This chapter is based on fieldwork conducted in the Philippines in the summer of 2010 around the problematic of religion, environmentalism and citizenship. The immediate background to the research included the BP oil spill in the US, mudslides in China, floods in Pakistan and a heat wave in Russia that destroyed a significant portion of the wheat harvest. During the period I was conducting the research, Filipino newspapers – like British newspapers – ran a number of stories that questioned whether these phenomena were interrelated, and the role of human beings in causing or contributing to – or not – these events. Moreover, during the period of my research a number of stories appeared in the Filipino press relating to more properly local environmental issues such as opposition to mining and alleged desecration of ancestral burial grounds by cement companies.

To date, much anthropological research around the question of the environment and environmental risk has focused either on exploring local, culturally mediated understandings of said risks as a “presently lived ecological hazard” (Rudiak-Gould 2011: 10) or on the social movements and NGOs that have become the most nationally and internationally visible vehicles of environmental advocacy and protest. While a strict ethnographic focus on local cultural conceptions of the environment and of ecological risks or on social movements and environmental struggle and advocacy are vital, such research is being done effectively by Filipino anthropologists themselves.