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	University of the Philippines Baguio	Governor Pack Road, 2600 Baguio City, Philippines
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coop TITIA SCHIPPERS
University of Amsterdam
Research Affiliate, Cordillera Studies Center

The Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title of Bakun: Expectations and Reality
Tuesday, 02 September 2008, 10:00 a.m.
Multipurpose Hall
University of the Philippines Baguio

ABSTRACT: In 2002, the Kankanaey and Bago people of Bakun became the first indigenous group of the Philippines to receive a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT). This achievement was the outcome of a political window of opportunity, the recognition of this chance by the Bakun Indigenous Tribes Organization (BITO) and the ability to make use of it.
Six years after the awarding of the CADT, what did the several stakeholders expect this CADT would bring and what are the actual changes in the community? And what can the case of Bakun tell us about the functioning of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act on the whole?
The CADT in Bakun is part of a wider development program, funded by the ILO and aimed at protecting the natural resources of Bakun. This program brought changes in the mindset of some people, but implementation is lagging behind. Most people of Bakun see an individual title as the ultimate thing they must have in order to fully protect their land against unwanted invaders. The recent blotches on the Free and Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) process in the barangay of Gambang of Royalco Mining Corporation to get consent for mining exploration show that this FPIC does not guarantee a fair process in which every citizen of the affected area can be involved.

coop Dr. GREG BANKOFF
Professor of Modern History
History Department
University of Hull
United Kingdom

Lecture 1
Cultures of Disaster,
Cultures of Coping:
Hazard as a Frequent Life Experience in the Philippines
Thursday, 17 July 2008, 2:30 p.m.
Bulwagang Juan Luna
University of the Philippines Baguio

The inter-relationship of human beings and the natural world, and the influence of the physical environment on a community's social and cultural development, is graphically demonstrated in societies that face the persistent threat (and reality) of disasters. A prime example is the Philippines. Consisting of over seven thousand islands and located in an extremely hazard-prone area, the Philippines as a whole experiences more earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis than any other country on earth. Although western social sciences typically depict "disasters" as abnormal occurrences, communities and individuals in the Philippines have come to accept hazard and disaster as a frequent life experience. Indeed, in a number of respects, Filipino cultures can be regarded as the product of community adaptation to these phenomena. Appreciating that there are both "cultures of disaster" and "cultures of coping" in all societies fosters an understanding of such events in terms of people's vulnerabilities and their resilience to withstand them through strengthening existing capacities.
Lecture 2
The Science of Nature and
the Nature of Science
in the Nineteenth Century
Philippines

Tuesday, 29 July 2008, 2:30 p.m.
Bulwagang Juan Luna
University of the Philippines Baguio

When Americans occupied the Philippines in 1899, they began the propagation of a second leyenda negra about their colonial predecessors. Rather than depicting the conquest of the New World in lurid and exaggerated details that stressed Spanish brutality, this second black legend was a more measured, scientifically couched denunciation that dwelt on the backwardness, elemental and irrational nature of Iberian culture. Actually colonial science in the Philippines was not nearly as rudimentary as it is frequently made out to be and was partly based on different schools of thought. Twentieth century natural science has been so dominated by Darwinian concepts about the evolution of life that those who have held alternative notions are deemed unutterably backward. The late nineteenth century Philippines pose an interesting case where different notions about the environment vie for state and public acceptance.
This lecture examines ideas about the science of nature and the nature of science in relation to forestry, botany, meteorology, architecture, and animal breeding. Far from demonstrating an unsophisticated or uninformed dialogue about the environment, the evidence shows a surprisingly rich fusion of European debates and discourses with local concerns and insights to form a creole science. It was primarily only in the eyes of the self-assured and self-righteous proponents of the new American imperium that all was darkness and ignorance.
Lecture 3
Wood for War: The Legacy of
Human Conflicts on the
Forests of the Philippines
1565-1945
Tuesday, 05 August 2008, 2:30 p.m.
Bulwagang Juan Luna
University of the Philippines Baguio

In this age of plastic, concrete and steel, it is all too easy to forget how ubiquitous a material wood was for many people in the past. Trees or their produce were used among other purposes for housing, transport, furniture, utensils, writing and medicine, as a source of heat and even as clothing. The tools of agriculture, the plough and dibbling-stick, were primarily wooden as were largely the weapons of war: the shafts of arrows and spears, the hilts of swords, the palisades of forts, and the hulls of canoes and warships. In tropical landmasses, the use of wood was even more commonplace as the sheer extent of the forests, the variety, size and shape of its trees, precluded the use of alternatives except for purposes of ostentatious display or in cases of absolute necessity. All this wood initially came from the forests not from plantations so that the history of the forest is largely commensurate with the history of the societies that lived in and about it.
This lecture traces the outline of human agency and its demands and effects on the forests of the Philippines through the context of the demands of warfare An initial description of the archipelago's forests and the scope and pace of its deforestation is followed by a brief overview of the nature of conflict in the islands since the sixteenth century focussing on three very different temporal periods: shipbuilding in the seventeenth and eighteenth century to repulse Dutch and Moro raiders, fort construction as part of the late Spanish colonial regime's attempt to subjugate the Cordilleras during the nineteenth century, and the policy of agricultural autarky practiced under Japanese occupation. The effects of warfare on the forest were not uniform, leading to the gradual genetic erosion of certain species in the period prior to the establishment of a commercial timber export industry in the twentieth century and culminating in the subsequent wholesale destruction of the forests since 1960.