Creative Writing the Environment in the Philippine Context

Philippine Island Narratives: Our Climate, Our Environment, Our Stories

Writing about our island experiences in the Philippines is one ethical response to the climate crisis. Through storytelling, poetry, and creative nonfiction, we explore how our lives are shaped by storms, seas, and shifting landscapes.

As Filipinos, we know the environment is not just a backdrop. It is our life source, culture bearer, and memory keeper. When we write, we preserve not only stories of loss but also resilience, kinship, and survival. And when we read or share these works, we are keeping our ecological memory alive.

Climate as Our Origin Story

In literatures of the Philippines, weather is not mere decoration but where we anchor our origin. Our islands have always lived with monsoons, tides, volcanic soil, and earthquakes. These rhythms form the metaphors of our language: bagyo ng buhay, umambon ng biyaya, alon ng alaala, parang bulkan kung magalit.

To grow up Filipino is to live with storm alerts, evacuation drills, and the scent of rain. Almost everyone has a flood story. This shared climate reality shapes our collective memory and fuels our literary imagination. The environment is right here, breathing through our stories, poems, and even our silences.

How Filipino Writers Respond to Climate Change

To write the environment is also to write memory, loss, and presence. Every coastline we trace in words recalls what the sea has claimed, each tide carrying fragments of lives and histories we can no longer touch. Valleys hold their own secrets, hidden in rivers, forests, and shadows, whispering stories of endurance and change. Storms do not only pass, they rearrange the land, leaving traces of what once was: homes, paths, trees, and the quiet, intimate details of daily life. Landslides bury not just soil but memories, artifacts of our connection to place, and traces of communities.

These losses become characters in our writing: in fiction, they inhabit landscapes where people struggle, adapt, and remember; in poetry, they speak in metaphors of absence and resilience; in memoir, they shape the contours of personal and collective histories; in speculative writing, they guide us to imagine futures we may yet prevent or endure.

Writing the environment is an act of attention, a witness to what remains and what vanishes. It is a way of honoring the invisible, the overlooked, and the endangered. To write the land, the sea, and the storms is to hold memory close, even as it slips away. Do you have such a story?

Filipino Writers as Keepers of Ecological Memory

Writing about the environment allows us to bridge art and advocacy, turning attention into witness and memory into care. In chronicling devastated landscapes, we create space for ecological grief, acknowledging loss while offering moments of healing through language. Each story, essay, and poem becomes a way to listen to the land—to feel the shifts in soil, the literal and metaphorical winds that move across islands, coasts, and mountains. Our bookshelves hold traces of these attentive journeys, a constellation of works that remind us of both vulnerability and resilience.

For those seeking inspiration, we recommend V.J. Campilan’s All My Lonely Islands, which tenderly maps the solitude and beauty of the Batanes islets; Merlinda Bobis’s magical realism in Fish-Hair Woman, where Bicolano folklore and ecology entwine; Clarissa Militante’s State of Happiness and Genevieve Asenjo’s Orkidyas, both exploring community and land in layered narratives; Dinah Roma’s creative Weaving Basey about Typhoon Haiyan in Samar; Marjorie Evasco’s contemplative Hiligaynon verses in Hope; and Criselda Yabes’s novel, Broken Islands, set in the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda. Their works offer potent island characterization, from Batanes to Jolo, and invite us, readers into an intimate dialogue with the Philippines’ fragile, beautiful, and enduring landscapes.

Writing the Storm, Together

Creative writing in the climate crisis is a shared practice of attention, witness, and care. The weather is no longer mere backdrop. Storms, floods, and heat waves are not only threats but teachers, exposing the failures of our stewardship. Our poems, essays, and stories listen to the land, trace the slow vanishing of coastlines, and lift the voices most at risk.

In the Philippine islands, at least, whatever dominion we once claimed over nature is gone. Survival now requires humility before its potent agency, and the courage to bend with its shifts and surges. We cannot dismiss them with a shrug of “weather-weather lang yan.”

To read, write, and share is to keep ecological memory alive, so the generations after us inherit not complacency, but an active love for the environment. We all carry this story. What is your story to tell?

Subscribe to our newsletter

Enjoy exclusive special deals available only to our subscribers.