Full disclosure: this is a post that I actually wrote to be an intro for my new role as a "citizen reporter" for the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council)'s OnEarth blog. I know that it is lazy of me to just post this since some of the information is redundant, however I also realize that I haven't posted in over a month. Also, let's be honest, the opportunities for recycling in Kalimantan are rather meager and I've got to get my kicks somehow! I promise that I will manage to take some of the many half written posts that I've been sitting on and publish them soon, that is if I still have anyone left reading this blog. Also, this is a picture of the ASRI clinic.
without further ado...
Deforestation and Its Discontents: An Introduction to Six Months in Borneo
Borneo. The name itself brings up the image of the exotic, maybe some images akin to those from Heart of Darkness: deep tropical jungle, wild natives, heads on sticks, etc. Beyond this however, many Americans know little of Borneo other than that it is far, far away and maybe that it is home to the orangutan. In fact, Borneo is one of the most biologically diverse places in the world thanks to its location at the junction of three tectonic plates and along the biological border of Asia and Australia. It’s not only the biological world that is diverse here however; three nations share the large island of Borneo: Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia. Brunei is a small, but wealthy, sultanate, known for its oil. Sabah and Sarawak, the Malaysian sections of the island, make up the vast majority of tourist infrastructure, despite being only a fraction of the large island. It’s almost a joke: you open up a Lonely Planet Borneo and there is large map of Borneo with pop-outs for highlighted places. Odd, you think, all of the pop-outs seem to be clustered along the northern coast; did all those natural wonders somehow end up divided by national lines? What about the other two thirds of the island? That, that large part that often gets little more than a footnote, is Kalimantan. Even to Indonesians, Kalimantan is considered a wild place and many eyebrows were raised in Java when I announced my intention to spend 6 months in a small village on the western coast named Sukadana.
The reason for the lack of eco-tourism here, of course, is the lack of infrastructure, but, though the roads are bad, this is not the whole story. The many environmental problems that plague Kalimantan are systematically destroying exactly that which the tourists would come to see. As many “environmentalists” (and readers of this blog) may know, Borneo is currently experiencing some of the highest, or the highest (depending on whom you ask), rates of deforestation in the world. What was once a verdant forested island, is quickly being reduced into a degraded island of palm oil plantations and invasive “along along” grass.
National parks represent some of the last preserves of forest in Kalimantan, where much of the rest of the land has already been logged and/or turned into palm oil plantations. Unfortunately, protection in name and protection in practice are two very different things.
The organization that I’m working with, Alam Sehat Lestari, or ASRI (www.healthinharmony.org ), is using a unique model to provide both high quality, accessible health-care to the local peoples and to try to save the Gunung Palung National Park. The GPNP is home to an estimated 10% or the worlds remaining orangutans, as well as the incredible biodiversity that is characteristic of Borneo. Entire lives have been devoted to studying this forest, yet so much remains undiscovered and undocumented. Unfortunately, this forest, as with much of the forest on Borneo, is disappearing.
ASRI works by integrating primary health care and conservation to improve the health of both the people and the eco-system. Patients may pay for their care through numerous non-cash eco-friendly methods, including manure, seedlings, or labor in the organic garden. This model organic garden thus not only provides vegetables and a small amount of revenue for the clinic, it also works to teach new skills. The project also incorporates a health-care incentives system, known as the “red green” system, in which for non-logging “green” communities are given a 75% discount on care, as well as free eye-glasses and ambulance rides. Additionally, an experimental reforestation project was started last year in which 4 hectares of completely degraded land within the national park was replanted in 102 different plots to test various methods of reforestation.
While the rapid demolition that was happening over the last 20 years in Kalimantan appears to have slowed, the local appetite for illegal wood is forever growing as the population of the area around the park balloons. In fact, I was recently out in the field working on a survey to determine the effectiveness of an organic farm training session that ASRI conducted last summer. While interviewing two farmers who live on the edge of the forest we heard a chainsaw. When we asked them about it, they assured us that it was just local people, poor people, taking wood to build their houses. They were not selling it. This, they told us, was not really illegal logging.
This is a common problem, not just of understanding, but of supply and demand. Since almost all of the local forest outside of the protected area has already been logged and exported abroad, there is now no unprotected area left for local people to take wood to build a house, or make a kitchen fire. Thus, the constant struggle towards balance between human civilization and the nature that it both depends on and destroys is placed into sharp relief here. In my future posts I hope to explore more deeply a few of the many environmental issues that come up due to this struggle.
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