July 2017 – Agam

Grace Monte de Ramos on AGAM

We are really way behind the deadline for saving the planet for ourselves. In many parts of the world, not least in our own corner of it, the effects of climate change have already altered landscapes and lives, led to conflict and privation, and placed in jeopardy the future of our children’s generation. What positive action we do now will perhaps mitigate the ruinous aftermath for our grandchildren. Agam represents our hopes and our most fervent prayers for them.

By Marjorie Evasco on AGAM

Perhaps among the most slippery words to prompt the writing of stories is the word “uncertainty.” But the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities used it to provoke 24 writers writing in eight languages of the Philippines to illumine this human experience, each writer given a photo-portrait of a survivor of natural hazards, whose voices could now be heard in the narratives and 26 photographs that compose the book “Agam.”Aside from the photo-portrait I was given, which was that of a fisherman who had survived the onslaught of typhoon Ondoy in Mindanao, ICSC also enjoined me to steer clear from using the usual catchwords of environmental science, especially the phrase “climate change” itself. The brief asked each of us to write the human in and with the environment, and to bring to the discourse the problems that have its contexts in specific cultural modes of thinking and behaving within one’s specific environment.

‘Agam’ sparks conversation on climate change

Originally published in GMA News Online

Acclaimed book ‘Agam: Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change’ last week reached a new audience as the authors featured on its pages convened to help relaunch the collection at Mt. Cloud Bookshop, Casa Vallejo in Baguio.

The bookshop’s co-owner Padmapani Perez, a poet and an anthropologist, wrote one of the 24 literary pieces featured in the book.

‘Agam’, first published in 2014, is a pioneering anthology of stories about climate change. Portraits by Jose Enrique Soriano taken in Tacloban — devastated by Supertyphoon Yolanda in 2013 — put a face to the narratives told in eight different Filipino languages (Tagalog, Ilocano, Cebuano, Waray, Maguindanao, Bikol, Sinama and English).