How many other countries represented at the Rio Earth Summit have such a wealth of nature? Up here on the hill I can think of perhaps just a dozen nations which haven’t trashed their natural heritage like a rental car. Maybe it doesn’t matter that Bhutan’s national airline has just one plane which flies into a single airport. Like a pretty girl chooses her suitors, Bhutan picks and chooses the foreign aid agencies with which it wants to deal. Like a legendary princess, Bhutan lives in splendid isolation, a land where there is no democracy but where every subject can request an audience with the king. Like a wise man, Bhutan has decided, for the moment, at least, to gauge its friends carefully and not base its behavior on greed.
How does a country value it’s wealth? If I were an economist I’d point out that GNP statistics mean little unless you have the vision to recognize that Bhutan has trees as far as the eye can see. Then I’d add a point that many economists would miss. There are prayer flags here that catch the clean wind and send messages to places most Rio-delegates have never dreamed of.
Chapter 9
ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES IN TINKERBELL’S SACRED FOREST
Dragonflies point the way to eco-cultural conservation
SANGBURNIH, Bali, Indonesia
It was traveller’s serendipity.
I met Made Murni while walking along the main Kuta-Seminyak road in Bali. She is a secretary for a small garment export firm, but that stifling afternoon she was in front of the factory/office doing a bit of gardening. She smiled. I smiled. It took us about five minutes to get past the tiring Indonesian queries (“You speak Indonesian!” “Where are you from?”) to the point when something in her eyes told me I could trust her with my interest in the arcane and mystical.
“My brother can help you,” she offered. North. Outside Singarajah. We agreed that I would return the next day for a letter.
I was skeptical she would have it ready, having been burned too many times by promises built on honey. But I was wrong. Besides an introduction to her family she had written instructions on how to get to her tiny village.
There are still forests in the region of Sangburnih where Made’s family lives, and I explored the area with Made’s teenage brother Surata, who became my guide and host and adopted younger brother.
We sat around for a while talking boy-talk that characterizes Indonesia as much as fried bananas and population pressure. We checked out the girls. “He’s my darling,” Surata would announce about every thirty seconds as a stream of lovely maidens strolled around. “She, Surata,” I would correct.
“Yes. She is my beautiful love,” he would giggle as the next girl sauntered by.
I tired of teaching Surata personal pronouns and urged him to explore the pura perched on the hill.
As temples go, this one was definitely blue collar. Small, not terribly elaborate, wonderfully isolated. I climbed the final set of steps, made a namaste and entered to see a wooden carved deer head, which looked like a happy-face reindeer. The place was deserted, and I felt a calm, a peace which I wanted to enjoy for a few moments without Surata lurking over my shoulder as I took notes. I asked Surata to go on ahead; I would follow shortly.
Indonesians hate to leave foreigners alone. Partly it is that they take seriously the responsibility of looking after a guest. Partly it is because they are frightened to be alone themselves and they project this fear onto others (“You’re not afraid to sleep alone?”). And I think there may be a third explanation, which is that they think that adult Europeans are clumsy, ignorant, innocent children who, instead of safely scampering down the hill to the village like any four-year-old, will take a wrong turn, break a leg, be attacked by demons, scramble fifty kilometers over the watershed and wind up crippled and broke in Denpasar. How would Surata explain that to the police?
I told Surata a half-truth, which was that I wanted to pray. Although prayer is not something for which a Balinese requires solitude, Surata did leave me alone, and I was grateful.
Imagine the setting. The temple, like all Balinese temples, faces inland, towards the mountains, the direction the Balinese call kaja. The good gods live in the inland volcanoes, the bad ones in the sea, a direction termed kelod, which is one reason most Balinese have never learned to swim. From my vantage point I looked to the dangerous kelod-north and saw several kilometers of villages, the plains, and, in the distance, the dangerous ocean. To the positive kaja-south lay reassuring mountains, garlanded with forests that provided water to the fruit trees half way up the slope and to the rice paddies at the base of the hills. A farmer with two golden brown cows ploughed the grey mud, and within less than half a square kilometer I counted at least five stages of rice cultivation.
The cultivation of wet rice, one of the four major “eco-cultural revolutions” that have transformed the shape and style of Asia, was flourishing there because of the fertility of the volcanic soil and the abundance of water that came when clouds bumped against the tree-covered hills.
Conservationists can be hard-nosed; even I have been guilty of identifying this kind of pastoral scene as an example of nature providing people with “environmental services”. Trees equal water equals food. Trees equal life. At times I have been so academic that I have tried to calculate what it would cost to replace that water if the mountains had been been stripped of trees. That’s pedantic economics, but it sells, at least in certain conservation quarters. It’s not too difficult to theorize that the Balinese’s association of the mountains with good spirits is based on the recognition that from the mountains comes water which makes agriculture possible.
The forests I contemplated were designated as reserves by the government but are managed by the people. They are useful, to be sure, but I soon stopped mentally calculating stream flows and the rupiah value of constant water and sought a different analytical structure – more calculus than arithmetic. I wanted to use the sacredness of the place to see myself more clearly. While meditating in that unheralded temple I recognized that there might be more to nature than practical economics.
I approximated a (very) modified lotus position and began to clear my mind. Soon I felt a sting, then another. Ah, a revelation. Multiple revelations. Actually I had neglected to notice that I had been sitting on a red ant track. The insects pulled me back smartly from the path to satori.
After brushing off the ants I noticed new things. On the (not-so-good) ocean side I heard sounds associated with people – distant roosters, gamelan music, motorcycles. On the (good) mountain side the people-noises were replaced by birdsong, cricket chirps and the gentle tinkle of dozens of tiny man-made waterfalls as water flowed among the rice terraces.
This, to me, was a sacred place. I’m not sure what the parameters of “sacred” are, but, like the famous definition of pornography, I know it when I see it. Particularly when there are omens. On the “good” kaja mountain side I sat amidst hundreds, perhaps thousands of golden dragonflies. Insect-Tinkerbells, flying towards the forest.
Chapter 10
WE BETTER COLLECT THE BIRDS’ NESTS BEFORE THE OUTSIDERS GET HERE
In isolated eastern Indonesia, the big question is who owns the resources
JIRLAI, Aru, Indonesia
What could be more exciting than being with men who walk into the forest wearing faded basketball shorts, encumbered only with hand-made bow and arrows, accompanied by just a couple of dogs, and return home an hour or two later with a deer? Where in the world are people still so independent and self-sufficient?
With my friend Mark van der Wal, and a small team of researchers and support crew, I met two local men – Ely and Yos – in the tiny village of Jirlai on the island of Aru, just off the western coast of New Guinea.
I asked Ely and Yos how they made money. They explained they sell birds of paradise, edible birds’ nests made from the saliva of swiftlets, and deer jerky. Had they lived on the coast of this rarely-visited island, their answer likely would have been sea turtles, sea cucumbers, mother of pearl and sharks’ fins. They rel
y on nature, and one of their main sources of cash – the birds of paradise – are protected species.
Even in as isolated a place as Aru (a Puerto Rico-sized island some four times zones and five flights from the capital of Jakarta) people need some cash – to pay school fees, to buy kerosene and monosodium glutamate and beer and soap, to buy a T-shirt and a dress for the wife.
How ironic. We envy them for their simplicity. They envy us for our possessions. I thought of philosopher Thomas Berry’s comment that the future belongs not to those who have the most but to those who need the least. I bet Ely and Yos wouldn’t agree. They only see the present. And in the present, the guy with the most toys wins. And they’re not unique – given half a chance, there are precious few societies in the world where people would not opt for electricity and TV, motorcycles and access to a town.
We asked whether they had noticed a reduction in birds or fish or big mammals.
“Yes. There are fewer birds nests to collect now,” the two men told me.
“But why?”
“We collect the nests three or four times a year, so there are fewer swiflets, of course.”
“What if you only collect nests twice a year? What if you set up some kind of control system?” I asked.
“Yes! Sasi” they said, referring to a traditional control of harvesting natural resources. But they gave me looks that said it would never work. “The problem is, if we don’t take them someone else will.”
“Who?”
“Outsiders.”
Which shows that things haven’t changed much since the Victorian explorer Alfred Russel Wallace was here in the middle of the 19th century. “The trade carried on at Dobbo [now Dobo, still the only town in Aru] is very considerable,” he wrote. “This year there were fifteen large praus from Macassar [Makasar], and perhaps a hundred small boats from Ceram, Goram, and Ké [Kei]. The Macassar cargoes are worth about £1000 each, and the other boats take away perhaps about £3000 worth, so that the whole exports may be estimated at £18,000 per annum.”
Then and now the town of Dobo flourished because traders were raping and pillaging what Wallace called “natural productions”. Dobo, where the majority of Aru’s 63,000 people live, is in the running for the most miserable town in Indonesia with stinking open drains, houses built over tidal flats reeking of sewage, muddy lanes, malarial mosquitoes and surly, overfed Chinese traders. Half hidden away in the back of restaurants we saw rare parrots and cockatoos, available for a price. We ogled baskets of turd-like dried sea cucumbers, piles of dried sharks’ fins. Merchants would happily sell you trinkets made from mother of pearl whose real price was never mentioned – the environmental cost, of course, but more important the fact that the untrained village lads who were paid by the piece sometimes got the bends because they dove too deep, came up too quickly, using faulty equipment provided by the Chinese traders. Boats sailed from Dobo to Hong Kong restaurants with reef fish caught by dynamiting the coral beds. Other boats were loaded with live green sea turtles, as long as a man’s leg, stacked on their backs like grotesque poker chips. In the Aru village of Sia, we saw where many of these creatures came from. Friendly kids offered to sell us cassowary eggs, crocodile skins and dugong teeth. I admired a small green parrot that a young happy boy offered, only US$5, a bargain, and protected by a law conceived in distant Jakarta. The boy had no concept this was an endangered species, a heritage of mankind, a treasure beyond words, a poster-animal for the western conservation movement. To him it was simply a product that could help him earn his school fees.
Things haven’t changed since Wallace’s time. Wherever people aren’t in control of their resources, nature gets hammered. This is the essence of the conservation problem.
One day Mark and I wanted some vegetables to accompany the daily diet of roast pork and fish, and in the forest of Aru asked Ely if there were any edible leaves growing nearby.
Ely disappeared for the afternoon. That night we were pleasantly surprised when he cooked up a potful of leaves, probably thinking it doesn’t take much to keep two Europeans happy. The next day, while out walking, we came upon a tree, maybe 20 meters tall, about 30 centimeters in diameter that had recently been chopped down. “What happened here?” we asked. “Yesterday you said you wanted vegetables,” Ely answered, plucking some withering leaves from the fallen tree. We were incredulous. “Never mind,” he said, allaying our unspoken doubts. “The deer like these leaves. We’ll go hunting here tomorrow.”
Around the fire we got to talking about abstractions.
“What’s the most important thing to give to your children?”
“Sayang,” Ely and Yos answered. Love and attention. “And education.”
“Are you people more like the [Malay-race] Javanese or the [Negroid] Papuans?” I asked.
“Papuan,” they agreed.
“I see lots of Javanese in the towns,” I said, expecting to provoke an anti-Javanese response. “Javanese settlers move to Irian Jaya for transmigration. Javanese run the government.”
“We need more education,” Ely and Yos answered warily.
“Why don’t you have better schools?” I asked, recognizing I was treading on sensitive ground.
“The Javanese want to keep us stupid,” they eventually said.
“And the future? What about your son, Ely? Will he grow up to be an engineer, or governor of the province?”
Ely and Yos were silent. I pushed. Is there an Arunese equivalent of the American dream in which any child can grow up to be president?
“The boy will probably grow up to be like me,” Ely finally admitted.
“And his world?”
“More people. Too many people fishing with nets. Fewer fish, fewer turtles. Fewer birds of paradise.”
Ely and Yos then asked me what I thought would happen to nature.
I felt strangely close to these men. I told them how they face the same problems as other rural people in South America and Africa and all over Asia. How rich countries, like mine, could afford anything they wanted, and how less-rich countries, like theirs, survived by providing these luxuries. I told them about birds of paradise feathers being in demand a century ago for ladies hats.
They were too poor to offer us tea.
We talked about the Indonesian concept of a Ratu Adil, a just leader. How local people, like Ely and Yos, know full well how to maintain wildlife populations but don’t have a chance because the global marketplace forces them into rapidly depleting their birds nests. If Ely and Yos don’t make money from nature then someone else, an outsider, will. To me it was clear. Don’t give outsiders a chance to get rich, I said. They listened quietly.
I thought I should tell them about UNPO, the Dutch-based Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization that fights for statehood for Mohawks from Quebec, Kurds from Iraq and Frisians from Holland. And if that doesn’t work, well, get tough.
Then I stopped. I sounded like Che Guevera. Like a college student of the late sixties. Rebel. Get control of your destiny. Peasants of the world arise. I was sounding ominously paternalistic.
“Wouldn’t you be happier being in control of your resources?” I asked. With each question Ely became increasingly withdrawn. To me the conversation was a mischievous intellectual exercise, like asking, during a spring afternoon on campus in the late sixties, whether we should take over the university president’s office. To Ely, however, this talk was conspiratorial, vaguely illegal, and certainly anti-social, and not at all in the spirit of Indonesia’s national feel-good philosophy of pancasila.
“Too bad we haven’t seen birds of paradise,” I said, changing the subject. Like many visitors, we longed to see these rare birds, found only in Aru and New Guinea and surrounding islands. Besides being strikingly ornate, the birds come with a legend worthy of an epic poem. The early Portuguese and Dutch explorers, who were basically adventurous traders seeking wealth in the spice islands, then the only source of cloves and nutmeg as well as pepper and numerous other valuable
commodities, were presented with curious brightly colored bird skins that had no feet. The locals had simply hacked off the appendages, perhaps deciding that a leg-less bird was more aesthetically pleasing. The Europeans however, deduced that the creatures spent their entire lives in the air, using a depression in the female’s back as an open-air nest, and dubbed them, in Portuguese, as Passaros de Sol, or Birds of the Sun. The learned Dutchmen who followed the Portuguese dusted off their Latin schooling and named the creature Avis paradiseus, or Paradise Bird.
We accepted that we would never glimpse these rare creatures, so instead we explored the island’s caves. In one cave, up to our knees in cold water, our flashlights caught glimpses of spooky white fish, and we flailed around like schoolboys trying to catch some in our mist net which was designed for nocturnal bats. Our idea was that we would catch one, pickle it in alcohol, and send it to an ichthyologist for identification. Too bad for the fish, but that’s the price of science. Ely, seeing what we were after, borrowed one of our flashlights and disappeared into the depths of the grotto. He came back twenty minutes later with two small fish that he had speared. We were pleased, thinking that these must be new species. We were somewhat less amused when they arrived on our dinner plates a couple of hours later, grilled.
Finally, on our last morning, on the walk out of the forest we saw a tree full of birds of paradise. There were well over a dozen, their calls somewhere between a squawk and a honk, call it a squank. One male was displaying, yellow and white tail feathers splayed, like a Portofino playboy cruising in his Ferrari. This was the great bird of paradise, one of just two bird of paradise species found on Aru.
The Sultan and the Mermaid Queen Page 18