Dispatch #116 - First-hand look at Illegal Logging
Johor Bahru, Malaysia
Our jungle odyssey was coming to an end, but we had one more excursion in mind before leaving Borneo behind, probably forever. Herbert and I wanted to actually see the illegal logging which was desecrating the national park and threatening the survival of several endangered species, including the orangutan.
Our guide, Andi, had once been a logger himself and knew many of the illegal loggers in the area, so we asked him to take us back into the jungle, this time not in search of orangutans, but to seek out the people whose livelihood depended on the destruction of one of the last remaining pieces of protected orangutan habitat in the world.
Northern Magic had already brought us up the river half way to our destination, but for the rest of the trip we again needed a wooden longboat. This time our driver was Anung, a cheerful young man with a large smile and an elegant white cap on his head. Wearing this special head covering, we learned, is something devout Muslims do to show that they have completed their haj, or pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. Anung looked rather young to have already made his pilgrimage, and he sheepishly confessed to me that he hadn't actually made his haj -- he was just wearing the cap because it looked good. I had a secret theory he did it mainly to impress the beautiful young women of Kumai.
Up the river we headed again, past the turnoff to Camp Leakey, past the abandoned station the machete-wielding loggers had attacked just weeks before, past many crude logging tracks which permitted the loggers to steal valuable hardwoods from inside the park. Our plan was to visit the actual loggers who had been part of the attack, who were now working within the territory they had recently seized as their own.
As we trundled our way upriver, we were passed in quick succession by three muscular speedboats, each packed full of uniformed men. They were zooming along the river at high speed, "Miami Vice" style, leaving a huge wake that rocked the floating plants at the river's edge and tore some of them away from their roots. These were park rangers, apparently intent on stopping the very loggers we were on our way to visit. We had earlier seen masses of them at the park office, fit young men in crisp green uniforms armed with automatic weapons. They looked an impressive show of force indeed, but we weren't entirely convinced.
On our earlier trip up the river, we had spent hours discussing the problem of illegal logging with various people and what we learned was uniformly depressing: despite periodic crackdowns, there was no real attempt to stop the logging in the park at all. Most of the people whose job it was to stop the logging were in fact accepting money from the loggers, permitting them to go about their work unimpeded by considerations like the law or park boundaries.
Some rangers, in fact, were said to be building huge new homes they never could have afforded on a forest ranger's modest salary.
So what was the purpose of zooming around with rifles and motorboats?
To get the names of the loggers, was the answer, so that the rangers could go back to the logging bosses in Kumai and demand money for each of the loggers they had "caught". Or, to confiscate their log booms, so that the rangers could sell them privately and finance their living expenses that way.
One person we met, in fact, had explained matter-of-factly to us that the corruption was so entrenched that when a new group of rangers had recently been assigned to the park, they came to him openly and asked: "Okay, we're new here, can you explain to us how we get our bribes from the loggers set up?" Another story we heard was that a large boom of illegal logs had actually been protected by armed men from the Indonesian navy as it was floated down the river.
So with this as background, we were actually more curious than nervous when the Kumai vice squad roared by and left us rocking in their wake. We wondered how many loggers they would, in fact, be successful in catching that day.
We arrived at a loggers' camp, another rude collection of shanties perched on stilts at the water's edge across the river from the national park boundary. Half a dozen loggers and their families were there, smiling as we passed around cigarettes and candies.
(Later, Michael, a rabid anti-smoker, expressed horror at us having passed cigarettes around to the men, reminding us that every cigarette would shorten their lives. To be truthful, Herbert and I hadn't been too happy about this ourselves, and had debated it long and hard. But in Indonesia, as in most developing countries, cigarettes are a valuable gift, almost a second currency.
"Well, think of it this way," I answered, groping for a way out of the moral dilemma my son had so clearly pointed out.
"If every cigarette cuts minutes from the loggers' lives, then at least we're saving trees."
"Oh," said Michael, after a thoughtful pause. "I hadn't thought about that. I guess that makes me feel better.")
The logging team spiciously, suspecting us of being spies from Greenpeace, we were paddled across the river in wobbly dugout canoes. We proceeded inside a tiny tributary, the waters of which were a rich orangey-black, not like the muddy Sekonyer, which is polluted from sediment and mercury run-off from the illegal gold fields upstream.
The logging track we followed was almost invisible from the river. Like the others we had seen, it was made like a crude oversized railway built from logs. In preparation for the crackdown, all but one of the trees already felled had earlier been transported down the river, but one particularly huge one remained, and now the loggers worked for more than half an hour trying to lever the massive tree onto a wooden sled to permit it to be pushed down the track to the river. While they worked and sweated amongst the trees, we could hear the park rangers passing by in their speedboats, but it didn't seem to disturb the loggers in the least.
In the end, with a little extra help from Andi, Anung and Herbert, the tree was at last maneuvered onto the sled. One of the loggers took a bar of soap and greased the track with it, and quickly the men slid the toboggan and the giant log balanced on it down the track to the water. Moving a few tons of wood was surprisingly quick in this way, and the men explained that they could make up to ten three-kilometre trips each day, earning each of them about $300 a month. To us it looked like a very hard way to earn a living.
The men let us photograph and videotape them as they worked, and laughed at my clumsy attempts to follow them as they nimbly walked on the log track to where they were actively felling trees. Behind my back, they joked about me needing to learn how to walk. Eventually I copied them and took off my sandals, traveling barefoot as they did, and every now and then, as I fell off the track into the swamp, I wondered if my bare feet would come up dripping with leeches. But they never did.
After we were shown where they were actually cutting trees, in that part of the park they had newly wrested from the research camp, we returned down the track to the longboat, where our driver Anung had miraculously put together a feast.
We invited the loggers to join us, which they did gratefully but shyly, gobbling up mountains of rice with their fingers. They loosened up when we passed our photo album from home around for them to see. Shots of our house and suburban street didn't interest them much, but they were fascinated with our Algonquin Park camping photos, and carefully studied the pictures of a Canadian pine forest and especially the construction of our cedar canoe.
Then we left the loggers behind and returned to Northern Magic, still tied up at the first station alongside Nanamuk, and where the monkey trio of Michael Junior, Magic, and Neil awaited us. On the way back we were once again rocked by boatloads of rangers passing us on their return trip to their homes in Kumai. We never did hear of any loggers being actually stopped, arrested, or fined as a result of that day's activities. But the big speedboats did look pretty cool.
Michael the gibbon and Neil the macaque had been making themselves at home on our boat and getting into all kinds of mischief, darting inside to make raids on our fruit hammock, swinging boldly around the rigging and generally turning Northern Magic into a primate playground.
Our boys and the kids from Nanamuk were engrossed in a game of Risk inside our salon when Neil made one of her surprise attacks. Swiping up a large handful of plastic Risk army pieces with her hands, she stuffed them into her cheeks the way a squirrel does and then leapt off the boat and scampered up a tree. There she sat, cracking the plastic artillery units, cavalry and infantry in her teeth as if they were nuts, her bushy eyebrows bobbing up and down all the while, which gave her a hilarious expression that looked alternately shocked and intent. Every few minutes she would eject a few pieces of mangled plastic from her mouth, and they would fall as colourful crumbs into the water below her perch. Neil did this with tremendous satisfaction and much eyebrow waggling all evening long, and even the next morning still retained a few unchomped pieces in her mouth.
Later a Magic Card game, underway in our cockpit, was raided as well, when Neil thought to spice up the action by ripping some of the boys' precious cards into pieces.
Michael Junior's naughty tendencies weren't as destructive and tended more towards the stealing of food and the receiving of attention -- at both of which he succeeded admirably. By the time we left, Michael had turned every last one of us into gibbon fans for life.
As for Magic, he stayed tied up and cowering beside the park ranger's house until Dr. Gede was satisfied he was ready for release. A few days later, after we returned to Kumai, Magic was pronounced fit, healthy, and possessed of sufficient wild instincts to be able to make a go of it on his own.
And so, the very same day Northern Magic turned her bow towards the blue waters of the South China Sea, Magic the gibbon, unfettered at last, quietly disappeared into the jungle into which he had been born.
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