Stewardship is one of those words that, to most people, sounds like it belongs in annual reports or Sunday homilies. Formal. Heavy. Almost distant.
But for me, stewardship has become deeply personal. It’s not abstract. It’s not just a principle to be quoted. It’s part of my everyday life because I’ve felt the cost of its absence.
I’ve lived in Quezon City long enough to know its moods. The unpredictability of the rain. The crawl along Commonwealth. The street corners that flood first. And I’ve lived with that slow, creeping realization that something is terribly wrong when ordinary rain begins to feel like a threat.
Our home has been flooded often enough for me to stop blaming the weather and start asking harder questions: What happened here? Why do we suddenly have floods where we didn’t before? Where did the water used to go?
As counsel of corporations, I have worked with land all my life. I’ve seen it bought, sold, mined, paved, fenced, titled, converted, contested. I’ve listened to landowners who inherited hectares of memory and to families who lost access to the soil they grew up on. Ben Logan’s book title rings in my ears every time: The Land Remembers.
Because it does. The land remembers how we treated it. Whether we honored it or extracted from it. Whether we built with foresight or flipped it for quick gain. I have walked through fields that once grew rice but now lie dry. I’ve stood on concrete where rivers once flowed. And I’ve seen, with my own eyes, one of the biggest developments in our area rise on what used to be a riverbed. I watched it change from dried earth into glossy brochures. Government even worked hand-in-hand with the developer to flatten the area through a road project. The riverbed disappeared from the map but not from nature. It turned out the water that now floods our home had nowhere else to go.
As a land-use counsel, I know how complex these decisions are. I’ve seen the pressure to maximize yield per square meter, the temptation to rush permits, the drive to create “value.” And yes, building on land isn’t inherently wrong. Real estate generates jobs, homes, and opportunities. I understand those motivations because I’ve helped close those deals.
But what I cannot ignore are the consequences when responsibility is set aside. Subdivisions that block natural waterways. Flood-prone zones sold as prime lots. These aren’t accidents of planning. They are decisions. And they ripple outward into barangays that stay underwater for days, schools forced to close during storms, and families like mine who live with the permanent anxiety of the next rainfall.
For me, that is where stewardship comes in.
It is about seeing the ripple before it happens. It’s about asking the harder question, not just “Can we build here?” but “Should we?”