Uneasy, to Save the Forest for 44 Years

By : Lutfi Pratomo Kota Waringin Timur – The morning had just broken, when long squeals of orangutans woke me up. It was sounding excitingly for me. I got up and walked out from the cabin trying to find where the long and highly pitched sound came from. It excited me even more as I found the noises came from somewhere inside the forest just a stone throw away from the cabin where I and Revalino, my teammate from COP, stayed for the night. A few meters away from the cabin, which is built by COP in 2008 as a camp for the local residents guarding their ten-thousand-hectare customary forest, I saw not only the Pongo Pygmaeus Wurmbis but also owas, a local name for Hylobates Agilis Albibarbis, jazzing up the atmosphere with their long pitched voices too during that peaceful morning. The forest is located in an area called Sei Merah, at Tumbang Koling Village of Kota Waringin District – Central Kalimantan. It is a home for various animals, which are preserved by the law, and hundreds of plants including herbs species, which serve the Dayaks, indigenous people of Borneo, with traditional medicines for hundreds of years. In addition to the flora and fauna, the forest also has abundance source of food like meat from animals, vegetables, fruit and forest products such as resin, rattans, rubber etc for Sahabu family’s livelihood. “We used to live with the forest harmoniously. It provides us with anything we need to survive. The Dayaks will not make it without the forest,” said Christopel Stone Sahabu, the owner of the forest in Sei Merah. His family and relatives living at Tumbang Koling and Tumbang Sanak Village have been relying on the forest as a source of their livelihood for 44 years and cultivating the forest since 1966. It has been hard enough for him to defend his forest as most of other village residents of Tumbang Koling, whose lands situated adjacent to his forest, have sold their land to palm oil corporations. Consequently his forest is practically surrounded by palm oil plantations today. Christopel goes to his forest every the other week to ensure its security, following recent cases of log thievery and partial deforestation by the palm oil corporations in his forest last year. He will stay for a week in the cabin to clear young rubber trees from the grass, collect resin or herbs and other plants in the forest both for food and sale. Afterwards he will bring the ‘crops’ home in Luwu Buntar, his current home village. He still practices old Dayaks’ method of catching fish called rengge in a stream within his forest, three hundred meters away from the cabin. He often goes to his field in the forest by a klotok, a canoe with an engine, and would take a six-hour-river sail from his house in Luwu Buntar. However it would take two days to reach his field before COP provided him a new boat with a much more powerful engine. All of these revealed when I visited the forest defender on August 9 to 14, 2010. The bad has gone worst ever since the law of the provincial autonomy has been legalized, which also justifies the district government’s authority in issuing permits for land using. The law was made to support accelerated prosperity of the local people. However it hardly goes to favors of people like Christopel but to those who have great capitals instead. As a result two palm oil corporations have encroached into his forest, such as PT. Nabatindo Karya Utama, which has deforested 2000 hectare in the south and PT. Windu Nabatindo Abadi did the same thing in the west of the forest. It has shrunk to become 6000 now, from formerly 10000 hectare. The remaining forest has been serving as the last stronghold for fled wild animals, whose forest home in the fragmented forests nearby were cleared for palm oil plantations. The forest is easily accessible. To go there you will take a two-hour drive from Palangkaraya, the capital of Central Borneo, to an intersection called Muara jalan PT. Bumi Hutan Lestari (BHL) – located at a highway linking Palangkaraya to Sampit, the capital of Kota Waringin Timur District. From the intersection you will continue the travel with another three-hour off-road drive to Tumbang Koling Village. From the village you will take another thirty minutes to reach the forest. Christopel Stone Sahabu is aged more than seventy years old now but still looks active and is still strong enough to walk inside the forest for three hours, without displaying signs of fatigue nor breathless. “I devote my life to defend the forest not only for my descents but also for everybody,“ he said. Many of his friends and relatives have tried to persuade him to give up and sell the forest to the palm oil plantations. However this Bue, a Dayak word for an elderly man or a grandfather, remains to stick to his stand of keeping the land as a main source of his family’s livelihood – although selling the forest will likely overcome his financial problems and support his family and provide enough fund for her wives’ medication, who is suffering from uric acid and has been languishing on a bed at home now. His determination of preserving his forest is supposed to be a good model for other Dayaks in Borneo, as many of indigenous people of Borneo sold their forest for an amount of money that lasted shortly and got the forest, their main livelihood, gone forever. Many of them finally end up to becoming workers in palm oil corporations and working much harder with minimum wages in the plantations, which used to be their forest providing them with everything they need to survive and livelihoods with much better incomes. Although having great burdens as the only support for his family, this old man live his life happily and loves joking to unleash him self from pressures in his uneasy life. “Planting marijuana will be much more profitable for the country while keeping the forest sustainable as it stands, then why planting oil palms which require deforestation!” joked him. This Christopel reminds me to Chico Mendes, a man who fight for the forest sustainability for his people’s welfare in Amazon – Brazil. The morning I had in the cabin by the forest of Tumbang Koling was truly exciting. It still lingers in me as an unforgettable moment. A cup of coffee, voices of primates from the jungle and Christopel’s Stone Sahabu’s hospitality, the forest defender of indigenous Dayak, gave me a perception about what Borneo is supposed to be. I imagined Kalimantan, an Indonesian word for Borneo, with its natural forests, endemic primates like orangutans, and indigenous Dayak who live harmoniously with the nature without palm oil plantations, logging or mining companies or even the capital of Indonesia – as proposed by many that Palangkaraya in Central Kalimantan is the most suitable city to become the capital of Indonesia, replacing Jakarta, which is estimated to have over burdens by 2015. Borneo is identical to forests - which absorb CO2 and serve the world with fresh and clean air - endangered fauna such as orangutans and the Indigenous Dayak, who have been practicing wise concepts of conserving the forest. The absence of them will only lead Borneo to tragic environmental disasters, which will destroy the greediest species on earth, humans. Stone Chrostopel Sahabu