Urban Consumerism in Karlo Sevilla’s Poems “Metro Manila Miasma” and “It’s Snowing in Manila” as An Ecological Critique of Anthropocentric Global Warming

Abstract

Consumerism is identical with anthropocentrism. Global culture through mass-produced gadgets and commercials on signboards in various social mass media contributes to escalate an individual’s consumerist drive. Instead, material overconsumption only wreaks havoc on the physical environment since it tallies with overexploitation of natural resources and overproduction of industrial and household waste. These are manifest in the heap of garbage as a sign of material inundation that gives rise to greenhouse effect as one phenomenon of global warming. Karlo Sevilla’s “Metro Manila Miasma” and “It’s Snowing in Manila” are two contemporary poems that portray a sense of place in space being disrupted by climate change and human materialism. These ‘miasma’ and ‘snow in Manila’ correlate with city dwellers’ extravagant consumption of material goods as well as physical overdevelopment in the city that environmentally deteriorate the urban life. Sevilla’s ecological poems and their concern about anthropogenic materialism that has detrimental impacts on the urban landscape then evoke readers’ awareness of conserving one’s cityscape through one’s wise consumption of material goods in his dailies.