By Chantal Jade V. Tolores
The wounds on Sierra Madre are no longer hidden. They are visible, bleeding, and sanctioned. In Dinapigue, Isabela, the eastern flank of the Philippines’ most extensive and crucial mountain range is now marked by mining roads and bald slopes—the latest casualties in a nation that seems unable to resist has turned its natural patrimony into quick cash.
What makes this worse? It’s all happening legally.
Dinapigue Mining Corporation (DMC), a subsidiary of Nickel Asia Corporation, holds an active Mineral Production Sharing Agreement (MPSA) with the government, which allows it to extract nickel from this environmentally critical zone until 2032. This isn’t some fly-by-night operation. This is a corporation operating with the full knowledge and permission of the government—while civil society, environmentalists, and locals look on in horror.
The Sierra Madre isn’t just another mountain range. It’s the country’s first and last line of defense against the intensifying typhoons born of climate change. It absorbs floodwaters, stabilizes soil, captures carbon, and provides habitat to hundreds of endemic species. Without it, Luzon is left exposed, defenseless.
We don’t need an environmental science degree to understand this—mining and deforestation in this region will kill us. If not directly, then through more violent typhoons, worsening flooding, biodiversity collapse, and eventual economic hardship. Yet our government chooses to listen more to mining companies than to science, conscience, or reason.
And make no mistake, this is not just about DMC or Dinapigue. The bigger issue is the audacity of our policies that allow extractive industries to operate within protected areas in the first place. What’s the use of environmental protection laws when a single government signature can render them meaningless? As justification today, it should have been reviewed, if not revoked outright, especially given the mounting threats of climate change.
The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) has some explaining to do. So does Congress. Why is there no blanket prohibition on mining in or near ecologically critical zones? Why is it that every administration, regardless of party or platform, caves to the pressure of extractive industries?
This is ecological negligence. And it is generational theft.
It’s infuriating that in a country battered yearly by typhoons, where thousands die and billions are lost in damages, we still debate whether destroying forests is acceptable if it means revenue. How can any peso earned from nickel justify the loss of a forest that took thousands of years to form and seconds for a backhoe to flatten?
But the most disturbing part is how normalized this destruction has become. There’s hardly any national outrage. No front-page protest. No walkouts in Congress.
In a saner world, the Sierra Madre’s scarred slopes would be cause for immediate investigation and a halt to all activity. Instead, all we receive are vague assurances of “compliance” with environmental standards, even when our own eyes and satellite images suggest otherwise.
We must treat this as what it truly is—a national emergency. We urge lawmakers to investigate the real impact of mining in Dinapigue and other parts of the Sierra Madre. We demand that the DENR review all active mining permits in protected and vulnerable areas. Most of all, we call on the Filipino public to stop tolerating this legalized environmental plunder.
Again, the Sierra Madre is not just a mountain range. It is our barrier, our lungs, our sanctuary. We cannot mine it and expect to survive the storms ahead.
Let Dinapigue be the last scar we ever see on the Sierra Madre.
