Paganwolf said:FANTASTIC! Great program, it tears my heart apart to see the damage done by logging though Ive seen this first hand in Borneo and it sickens me to see it here too, i remember stopping to look at a beautiful jungle view in front of a large hill sadly when we got to the other side of the hill a mining company had removed the other side to crush up for building materials
I remember my first taste of the damage done by logging, after three days of walking though pristine jungle we suddenly walked out it to a huge clearing devoid of trees, just rubble and piles of logs, I was stunned.... even more so when I saw the big road bulldozed to the clearing that snaked away though the jungle.
a short distance from the clearing was the long house of long luban here the logging companies with the assistance of the Malaysian government* had built a long house to house the Nomadic penan that lived in the forest they were cutting down.
*(governments dont like nomads, they dont pay taxes, they difficult to control, and they are embarrassing to a country who wants to be modern, they prefer settling them. logging companies like to settle them as it keeps them distracted and lessens the chance of them becoming hostile)
the penan that had settled down in the long house were excited, they had a generator and electric lights, a radio, and even a TV with a video player to watch the two videos they had been given.
they didnt know just how many trees the logging company was going to cut down, they didnt realise that when the loggers moved on the would stop supplying them with diesel for the generator or that they would not be able to hunt to feed themselves because of the damage to the land around them.
they did not know that this had happened to so many other groups of penan in before them, settled in longhouses to keep them happy and passive whilst the land is destroyed, then abandoned by the companies, only then realising that they had no food and the rivers were tainted, only the realizing that they had been cheated.
they can not go back to their hunter gather life as the forest is gone, and they do not understand the new modern money driven world that they now find themselves a part of.
On my last day at long luban I went fishing with a penan man from the village, I noticed that he did not fish in the river in the valley we were in but walked some distance over to the next valley instead. When we got back to the long house to someone who could translate I asked why? he told me that there were no fish in the valley anymore, they had gone since the loggers came, he didnt know why they had gone, he thought maybe the noise of the chainsaws scared them like the animals.
when I had flown over the jungle on my way to the landing strip at Bario before I stared my walk in there had been heavy cloud cover, when I flew out however my heart sank as I saw with clear skys that the jungle was covered in a criss cross network of bulldozed roads and clearings with landslides in places where the clearing had removed the trees holding the soil togeather.
its very easy to cheat people who's culture is based on sharing, a people who's language does not have words for thief or stolen, and if you cant cheat them... like some of the penan who have fought back?.... well you arrest them of course.... the land belongs to the loggers they bought it from the govenment.
In Mulu I visited a penan village were the they were settled by the loggers over a decade ago. They were doing well and made a living selling baskets and trinkets to the tourists that came to visit the caves, it gave me hope for those that I had come to know at long luban, but the transition had been hard and a lot of suffering had been endured before they etched out a place in this new world they found themselves in.
I hope those at long luban do as well in the future, they have hard times ahead.
