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Jhazzel Dumlao
Jhazzel Dumlao Verified Account
Biology Undergraduate Student @ Ateneo de Manila University
Writer, advocate and grassroots organiser fighting for environmental stewardship and a just future

I am Jhazzel Timothy Ilao Dumlao, a BS Biology student at Ateneo de Manila University, and I advocate for environmental and social responsibility. As a consistent honor student, I pair my academic pursuits with active involvement in research, writing, and leadership. At Ateneo, I represent students in regional quality assurance assessments, write on science and technology for publications, and lead sustainability-driven projects. Beyond the university, I spearhead ecological restoration initiatives, organize community fundraisers, and advocate for environmental stewardship. Through science, advocacy, and writing, I hope to inspire collective action toward a more sustainable and just future.

Speaking Ocean Silenced (S.O.S)
Speaking Ocean Silenced (S.O.S)
I used to think the ocean would always speak.That despite how far away from it I was, physically, emotionally, or even generationally, it would still serenade me with the same song. But something had shifted. The waves still crashed, tides still rose, but their song was different. I wasn’t listening to the ocean. I was remembering it.It’s easy to romanticize nature when we are not the one coming home with hollow nets. But when I began to listen, beyond the postcards, beyond the tale passed hand to hand like shells smoothed by grief, I heard something else. Fish were vanishing. Coral reefs had changed from vibrant mosaics into white skeletons. What once pulsed with life now pulsed with warning.And I, like countless others, had learned to look away. Not because we didn’t care, but because caring had started to seem pointless.The climate emergency had felt too vast, too slow, too late. How does one protest acidified oceans or whisper warnings into rising tides? What voice can match a drowning shore?And then I learned of the bio-sentinels — mussels, corals, plankton — acting as living sensors that translate ocean distress into signals we can see and measure. They glow, pulse, slow, or stop. They do not use language, but they speak. They are the ocean’s silent scream.What moved me most was not the innovation, but the intimacy. This was not science that sought to conquer nature, but one that collaborates with it. In the Philippines, a nation of more than 7,000 islands bound by water and memory, this wasn’t just a discovery. It felt like a return. A homecoming.For millions of coastal Filipinos, marine ecosystems are more than environments; they are inheritance, dignity, and survival. But today, fishers return from long nights at sea with nearly empty pails. In Leyte, bangus fish that once filled baskets in hours now take days to find. In Zamboanga and Samar, brackish warming waters confuse fish behavior and breeding. In Mindoro’s agro-fisheries, people are cornered on both sides: drought on land, salinated shores on seas.Here, water insecurity means more than thirst. It means loss: of catch, of income, of tradition, and of trust in nature’s rhythms. Young people leave the coasts because the sea no longer gives. With them go generations of knowledge, in songs, methods, or stories that once taught us how to live with the ocean, not against it.This is where bio-sentinels become more than scientific marvels. They are translators. From the glow of a coral to the flicker of a mussel’s electric current, they are warning lights in a language older than ours. One that asks us not for credentials, but for attention, memory, and care.This isn’t just a technical correction. It’s an ethical one. A spiritual one. It demands that we reject the illusion of separation: that humans can live apart from the seas that shaped our history and sustain our breath. Because climate change is not merely an ecological catastrophe. It is a failure to listen.Bio-sentinels remind us that the ocean is not mute — it is multilingual. It speaks in pulses and colors, silences and shifts. It has been sounding the alarm. The real question is: are we finally willing to hear it?I want to learn this language. I want our communities to speak it with fluency, with urgency, with hope. When we begin to listen, to the sudden quiet of reefs, to the flickering signs beneath the tide, we begin to understand that this crisis is not abstract. It is for sustainability and our integral ecology. It is already here, washing against our coastlines, rising through our wells, retreating from our nets.The ocean doesn’t need to speak every language. It only needs us to remember how to listen. Because if we dismiss the S.O.S. of these silent speakers, we will not only lose fish or coral.If the ocean speaks and we fail to hear it, we lose more than fish. We lose the future.
0 Comments   04/09/2025
When I Was Ten, I Watched a House Walk
When I Was Ten, I Watched a House Walk
I witnessed a house walk when I was ten.It was my Lolo's (grandfather’s) — wooden, weathered by one typhoon too many — and even if floodwaters came back year after year, he would never leave the lowlands. One morning, after another storm left the house half-submerged, my uncles decided it was time to move it uphill. We did not have trucks. But we had neighbors.That afternoon in our barangay in Batangas, thirty villagers lifted my grandfather's house on ridiculously long bamboo poles. The walls creaked, the nipa roof creaked. Inch by inch and slowly, they lifted his lifework uphill, and their laughter echoed as they worked. Surprisingly, no one asked for pay. It was “bayanihan”, they told me. Back then, I had not heard the term before, but now, I think it is the most important word in the world.Years passed, and I moved to a city that couldn’t care less, where digital lives replaced shared lives, and in the pandemic, the distance widened. Lockdowns held doors shut. Screens replaced smiles. I watched the loneliness spread faster than the virus.It was when I remembered my Lolo's house.Bayanihan is not a quaint tradition or a sepia-toned memory of rural life; it is justice, embodied. Rooted from the Filipino term bayan, meaning both "nation" and "community," bayanihan literally invokes carrying the burden of the people, all together. More than folklore, it’s a system of solidarity in which survival is not an individual accomplishment, but a communal promise. In a world splintered by inequality, environmental catastrophe, and social alienation, this old Filipino custom remains not a relic but rather a radical blueprint modern societies desperately need.Underlying the current converging crises of rising inequality, climate trauma, and institutional distrust is an underlying cleavage: disconnection. While contemporary societies prioritize autonomy, bayanihan insists on interdependence. Individuals break, but communities bend.In the Philippines, where state support is often threadbare, we've long depended on economies of care that are often unseen: a neighbor offering a pot of rice during a blackout, a stranger handing down used school uniforms, or community pantries sprouting overnight during lockdowns. These are not indicators of scarcity, they're indicators of a parallel system founded upon mutualism and collective value.Across the globe, we witnessed echoes during the pandemic. Self-aid groups thrived in cities, only to vanish when media attention diverted elsewhere, because they did not have what bayanihan does: cultural roots. Bayanihan is not a project nor a performance. Bayanihan is identity. It asserts we exist because we carry one another.I saw it again when Typhoon Ulysses hit, where neighbors rescued the elderly on makeshift rafts made of banana stalks and twine. I saw it in community pantries, where people stood in line with dignity, "Take what you need, give what you can" as governments lagged. I saw it in climate justice protests, when fisherfolk from my hometown fed me lunch, unasked.They had no idea they were building an alternative economy. But they were building something fairer, not by design, but by instinct.So what if we followed that instinct on purpose?What if every barangay had a bayanihan team, not grant recipients only, but trained local responders rooted in empathy and local knowledge? What if disaster response began not with red tape, but with red rice and rescue ropes passed from neighbor to neighbor? What if housing policies mandated not just aid for people, but building with people? This is not utopia. It's memory. And it's reproducible.The tragedy is — we're forgetting. Urbanization, migration, and hyper-individualism are eroding this ethic. Our younger generation is learning to compete, not to co-share. Bayanihan is in danger of becoming ancient, trotted out only during cultural festivals, but forgotten in daily life.Yet I believe in cultural revival, in justice which begins not in courtrooms, but in kitchens; in rebuilding by lifting hands, not accusing hands. If we share the stories — of my Lolo's home, of flood rescues, of strangers sharing rice — we can remind everyone everywhere that community isn't charity. It's survival. We don’t need to teach the world a new word. We just need to show them what it means to lift, together.And maybe next time a house begins to fall, no one will wait. They’ll already be reaching for poles.
0 Comments   04/09/2025
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