Robert Chan shuffles a pile of legal briefs in his temporary office – a wooden cargo vessel that he and a team of volunteer paralegals had apprehended during an operation against smugglers of logs and other forest products from the central Philippine province of Palawan to Malaysia.

“They (court officials) probably think this is already where I hold office permanently,” he said, examining summons that had just been delivered by a court clerk on a Monday morning.

Chan, a lawyer who heads the Palawan NGO Network – Global Legal Action for Climate Change (PNNI-GLACC), explained that he and his group of civilian volunteers were taking turns guarding the vessel, which was anchored off the city pier.

Owned by a trader based in the southern Palawan town of Rizal, the vessel was part of a fleet that had been smuggling logs and mangrove tanbark to Malaysia, which shares a maritime border with the Philippines in the Sulu Sulawesi seas, Chan said. These, among the valuable timber in Palawan’s forests, are prohibited from being cut under a ban on commercial logging in the province.

The apprehension of the vessel yielded a cargo of Palawan ipil hardwood valued in the black market at 65,000 U.S. dollars. Chan said the bust was important because it broke up an entrenched smuggling syndicate that had been operating out of Rizal and Balabac towns for at least 10 years.

But instead of filing the usual forestry violation and criminal cases, Chan chose not to sue the boat owner or its crew but filed an administrative case seeking forfeiture of the vessel in favour of the government.

“It is a legal strategy that is a trademark of our approach to enforcement. We’d rather not get stuck in prosecuting criminal cases that will drag on for no less than five years, if we’re lucky,” Chan explained. Here, we can forfeit the vessel used in the crime in less than a year’s time. What is important is not that you incarcerate people, but teach them a lesson and make it extremely difficult for them to continue.”

The focus on confiscation of vessels and equipment such as chainsaws from violators of environmental laws – as a way of upsetting operations that would otherwise be difficult to prosecute in court – is something that Chan and his colleagues have developed from a decade of enforcement initiatives.

What allows a civilian group like PNNI to go after suspected violators of environmental laws is a doctrine in Philippine criminal law providing for “citizens’ arrest”, which overrides the normal requirement of serving a warrant issued by a judge.

In its operations, Chan’s team is accompanied by up to two uniformed police officers from the Philippine National Police Maritime Police. They are the only armed members of the posse. “It is a very good partnership because we are able to accomplish a lot even with limited resources available,” PNP Maritime chief for Palawan Col Agustin Molina said.

Chan says the impact of citizens’ operations – against those who use the seas for activities like logging or illegal fishing – has been strongly felt throughout Palawan, considered the Philippines’ last ecological frontier.

Since the start of its campaign a decade ago, PNNI has accumulated more than 300 unlicensed chainsaws, which had been used in illegal logging, without having to criminally prosecute a hired hand or its owner. The volume of this haul is more than double what the law enforcement agencies have been able to confiscate.

In May this year, the same team busted a group that supplies sodium cyanide to fishermen for use in catching live groupers. A banned chemical substance in fishing, cyanide – even in its diluted form used to stun fish – is highly potent to corals and kills any reef it comes into contact with.

In that bust, PNNI stalked a large boat for three days near Double Island in Rizal town, and some of its members posed as fishermen buying cyanide. The operation netted seven kilogrammes of the banned substance and the confiscation of the fishing boat itself.

Efren Balladares, that group’s team leader, attributes its success to the support of communities that give them information about the illegal loggers and fishers’ activities. “We have a network of trained paralegals who are members of the communities and they act as our assets,” Balladares.

At the same, its successes have come with a heavy – and lethal – price. Over the last decade, three persons associated with Chan’s group have been murdered in connection with their participation in community-driven enforcement operations. A team leader of an operation to demolish an illegal fish trap was mugged and left for dead, but luckily survived.

The group’s eight paralegal volunteers get a meager food allowance of 10 dollars during each operation, and sometimes a bonus for a major bust. “It is the passion for the environment that keeps us together,” Balladares said.

In truth, it has not been easy to convince funding agencies to support this kind of environmental work. “We have approached agencies such as the European Union and AusAid. . . Unfortunately, these agencies don’t appreciate the realities of law enforcement in the Philippines. They see is as a task of government and think the NGOs have no business doing enforcement work,” Chan said.

But the local government sees things differently. In 2009, Puerto Princesa Mayor Edward Hagedorn gave Chan’s team a one million peso (22,753 dollar) fund and a secondhand off-road vehicle. “Attorney Chan’s work needs to be supported by local governments. This is the true essence of good governance participation,” Hagedorn had said when he signed the check for the fund.

Depending on who one talks to, Mt Mantalingahan is either a treasure trove of untapped minerals lying underneath the earth’s crust, or a biodiversity hotspot that is home to some of the worlds rarest and threatened animals.

Mt Mantalingahan's cloud-covered slopes mask the conflict brewing in the environment. Credit: Danito Balete

It is both, which is why Mt Mantalingahan, some 150 kilometres south of this capital city of the Philippines’ central Palawan province, is the scene of conflict between communities and environmental activists on one hand, and mining companies on the other.

Palawan accounts for bulk of the country’s reserves of nickel ore, valued at 300 billion U.S. dollars, official data show. But cashing on this is easier said than done, because it would involve compromising large areas of old- growth forests and the ecological benefits derived from them.

Geologist Jose Antonio Socrates calls Mt Mantalingahan “perhaps the country’s largest deposit of nickel ore”, which explains why major mining companies have stepped up plans and others have filed for mining claims before the regulatory agencies in the capital Manila.

But for Danny Balete, one of the country’s top mammal scientists, Mantalingahan is “the centre of the Philippines’ mammalian endemism and biodiversity” and home of the ‘Tau’t Bato’ (stone people) tribe, whose number is estimated to be down to less than 500 individuals.

Balete discovered a new species of mountain shrew in Mt Mantalingahan, and other scientists collected new species of plants, including a stunning white orchid with golden lip petals.

Mantalingahan’s importance as the home to a number of short-range endemic species, including the soft-furred mountain rat, which had not been seen in decades, and critically endangered species like the Palawan peacock pheasant and the Palawan cockatoo, has also been noted by the Alliance for Zero Extinction, an initiative of 52 multinational biodiversity organisations.

“There is so much still to learn about Mt Mantalingahan, so much to discover not just for science but more importantly for society who stands to benefit from this wealth of biological resources,” Balete said, referring to potential medicinal breakthroughs from bioprospecting.

Balete added that the 2007 survey his group did in Mantalingahan for Conservation International underlined that it is an “important component of the country’s overall biodiversity”.

In June 2009, former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo declared Mantalingahan a national park and classified it as a ‘protected landscape’ covering 120,457 hectares.

Against this backdrop, the conflict between mining interests and environmentalists is heating up – and involving local officials, laws and communities. Buoyed by the global demand for nickel and a government policy to revive mining, several mining firms plan to set up operations around Mantalingahan. MacroAsia, the flagship of one of the country’s most prominent business conglomerates, is applying for local permits to operate a 25-year government lease it got in the town of Brooke’s Point that partly overlaps with the protected area.

Two other companies – Ipilan Nickel Mining Corp and Lebach Mining Corp – are in earlier stages of project development, trying to get all local endorsements needed to proceed.

Standing in their way are civil society groups that are challenging their every move – from securing endorsements from communities and provincial regulatory bodies, to filing legal action to stop mining projects.

The residents of Ipilan village who oppose mining, led by village captain Job Lagrada, have vowed to put up a human barricade if the government allows the projects to proceed. They believe that mining will destroy their farms and watersheds.

One group, the Palawan Youth Force, has embarked on a signature campaign on the social networking site Facebook to convince the Philippines’ new president, Benigno Aquino III, to prevent new mining activity in the province.

A lawyers’ organisation, the Environmental Legal Assistance Centre, has hauled to court most provincial officials for endorsing a mining project in the Narra municipality, in alleged violation of a special national law protecting Palawan’s remaining old-growth forests.

One contentious issue about Mantalingahan is whether mining should be allowed in “core zone” areas with old- growth forests, which are protected under the Strategic Environmental Plan (SEP) law for Palawan. An initial review by the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development (PCSD), the provincial regulatory agency, showed that all except 91 hectares of the area leased to MacroAsia are “core and restricted zones” protected under the SEP zoning system.

But MacroAsia maintains that its legal right to utilise its leased area has precedence over local laws, including the proclamation of Mantalingahan as a protected area.

The former vice mayor of Brooke’s Point, Jean Feliciano, claims that the majority of municipal officials who back the MacroAsia project plan to change local laws and reclassify old-growth forest areas under the local zoning plan, in order to accommodate the mining project. “There is now an effort to revise the comprehensive land use plan,” Feliciano said.

Feliciano blames MacroAsia for being behind the “harassment” of anti-mining groups in Brooke’s Point, citing the case of the chief village official of Ipilan who is facing a slew of administrative cases related to his opposition to the project. The official, Job Lagrada, had stopped the mining firm from conducting surveys.

In an interview, MacroAsia’s vice president for operations, Ramon Santos, declined to comment on most of the criticism against the company, saying “we have formally responded to those issues raised by the PCSD”.

He said MacroAsia is not directly involved in the move to change the land use plan in order to accommodate its nickel ore project. “It is the concern of the local government unit, which is mandated to prepare their own comprehensive land use plan,” he said.

Santos added: “We have a good relationship with the community, with the local government. We have the all the endorsements – although, in this world you cannot please everybody.”

But Feliciano questions the validity of the signatures MarcoAsia got to comply with the mandatory local requirements. “They only got the signatures of the people that favoured them. Those who were against the project, they did not bother to consult. That’s not what social acceptability is all about,” Feliciano pointed out.

Lagrada, who has been suspended from his duties while the administrative complaint by Macroasia is pending, remains firm in his anti-mining stance. “They (mining companies) might have bought off most officials to endorse mining, and those people will benefit financially, while we suffer the environmental consequences. If this project goes ahead, we will put up a human barricade to oppose it,” he said in Filipino.

* This story is part of a series of features on biodiversity by IPS, CGIAR/Bioversity International, IFEJ and UNEP/CBD, members of Communicators for Sustainable Development (http://www.complusalliance.org).