I am so happy to see the Ford Foundation invest in Indigenous Indonesian communities who are the advocates and protectors of their forests. Great photos, too. We should all appreciate this comment from within that shows how humans have made themselves vulnerable to pandemics:
"The pandemic is also demonstrating Mother Nature’s awesome power to disrupt human societies—a point climate activists have been making for decades. In fact, polls show that a record number of people is asking how we can build back in a more environmentally sustainable way. Indigenous leaders, environmental activists, and scientists are advancing another key point about the link between forests and pandemics: If we keep turning forests into plantations, that means more opportunity for pathogens to jump from animals to human beings."
Stated differently, COVID is not "attacking us," but rather, we are attacking the once-pristine, ancient forests that are their habitats. Yes, us humans and our ways of knowing and being are the culprits in this equation.
In addition, according to this June 22, 2020 piece from Vox titled, "The Covid-19 pandemic is threatening vital rainforests" due to a lack of enforcement of environmental laws in Brazil and Indonesia.
The harvesting of palm oil that includes the establishment of "palm-oil
plantations" is taking place with native peoples getting divested of their own land.
I encourage all to read this piece titled, "The Devastating Effects of the World's Palm Oil Addiction." As consumers, we should avoid using products that use palm oil and we should sign petitions like this one to get companies to stop buying products with palm oil: Tell Trader Joe's to stop using palm oil
As an important policy step to protect rainforests, Native peoples everywhere need both a legal acknowledgment and safeguarding of their land rights. To the activists of Indonesia and Brazil who risk their lives defending their land, I applaud you for your tremendous courage.
It is to our peril as humans that we not see either Brazil's or Indonesia's forests—and indeed all forests everywhere—as essential to our survival and well-being.
-Angela Valenzuela
The Fight for Indonesia’s Forests
Steve Rhee, Senior Program Officer, Indonesia
5 AUGUST 2020
When the indigenous community in Sungai Utik turned down an offer to buy its forests in 1973, it didn’t expect to be fighting for its land rights nearly 50 years later.
Like many Dayak Iban elders on the island of Borneo, Apai Janggut can’t determine his precise age. He knows he has to be over 80, because he was born when the Dutch still colonized Indonesia. But you’d never guess he’s that old if you saw the lithe, barefoot ease with which he navigates the dense rainforest his community protects as a sacred gift from its ancestors.
In February, just before Indonesia locked down for COVID-19, I tried (and sometimes failed) to keep up with Apai on a hike through what he calls “the supermarket”—the pristine hardwood forest that has provided almost all of his community’s nutritional and medical needs for the past 130 years. He shared why his community, based in the tiny Indonesian hamlet of Sungai Utik, has fought so hard to protect its forests from encroachment and extraction.
My visits to Sungai Utik have given me a ground-level understanding of what hard science has now proven at the global level: Indigenous peoples are the best stewards of their land and the massive quantities of carbon within them—especially when they gain legal acknowledgment of their land rights. When indigenous peoples secure this formal recognition, they have the authority to fend off extraction, logging, and other commercial operations that result in forest destruction. In fact, the World Resources Institute reports that deforestation is up to seven times lower inside legally recognized indigenous territories than outside them.
Indigenous and other local communities have legitimate claims to nearly half of the world’s land. And yet they have been granted legal rights to less than 20 percent. If indigenous communities and their allies narrow that gap, it will have important implications for all citizens of this warming planet. If we don’t, the math suggests there’s no way, short of an unprecedented technological breakthrough, that governments can meet the Paris climate targets and keep global warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Granting indigenous peoples the rights to their land isn’t just critical for our planet; it’s more cost- effective than attracting billion-dollar investments from green investors like Bill Gates and multilateral institutions. Competing approaches to climate-change mitigation, such as carbon-capture at coal plants, cost up to 42 times more. Therefore, investing in land rights is not just the right thing to do for indigenous peoples; it’s also a smart, sustainable solution for addressing the greatest environmental threat we all face.
Caterpillars and Chainsaws
Sungai Utik’s struggle to protect its forest, which stores some 1.3 million tons of carbon, began in 1973. That’s when a Malaysian logging company showed up with a large box once full of instant noodles but packed with rolls of cash. Many other loggers, pulp-and-paper companies, and palm-plantation owners soon came bearing gifts.
To assess these offers, Apai helped lead a slow, careful Dayak Iban deliberation process, enabling all adult members of the community to weigh in on the potential costs and benefits. The community determined that the money would run out quickly, but the damage to the forest would last for generations. “We knew if we lost our forest, we’d lose our culture,” Apai said.
Other areas of Indonesian Borneo, especially those without the close ties and strong leadership of Sungai Utik, signed deals and lost their land. As a result, the rainforest of Borneo, one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, has been decimated. In 1973, more than 75 percent of Borneo was covered in dense forest. Today, only 38 percent of Borneo’s forests remain intact. When flying over Borneo, I see ever-bigger bald spots and more hair plugs—the perfectly spaced rows of monoculture palm trees characteristic of industrial plantations.
