Photographer James Whitlow Delano, who has contributed to Nuru’s STAND WITH HAITI, Dignity, and World Food Crisis events, is working on a new project.
It concerns Malaysian rainforest peoples losing their forest to logging and eventually “green” bio-fuel.
A selection of the work:
Palms in the undercanopy of the 1.07 million acre rainforest in Taman Negara National Park. The protected 130 million year old primary rainforest is the homeland of the Batek Negrito people and supports tigers, sumatran rhinoceros, Asian elephants, Malaysian gaur (wild bovine), tapir, gibbons, monkeys totalling over 200 species of terrestrial animals, over 300 species of birds, over 1,000 species of butterfly, and over 14,500 species of flowering plants and trees.
Balang Weng, a Penan man, scans the rainforest canopy where he heard a crashing sound for an unseen macaque (monkey). The Penan used to roam the rainforest following game or fruit that was in season as nomads. This is no longer possible because selective logging has pulled out important trees, damaged the soil, silts up rivers reducing food for the Penan, fish in streams and prey animals on the forest floor and in the canopy. Now, they can no longer sustain themselves from the forest alone and suppliment their diet with rice bought from the nearest towns, like Long Lellang. Although Penan are famous for hunting with poison arrows from a blowpipe, many Penan now use small arms, especially if they have small cuts on their fingers or hands because the poison will kill the hunter just as it would prey if it enters the blood stream.
Buttressed roots stabilize a towering 260ft high old growth rainforest tree in the very shallow tropical soil in Taman Negara National Park, Kelantan, Malaysia. Even the soil in the virgin forests are exceedingly shallow meaning that most of the bio mass of a tropical rainforest is found in the living trees and plants, not the soil. When the forest is cut, even selectively logged, what little soil there is immediately turns streams muddy brown and, if clear cut and converted to oil palm plantations, there is almost no top soil left at all. Torrential tropical downpours, typical to the ever wet rainforests of Malaysia, quickly wash it all away.
Logging road used by Samling Global Ltd. logging company pushes deeper toward one of the last unprotected parcels of old growth forest in the interior of Borneo. According to Forbes Magazine, Samling’s father & son owners, Yaw Teck Seng & Yaw Chee Ming have an estimated worth of $480 million. According to Survival International, there are roughly 10,000 to 12,000 traditionally nomadic Penan living in the forests of Sarawak now in settled communities. The per capita GDP in Malaysia is $6,970 (World Bank). Even if, taking the upper figure of 12,000, all the Penan people earned the per capita GDP of $6970, which these forest dwellers who are only marginally participating in the cash economy certainly would not, the entire population of the Penan people would earn $84 million per year, less than 20% the net total worth of the two tycoon owners of Samling Global Limited.
Palm oil processing plant where the rainforest once stood, where the Batek Negritos lived. The rainforest must be clear cut before oil palm can be planted. Oil palm plantations are impoverished “green deserts”. Lian Pin Koh and David S. Wilcove of Princeton University, analyzing data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, found that 55-59 percent of oil palm expansion in Malaysia, used in part to produce bio fuel, spread at the expense of the rainforest. Between 1990 and 2005 the area of oil palm plantations in Malaysia more than doubled to 8.9 million acres while Malaysia correspondingly lost roughly 3.7 million acres of forest.
Workers, mostly Indonesians of dubious visa status, cut logs from the Borneo rainforest into planks of lumber for export in one of the sawmills that line the banks of Batang (River) Kemena, Bintulu, Sarawak, Malaysia. According to the United Nations Environment Programme – World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), 2004 World Database on Protected Areas, Malaysia lost an average of 194,00 acres of forest per year between 1990 and 2000. Between 2000 and 2005, the rate of deforestation actually increased by 85.1%. From 1990 to 2005, Malaysia forest cover decreased by 3.7 million acres.
Squalid workers dormitory at one of the large sawmills that line the banks of Batang (River) Kemena, Bintulu, Sarawak, Malaysia. There are jobs generated from logging but the quality of jobs is questionable. Since many of the workers are migrants from Indonesia, it brings into question how much the local population is helped at all by the logging industry by the creation of jobs.
The Baram River, the jungle thoroughfare for the indigenous Dayak peoples, snakes through the last great forest in Southeast Asia, the interior forest of Borneo, and into Penan territory. Not long ago, the Baram River and its tributaries were the only way from the Kelibits and the Penans to travel to the coast from Long Lellang. The journey took 10 days. For a couple of decades, tons of top soil, mostly washed away because intensive logging operations which exposes the earth to torrential rains in this watershed have turned the waters the color of cafe latte.
Balang Weng surveys a logging road barricade on another separate logging road, built the previous month by the residents of Long Kelamu await logging trucks from Samling Global Ltd. who they hope to prevent entering virgin Borneo rainforest between the Penan settlements of Long Kelamu and Long Sabai.
Palatial home, one of many found in large enclaves around Miri, a former oil city and now known for oil palm, plywood mills and a passable, pleasant beach on the muddy Borneo coast. Many of these homes, locals concur, are holiday homes for the largely ethnic Chinese Malaysians tycoons, referred to as “Foochow” (Fuzhou, Fujian) Chinese, from Sibu (once known as “New Foochow”), which is Malaysia’s second largest city set in the broad, muddy Rejang River delta. The dominant tycoons of the timber extraction and oil palm industry in Sarawak mostly hail from the “Foochow” Chinese community and two of Sarawak’s largest logging companies Samling Global Ltd. and Shin Yang Group are headquartered in Miri. Sarawak Oil Palms Berhad is also based in Miri and Group Executive Chairman, Ling Chiong Ho of Sarawak Oil Palms Berhad (SOPB) happens also to be the founder and chairman of Shin Yang Group. Tang Tiong Ing, a Non-Executive Director of SOPB, joined Shin Yang Group as a Group Accountant in 1991 and is an appointed representative of Shin Yang Plantation Sdn. Bhd. which is a substantial shareholder of Sarawak Oil Palms Berhad.
Security sign at the entrance to the sea front estate of the owner of Shin Yang Group leaves little doubt what would happen to an intruder should they enter the grounds of the estate that logging over the Borneo rainforest has built. Luak Bay, south of Miri, Sarawak, Malaysia.
The Batek Negrito and Penan peoples do not fit into Malaysia’s image of itself and its future as a fully industialized country. Malaysia has moved up to the next level of development where it can afford to think about the environment, and it can afford to stop growing at the expense of its 130 million year old rainforests which is a treasure to the planet. Kuala Lumpur is a fully modern city with plenty of green space. Perhaps the balance found in this modern metropolis can act as a guide to saving greater rural green spaces.
