To Earth with a Bump

A pre-warning…this is a mammoth one (this is what happens when you care about something and have spare time on your hands!)

If you’ve ever been to a rainforest then you will know that it is a chaos of noises; layer upon layer of different sounds fill your ears at any one one time- Hundreds of different bird songs (most of the time you can’t even see them, but you can sure as hell hear them!), crickets hissing, monkeys whooping, a whole orchestra of different cicadas whistling their way through the day, every type has its own unique sound (my ‘favourite’ is the one that starts singing like clockwork at 5.30 am every day and sounds just like a car alarm. Pure joy). You can hear the rain coming through the trees long before you see it or feel it, it’s quite exhilarating and puts a tingle up your spine…And then, in some rainforests there are the logging vans and the chainsaws. The dull, depressing, omnipresent drone of the logging vans resonates as a sinister undertone in the background of life in the jungle in Suka-hutan, coupled with the jarring sound of the saws that accompany them. And every now and then you get a pause in the chainsaw, followed by a desperately slow, painful creak, and then the inevitable crash. You stop whatever you’re doing and take a moment to compose yourself and take a deep, long breath. It’s not the kind of sound you can let pass you by…it strikes you right into your core.

We decided to come to Suka-hutan as we knew that Stephen and Sarah own 300 hectares of rainforest in an area that is currently being heavily logged, in Malaysia where the palm oil craze is both mind-blowing and devastating in equal measure. This couple have set out to protect their land, with the long-term goal of gazetting the trees on their property (therefore protecting them from potential loggers), and developing an eco-tourist project to educate people about the rainforest. They sounded like people we wanted to meet, and this sounded like a project we wanted to be involved in.

It took about two minutes after meeting Stephen before we got on to the topic. This is clearly something he cares deeply about.

The road that leads to Suka-hutan is a dirt track that follows the valley through from Lawas to Stephen and Sarah’s home. The only reason there is a road there is that loggers need to have access to the forest for trees, and a route to carry them out. Driving down this road for two hours on our way to Suka-hutan, you would be forgiven for thinking that the forest is relatively healthy and untouched as it lies thick on both sides of the track and it all feels very wild and inaccessible and everything looks very green. However, Stephen would point out every now and then a ridiculously tall tree that towered above the rest. This, he pointed out, was how high the canopy used to be. The current existing canopy lay a gut-wrenching 10, 20, even 30 foot or so below that as only smaller trees that are no good for logging are left. That was quite hard to swallow.

He then pointed out the skyline on the top of the hill, and where there should be a solid line of trees, there is a now only a straggly line up of sparse trees remaining. It was depressing. The entire 2 hour journey from Lawas to Stephen’s place had the same harrowing symptoms where loggers had systematically combed through the forest and removed any large trees. You might think, well at least they’ve left the remainder there, and yes, in comparison to many areas of Borneo where land is just completely flattened to make way for monoculture (usually palm oil plantations), this is not nearly as devastating. In fact some species even prosper in selectively logged forest (eg. berry-eating nectarivorous birds such as bulbuls and sunbirds), but many species will decline as a result (eg. insect-eaters such as pittas, babblers and flycatchers). But if I tell you that primary, untouched forest in Borneo should have approx. 1,200 tree species and 220+ bird species, yet secondary forest can have as few as 80 tree species and approx. 60 bird species, that perhaps opens your eyes a little.  

That said, if left to regenerate, after 30 years, logged land should be able to regenerate to its original numbers of both bird and tree species. This is where people like Stephen and Sarah come in.

Stephen and Sarah built their own house 10 years ago, on the top of a hill in the centre of their land with this incredible view. 

Two weeks before we arrived the loggers reached this stretch of forest and holes started appearing in the hillside where trees were being logged (if you look carefully enough you can spot them in the picture). By the time we’ve come to leave there are now 5 holes where mud is visible through the canopy of trees. Every day at Suka-hutan we could hear the logging trucks and chainsaws creeping steadily and steadily closer. We couldn’t see them  but my god could we hear them well above the other sounds of the forest.

Stephen and Sarah arrived back home two days ago and we had the horrible job of telling them our concerns that they must be close, so Stephen decided that we should take a jungle trek to his perimeters the following day to see how close they were and to see if there were any signs of them encroaching his land.

So Tuesday arrived and we set off with lots of water and having made suitable precautions against leeches (thick socks with trousers tucked in and a second pair on top as apparently even the small ones can get through socks. Joy). We trekked down the hillside through the forest-you follow vague ancient hunting trails where there is a vague path through the thickness, but we still needed a machete to get us through-this is serious jungle!

We slowly meandered our way down the steep hill to the river at the bottom which marks the boundary of Stephen and Sarah’s land. And this is where we got a massive smack in the face. It was devastation like I can’t describe it. It’s so hard to put into words. Stephen’s side of the river was thick, luscious jungle, like something straight out of a Tarzan film, and the other side....like a war zone. We weren’t wrong when we thought they loggers had been close…they were on Stephen’s doorstep and this was worse than even he’d feared. Rather than selectively removing only the trees they needed, these loggers had come in with their diggers and mowed down everything in their path. By everything, I mean everything. I have put some photos below but I don’t think they do it justice as they don’t convey the vast openness you are suddenly confronted with. I can’t describe what it felt like to emerge from this thick forest where you’ve spent two weeks without seeing a soul and then smack, you are confronted with a gaping hole and a vast ceiling of sky…like a giant piece has been blown out of the Earth. It knocks the wind out of you.

The loggers were still there, still busy, so we decided they should see us with our cameras and know we were there…anything to try and keep them away from Stephen’s land. Stephen also wanted to gauge the extent of the destruction so we picked our way across the new wasteland, weaving in and out of the river, following his boarder. I have to say this was one of the most harrowing and humbling experiences of my life. You learn about it in school, you read about it in the newspaper, you watch it on the TV, and it’s all quite abstract..“An area of rainforest the size of <insert arbitary American state here> is destroyed every minute/hour/day”…but it’s all just numbers of things that happen a long way from your sofa in rainy old England. And here we were staring it in its disgusting, gruesome face. And it felt shit. They wouldn’t want my pity, but my heart broke for Stephen and Sarah. I can walk away from this but this is their front garden.

We spent about an hour picking our way along the border. They hadn’t encroached on his land, but in about three substantial areas they had dropped trees right across the river onto his land, blocking the normal path of the river.

One of the worst things about this is that this suggests these people are not just selectively logging, it looks like they’re clearing the land entirely. And that probably means the end of the forest, and the start of palm oil which would be the worst case scenario. Rainforest soil when cleared is extremely nutrient poor, and you end up left with deserts of mud where very little can grow. Forest clearance is linked with mudslides, river silting, and the absolute loss of biodiversity. If this land becomes palm oil, you can throw pesticides, herbicides and people traffic (to name but a few) into the mix. Just to twist the knife in.

Stephen’s land is an island, and becoming more and more so. I’ve mentioned before the kinds of animals Stephen has seen on his land...macaques, gibbons, the extremely rare clouded leopard, sunbears…and that’s just the mammals. If these animals can’t go anywhere they won’t be able to breed, they won’t be able to move, they will simply disappear. That’s not a hunch, that’s a fact.

The day after our forest trek was the day we were leaving. We had our breakfast on the deck as usual overlooking the incredible view of the forest and Stephen came up to us and said gently…”Beautiful isn’t it? I’m glad you got to see it like this…Perhaps you’ll be our last Wwoofers to see it like this...” What do you say to that?

I am sat here writing this on our 4 hour journey back from Lawas to KK watching field after field of palm oil slide past my window, feeling a bit broken. It’s the hopelessness, the inevitability of it…this gargantuan feeling of irreversible loss. Stephen and Sarah are doing their best, but as I’ve written in previous blogs, they are two people up against an army. They have been beaten up, had guns to their heads, been framed and let down time and time again by police and the judicial system. All because they want to keep their own precious land safe. If Stephen puts even a foot wrong he could lose his visa and be thrown out of the country so all he can do is watch as the forest around him falls, and do his best to protect his own tiny oasis in this horribly scarred world. It’s absolutely heart-breaking.

We can help. Even from those sofas in England. We can raise the profile, we can sign petitions, we can avoid foods containing palm oil (http://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/which-everyday-products-contain-palm-oil), we can raise our children to be aware of these issues, or teach them in schools, we can only buy sustainable products and recycled loo roll….And me? First stop, I’m off to the Kinabatangen to plant some trees!