjust and unsustainable exploitation of nature will do all in their power to protect their vested interests.
This will inevitably lead to human rights abuses. One hopeful sign amid this gloom is that human rights and environmental organisations have now begun to work more closely together to promote human rights and protect the environment.