City environmentalists urge Sting: Don’t hold concert at SM Mall

Sting

By Gina Dizon

BAGUIO CITY- Environmentalists here appealed to  world renowned musician and environmental activist Sting to change the venue of his concert set at SM-Mall of Asia in Pasay City on Dec. 9, saying performing in the mall would be contrary to his causes as the firm had cut scores of trees in Baguio.

Humphrey  Fellow and environmentalist Cheryl Daytec-Yangot in a letter to Alicia Geist, staff of  Live Nation, tour promoting company, said SM- Mall of  Asia is  owned by  the same management who owns  SM-Baguio and the management’s  insistence to cut down 182 trees despite Baguio people’s protest.  

Tour promoter Arthur Fogel of Live Nation wrote Daytec saying he and Sting’s management are aware of Daytec’s email.

Daytec is the lead lawyer in two environmental cases filed against SM Investment Corporation and SM Prime Holdings on SM’s plan to cut down 182 trees at Luneta Hill in Baguio City to expand the mall.

Daytec, lawyer and founding member of the human rights lawyers group, National Union of Peoples Lawyers is currently an international Fulbright-Humphrey fellow in the US and now based in the University of Minnesota. 

SM-MOA is one of the buildings owned by billionaire Henry Sy Sr who also owns SM-Baguio located stop Session Road at Baguio City.  

The planned expansion was stopped after a temporary environmental protection order was granted April 2012.A protest rally of more than 5000 people was held April 10 even as cases are still being heard.

An ongoing online petition asking Sting for a change of venue of his concert  was initiated by Project Save 182 based in Baguio City.

Popularly called Sting, Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner is an English musician, singer-songwriter, activist, actor, philanthropist and principal songwriter, lead singer and bassist for the rock band The Police.  Some of his popular protest songs include “Russians” written in 1985, leveled at the US and Russia drawing on the Cold War’s nuclear rhetoric and the bomb’s origins.

Earlier, Sting backed out at Kazakhstan president's birthday concert in protest at  government "crackdown" on striking oil workers, following the  advice of the international rights group Amnesty International, who warned that the concert would be "an endorsement of the presidents' administration," and would "go against everything he (Sting) has stood for, while supporting Amnesty".  Workers have been striking for more than 40 days in Kazakhstan's oil-rich Western region.

One of Sting’s popular quotes goes, “If you really want to define civilization it should be a culture that doesn’t destroy its environment. If you burn down the kitchen one day and expect to eat the next, it is not even intelligent, let alone civilized.”