Niño Randy Flores

Waste management remains a persistent challenge in the fisherfolk community of Lian, Batangas, where recurring waste continues to affect Tayum Bay despite long-standing community initiatives. This study aims to understand how waste acquires existential meaning for community members and how this shapes their ecological awareness, participation, and capacity for action. Using a qualitative single case study design, the research draws on field observations, a semi-structured interview with the association leader, and thematic analysis guided by Deep Ecology and Leopold’s Land Ethics. The analysis generated three themes: Individual Awareness and Transformation, Collective Environmental Engagement, and Recognition of Structural and Institutional Barriers. Findings reflect a progression from personal awakening to shared ecological practice, limited by systemic constraints. While context-specific, the findings suggest that similar communities may experience ecological action as a balance of ethical awareness, collective effort, and structural support. These insights inform the proposed Community Ecological Action Framework, offering guidance for sustainable community-led stewardship and local policy development.

This paper seeks to elucidate self-constancy as the creative and formative dimension of moral responsibility, through an exploratory review of Fischer’s semi-compatibilist view of freedom. It underscores the value of artistic self- expression by highlighting the narrative meaning of one’s actions, seen as a cohesive sequence for storytelling rather than a mere chronological order. Self-constancy reflects the agent’s capacity to own their actions, making them a reliable and accountable person. In this light, the value of acting freely—akin to the value of artistic self-expression—can be understood as the agent’s conscious effort to live a life of personal meaning, marked by epistemic awareness and creativity, whether life is determined or not.

Ecological responsibility, as emphasized in Laudato Si’, is rooted in the understanding that an essential aspect of being human is the commitment to care for the environment. In the Ilocano language, this committed practice is expressed through the concept of “taripato,” which encompasses nurturing and protecting, depending on context usage. Drawing from the praxis of taripato, this paper attempts to contextualize Laudato Si’s teachings on ecological responsibility by interpreting it from an Ilocano perspective. This perspective characterizes environmental care as nurturing connections, recognizing our life source, and showing respect not only because we benefit from the environment but because it is integral to life. Following a lexical exploration of the meaning of taripato, the paper concludes by offering insights on ecological responsibility.

This study posits ecological communion as the integration of facilitative learning through community engagements leading to an ecological conversion. Employing the interpretive phenomenological method, it examined how educational institutions in the CICM Philippine Schools’ Network (CICM-PSN) integrate the ecological principles of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si in terms of religious instruction, community engagement, and campus ministry program. Through a semi-structured interview with the participants, the study revealed three themes that illustrate the CICM educational institutions' efforts in bringing the Laudato Si’ teachings to the level of practice and reflection. First, pedagogical integration denotes the challenge of integrating integral ecology in instruction. Second, community engagement shows the effort of the academic community to practice ecological principles through extension programs. Third, ecological conversion aims to internalize the ecological values taught through instruction and practiced through community service. Taken as a unified whole, the three themes mentioned form the Transformative Interpretative Pedagogical Model to consolidate the framework for the CICM-Philippine Schools Network. Furthermore, this model may guide the concrete articulation and application of ecological communion in their religious instruction, community extension and social action programs, and campus ministry activities.

Language is the repository of meaning which emerges from human experience. From this ground of experience, presuppositions affecting how a person understands him- or herself, others, and the world around him, arise. For Ricoeur, the function of language must be examined to situate better the human person as having the capacity to say something. All meaning is realized and communicated in language as discourse. Whether written or oral, discourse always offers an opening of a new perspective to anyone who can read, listen, and communicate. For this reason, language is through and through hermeneutical because it is the medium through which sense and meaning are passed on, either through the event of speaking or of the written text.