Coffee with Kate | Illegal Logging
The Orang-Asli and Orang-Utan
The Jungle — Where people and primates suffer.
Orang-Utans are beautiful primates, and Orang-Asli are beautiful people. Both live in the jungle.
Most people know about the former, but fewer have heard of the latter.
The former are loved by most, the latter considered inconvenient by many.
I lived and worked in the jungles of South East Asia among its indigenous peoples. We tracked illegal logging using satellite change detection.
Cutting tress down illegally destroys people's lives, specifically, in the case to which I refer, the Orang Asli. Other tribal peoples in the region suffer a similar fate, but I can’t attest to it because I wasn’t among them.
This problem of illegal logging is about corruption, and it’s not the same problem as deforestation, which may result from legal tree felling activities.
Strip logging the forest destroys our global bio-diversity and the natural habitat for miles beyond the border of the incident. Many people see the post-apocalyptic effect of illegal logging through images of Orang Utans clinging to lone trees or wandering through decimated jungles, barely subsisting. Where are the Orang-Asli?
Illegal logging is not a surreptitious removal of trees by mysterious thieves in the night. The mechanical engines of destruction required to munch thousands of hectares of jungle are not easily hidden, arrive unnoticed nor rapid consumers.
Illegal logging concessions look like legal ones. They present fake permits, have official signage at the entrance to their logging concession camp, and benefit from the corrupt silence of law enforcement, politicians, and even royalty.
If you check permits, they exist in a void where nobody verifies or denies them.
Mostly, the people working on an illegal logging concession don’t even know. These chainsaw, plant, and equipment operators and truckers have no idea because the corruption plays out at a much higher level.
There are armed security guards on site. It’s dangerous.
When corrupt officials collude with criminals to remove trees illegally, there is no Social Environmental Impact Study and, therefore, no mitigation strategy for affected communities of animals or people. There is also no planned restoration for the land to become forest again because it likely never will.
Once trees are gone, the heavy monsoon rains afflicting the region do not stop. Water runs off the land more quickly, with no roots or trees to hold and consume it.
Minerals and silt strangle river waterways with increased toxicity and unnavigable water depth.
Indigenous people can’t fish or travel.
The increased volume at which rainfall runs-off causes flooding, exacerbated by silted rivers. Proud, independent people become refugees, reliant, most times, on those who stole their forest. They are victims, their villages become an incubus for disease.
Rattan disappears, depriving indigenous people of the opportunity to grow, harvest, sell or use it to make furniture or tourist curios, to earn and buy food.
No work, no food, no village, family scattered, diversity lost. Humanity mourns.
“Come — work for your palm plantation overlord.”
Yes, indeed, a rich reward for losing the life they had.
The new owners of the land are usually giant corporations that grow palm, rubber, cocoa, or another commodity crop. They’ll offer displaced people a job amounting to slavery.
Salvation, for those not keen to sell their soul to plantation corporations, is a prison cell in the city called an ‘apartment,’ These proud, independent Orang Asli people can borrow debt to buy nice stuff, then find a job and buy a phone.
Now and then, they call mom and dad, who rot at the displaced people's camp on a scarred landscape pockmarked by juvenile palm trees.
The mud and flood look great today, son.
They can join the civilised world when the trees are gone, for sure, they’ll be happy because everyone else is, right?
The Orang Asli, just like the Orang Utan and countless other species, relies on the rest of us to do the right thing.
Not for the climate tomorrow but for theirs today.
I write romance, erotic fiction, and about life on several blogs.
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