Ecclesial Opposition to Large-Scale Mining on Samar: Neoliberalism Meets the Church of the Poor in a Wounded Land
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, the government of the Philippines (adhering to the precepts of neoliberalism) has promoted large-scale mining as a method of stimulating economic development. Mining, an activity with substantial potential for environmental harm, is staunchly opposed by the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines, particularly on the island of Samar. The crux of the church’s opposition to mining are the adverse environmental consequences that mining may impose upon the rural poor who, engaging in subsistence agriculture and aquaculture, are vitally dependent upon access to natural resources. Should there be a mining-related environmental disruption, these people will be thrust from subsistence into destitution. The commitment of the church to act on behalf of the poor emanates from the conciliar documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the fertile ground for liberation theology in the Philippines provided by the Marcos dictatorship (1972–1986), and by the commitment of the church in its 1992 Second Plenary Council to become a church of the poor. Samar contains quality mineralization set amid a wealth of biodiversity, grinding poverty, a simmering Maoist insurgency, and a vulnerability to natural hazards such as typhoons and El Niño induced drought. The opposition of the church to mining on Samar demonstrates the commitment of the church to be a church of the poor and how this praxis stands in contradistinction to the intellectual hegemony of neoliberalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".