Earth's oldest ecosystem endangered
Squalid resettlement camps no substitute for Penan's jungle homeland.
Help save Sarawak's remaining rainforest.
Mutan Tuo of Long Iman - one of hundreds of Penan Natives who have been forced from their jungle homeland to live in the squalor of re-settlement camps - proudly displays a poster symbolizing his people's determination and an urgent plea to the world for help.
Nowhere on the earth is there an older and richer ecosystem than the rainforests of Borneo and nowhere is a forest being destroyed with such ferocious speed as in Sarawak, the Malaysian state of northern Borneo. For the past 180 million years, long before the dinosaurs became extinct, Borneo's forests have been home to the world's greatest wealth of plant and animal life. And yet today, relatively speaking, we know more about the moon, Jupiter and Mars, than this most ancient ecosystem on earth.
A mere ten square hectares plot of rainforest in Borneo contains more tree species than are found in all of Canada and the continental U.S.A. combined. The diversity is so staggering that one square metre of forest litter here can contain up to 200 different species of ants.
Many of the world's important food crops and domestic animals have been developed from wild South East Asia's rainforest species. Wild stocks will continually need to be sought to improve crop yields and develop new disease- resistant strains of plants and animals. As the world's richest botanical zone, this same forest is the world's future pharmacy.
Moving silently through the understory with their blowpipes and poisened dart quivers, Penan hunters Dawat and Nyiong carefully scan the rainforest canopy for food. No sound, no movement goes undetected. A Penan hunter can strike a moving target with a poison dart at a range of more than 50 feet.
More than half of all species on earth live in rainforest canopies. A very few, like the Atlas moth (above) have been classified. Below: The flared buttressed roots of large rainforest trees are a response to shallow soil and strong tropical wild storms.
Today, less than one percent of the world's tropical forest plants have been tested for pharmaceutical properties, yet 25 percent of all our modern drugs come from these sources. 75 percent of all cancer treatment drugs are derived from rainforest plants. Traditional healers in South East Asia use more than 6,500 forest plants for treating diseases ranging from malaria and stomach ulcers to syphilis.
The Penan people of Borneo may be the world's greatest pharmacists. Their ancestors have lived in the Borneo jungles longer than any other people-- perhaps 40,000 years or perhaps even longer. The surviving Penan culture has a wealth of knowledge of medicinal plants unknown to modern science.
If the current rate of destruction continues, long before science even classifies these species, many will be extinct. Worldwild, unless there is a drastic change in consciousness coupled with less consumption in the developed countries and more genuine help to overpopulated, over exploited, poverty stricken tropical countries with rainforests, more than a million rainforest species are expected to become extinct during the next decade.
Scientists are describing the rapid destruction of tropical forests now taking place on earth as the worst environmental disaster of all times. By the year 2000, at the present rate of cutting, we shall have removed 65 percent of the forests of the humid tropics. After that, it will not be long before they vanish, for once 70 to 80 percent of a tropical forest is destroyed, the remainder can no longer sustain the climate and the whole ecosystem collapses.
Borneo today represents a microcosm of this global disaster in the making. It is now at the threshold point. An immediate moratorium on logging in Sarawak's primary forests must be imposed to protect the remaining forest ecocsytem and the people who live there.
Thailand, following great loss of human life from flooding due to deforestation, has recently outlawed all logging. But Thailand, West Malaysia and the Philippines are already largely deforested. In Borneo, there is still an opportunity to set a different course. Borneo's rainforests and its tribal peoples hold answers to questions we have not yet thought to ask. Their loss will have global consequences more than we can imagine.
