A Way to Stay
In the time of our fathers, the tropical rainforests stood immense, inviolable, a mantle of green stretching across entire continents. That era is no more. Today in many parts of the tropics the clouds are made of smoke, the scents are of grease and lube oil, and the sounds one hears are of machinery, the buzz of chainsaws, and the cacophony of enormous reptilian earth movers hissing and moaning with exertion......
One species goes extinct every thirty minutes, and the rate is accelerating. Unless there is a dramatic global reduction in deforestation, more than a million species may become extinct within the next thirty years......
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As the roads pierce the wild heart of the forests, the indigenous cultures suffer the most, the very people who have over the course of thousands of years developed an intimate knowledge of the land; men and women who, lacking the technology to transform the forest, chose instead long ago to understand it. Now, with dozens of tribal groups facing assimilation or destruction, we stand to lose in a single generation wisdom of millennia......
In Sarawak, the wisdom of an entire people is waiting to be herd. Numbering some 7,600, of whom perhaps a thousand remain deep in the forest following their ancient way of life, the Penan are one of the few truly nomadic rainforest societies of the earth.
Excerts from the essay A Way to Stay by Wade Davis in PENAN - Voice for the Borneo Rainforest
So friend, help us preserve this land as it is. Help us so that they will divide, share the land with us, -- not take it all away.
After Dawat had finished speaking there was silence. Only the forest sounds of distant birds and cicades remained.
Ah, we would be grateful, thankful. We would be happy if some land is saved for us Penan.
