The Lost Forest

by John Francis Kinsella

  Chapter 36

  A BRAZILLIAN

  Boats and ethnology, a funny mix, but that was Paul Suarez, he was a specialist in both. Boats came first and the forestry paid the bills. The boats were expensive, much more expensive than any mistress.

  He had been born into a wealthy family in Buenos Aires, where he lived until the family moved to the United States when he was sixteen years old. He studied ethnology, not with the view to it being a profession but because it was fashionable amongst students. He added tropical forest ecology because in South America the two went together because governments killed Indians and dispossessed them of their natural home. Suarez like many other young people of his generation had taken up the banner in their defence.

  After graduation he moved from Buenos Aires to Europe to continue his education and in doing so becoming fluent in French and German. His manners were smooth only enhancing his cultured background, although he retained a very slight South American accent, giving him a very certain charm.

  A little older and more realistic Paul Suarez commenced his career with a Boston based consulting firm, advising them on forestry and conservation in the Amazon Basin. After almost five years he was appointed as a permanent adviser based in Rio de Janeiro, where the Brazilian market promised them high growth.

  He built a solid reputation advising government policy makers concerned by the effect the bad treatment of the Indians had on the country’s international image. Suarez then moved on joining a multinational group as an internal consultant for a vast reforestation project in Amazonia.

  Deeply engaged the business of his employers in Amazonia, he never ceased to be concerned by the destruction of the Indian habitat, an endless conflict between the needs of his country with its burgeoning population and the forest peoples. In spite of his real sincerity he was not made to spend his life as a missionary, struggling to survive, defending the Indian way of life in some village that lay village deep in the heart of the Amazonian forest.

  The frugal life in Amazonia away from the distractions of civilisation finally took its toll and Suarez having accumulated enough money decided that a change was in order. The conflict of interest had become too much and declaring his disgust with his government’s policies he simply chose the easy route out. He packed his bags and headed for San Diego in California where he had dreamt of spending his days as a kind of latter day Hemingway, boating and writing about the Indians.

  It did not turn out quite as he had expected, as an over enthusiastic South American he could not resist the infinite number of business temptations of Southern California. He became involved in a boat building company in which he invested heavily. They built boats for the very rich in the USA and overseas.

  His enthusiasm and ambition overtook his sense of business. Through a combination of poor judgment and bad luck he lost his shirt to a Lebanese Arab, who embroiled him in a sordid affair delivering boats to rich Saudi Arabians in Southern Spain. Paul’s problem was that he was too trusting with the result his Lebanese middleman disappeared with several million dollars disappearing into his murky eastern Mediterranean world.

  It was a dramatic setback for him. He fell back on his professional background, setting himself up as an independent consultant, specialised in tropical forest policy. He was forced to put as much space as possible between himself and California setting himself up in Montreal, where many of the large forest based industry companies and consulting firms had their headquarters.

  He was now wiser and though perhaps a little over-weight he cut a fine figure, a smart dresser, often wearing a blazer and British style regimental tie. He had the kind of qualities that inspired the confidence of his clients, a good listener with endless patience, and above all an incomparable knowledge of tropical forest systems and ecology.

  Canada was not know for its tropical forests and his customers whose business had spread into South East Asia engaged him for the advice on their projects and lobbying governments when the forests of Malaysia and Indonesia had been full of promise before the economic crisis had started to bite.

  He was well introduced in Jakarta with contacts at the Ministry of Forests in Jakarta. He was close to the Minister Wihartjo and his Director General Rudini, whom he advised on long term planning of pulpwood plantations and conservation questions. Wihartjo had recommended him to Aris on the setting up of timber estates and plantations needed for the supply of raw materials to his mills.

  Ennis had met Suarez as a guest of Aris at one of his business dinners. They became friends with a common interest in ethnology, comparing their experiences in the forests of South East Asia and Amazonia which were remarkably similar. Beyond that their business worlds were very different but little by little they got around to mixing in art and boats. Suarez took pleasure in introducing Ennis to his liking for island hopping, sailing to little known islands, and those much more know such as Krakatoa.

  Together with Pierre Ros they had flown to Bali to meet Paul who was keeping his promise to take Ennis on a boat trip to the Island of Komodo for an extended weekend. Ennis also wanted to explore Flores, 370 miles east of Bali, beyond Komodo. He could visit the caves where ancient stone tools had been found and possibly other islands that lay to the east, a potential source of antiques and ethnic art, a little time away from Jakarta would not hurt as the riots and disorder seemed to have taken hold of the city.

  Suarez following Aris’ recommendations of Aris chartered a twelve metre sailing boat from Jim Collins, an Australian who had opted for a wanderers life island hopping paid by well healed tourists. It was Saturday morning in the half light when they sailed out amongst the Bugis’ sailing ships in Sape Harbour. They headed down the long narrow bay and were soon in the open sea, turning east around the point with a stiff breeze behind them, the coast a grey-blue haze to the south.

  Suarez told them that they should be on the island before midday if the breeze kept-up; normally the sailing time to Komodo was about five hours. They sailed between Pulau Banta and Pulau Kelap where they soon saw Komodo before them. The Komodo National Park consisted of several islands, the largest of which was Komodo; it was located between the islands of Sumbawa and Flores in the Lesser Sunda Islands, 200 nautical miles to the east of Bali.

  Once underway and Jim Collins had set the course they relaxed watching the coast line slip by, there was little else to do for the next few hours. Their conversation wandered and Suarez started described to Ennis his work in East Kalimantan on a project that was to transform the secondary forest areas into pulpwood plantations.

  “So little by little the forest is being cut down to make for agricultural land and the tribes’ people will become town dwellers.”

  ‘I’m afraid do and there’s very little we can about it, the population is growing at an alarming rate and they need land and food.’

  ‘The population of Java, not Borneo!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter where, for the government it’s all Indonesia.’

  Suarez described the secondary forest that sprung up replacing the natural forest after the valuable timber had been felled by the logging companies, consisting of dominants, the giants of the forest that form the pillars around which the forest was built. The loggers now wanted to clear cut the secondary forest as part of a programme to settle immigrants from densely populated Java clear, transforming the secondary forest into agricultural land and plantations of oil palms, rubber trees and pulpwood.

  ‘So this means that little by little Borneo will be deforested?’

  ‘That’s right, the same as in Brazil and the Philippines.’

  ‘Do agree with that?’ questioned Ennis.

  ‘Whether I agree or not makes little difference.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll tell you a story,’ he said, ‘the story of the Jari River project in Amazonia, a story of how men destroy nature without the slightest consideration for future generations.’

  ‘I think I’ve heard of Jari,’ Ennis s
aid vaguely. ‘It wasn’t Ludwig was it?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t really Ludwig who started it all, sure it had been his baby, but above all Jari was fully backed by General Golbery.’

  ‘Golbery?’

  ‘A general who controlled the Extraordinary Ministry for Regional Agencies in Brazil. Later he became the Chief of State security. It was unusual because he had some very strange ideas about geopolitics.’

  ‘What do you mean by strange?’ asked Ennis.

  ‘Well, he controlled and influenced Brazil’s development of its natural resources for several decades. He was a man who stuck to his policies...even when it should have been obvious that he was on the wrong track.

  ‘How exactly was he involved with Jari?’

  ‘Jari was what I suppose you could call a joint-venture between government and capitalism. One of the most well known because of the publicity of Daniel K.Ludwig’s involvement.

  ‘I see,’ Ennis nodded.

  ‘It was seen at the start as a frontier project, you know the kind that the media likes to talk about, that is before the ecologist movement even existed,’ he chuckled.

  ‘When did it start?’

  ‘On the Jari River! You know where that is?’ he said glancing at Ennis. ‘South from the Tuma-Humac Mountains that separate French Guiana from Brazil, the plantations were started in 1967.’

  Ennis was none the wiser, and furrowed his brow as if trying to visualise the geography northern Brazil. Paul had talked about it many times, but geographically it remained vague.

  ‘Who was Ludwig anyway?’ asked Ennis.

  ‘An American billionaire, enormously rich, his fortune was made in shipping.’

  ‘Yeah, I seem to remember that, but what was he doing in the Amazon anyway?’

  ‘I’m not really sure, but you know his idea to make plantations there wasn’t the first.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘The first, in modern times, was none other than Henry Ford. He tried to set-up rubber plantations, at a place he called Fordlandia, where he bought two and a half million acres, much further into the interior than Jari.’

  ‘Fordlandia! That goes back quite a way?’

  ‘Yes. It wasn’t such a big project as Ludwig’s, about seven thousand acres of rubber trees were planted, they should have been ready for tapping in 1936, but one disaster followed another. In the end, after spending over ten million dollars, Ford sold out to the Brazilian government, for a twentieth of that sum in 1945. I guess he wanted to control the source of rubber for his car tyres.

  ‘Anyway it was a fiasco, just as Ludwig’s was to end up forty years later. The only difference was that Ludwig’s project was on a very much bigger scale and surprisingly looking back most of mistakes were the same!’

  Ennis looked at Suarez, he had stopped talking, the swell had increased and the boat was rising and falling with a greater degree than earlier.

  ‘The weather is changing?’

  ‘No, it’s just the swell.’

  ‘So what happened with Ludwig?’

  ‘Well Ludwig bought three million acres in northern Para, on the north side of the Amazon, about 200 kilometres from the island of Marajo. He planned plantations of a fast growing Indian tree known as Gemilina arborea. They’d calculated that there would be a shortage of wood fibre for the paper pulp industry.’

  ‘Was he wrong?’ said Ennis smiling.

  ‘You know he was! There’s no shortage now or in the near future, but then Brazil imported all of its paper pulp from the USA, illogical when you think of the vast forests resources in Amazonia, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What about Borneo?’

  ‘You don’t need to cut down all the forest, that’s what I tell them. A couple of hundred thousand hectares can supply all the wood you want. They don’t need to need to push the Dayaks into slum towns and run down villages where’s there’s no work. Anyway it wasn’t only pulp wood plantations that Ludwig planned, he also envisaged vast rice paddies, the biggest in the world, mining and livestock operations and workers townships, as well as 2,500 miles of roads and about fifty miles of railroad track.’

  ‘Sounds a bit like Aris’ project,’ said Ennis frowning.

  ‘That’s exactly why I’m here in Indonesia. Not only Aris but the Ministry of Forests want to avoid the kind of mistakes made over the last few years in the forestry industry here. They want to set up eco-tourism, providing a living for the local peoples and developing nature reserves, like the Komodo National Park. Avoiding the mistakes Ludwig and Ford made. Everything that could go wrong went wrong from the start, Murphy’s Law. I’m not making excuses, even if I had been there, it wouldn’t have made any difference!’ he laughed. ‘You know those god dammed bulldozers, even scrapped off the top soil, and practically all of Gemilina seedlings failed,’ he said shaking his head. ‘The rest were attacked by disease.’

  The boat veered the right as they neared the shoreline sailing down the west coast of Komodo.

  ‘Sandbanks, I have to be careful, we wouldn’t want to be stranded would we?’ he laughed.

  They were still some ten kilometres away.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he laughed and continued his story. ‘Anyway, less than a quarter of the planned plantations had been actually planted, and the success rate of those was fifty percent below what they had calculated.’

  ‘How was that?’ asked Ennis, accepting a beer and one of the sandwiches that Jim Collins was handing around.

  ‘I suppose the real reasons were a lack of botanists and experienced silviculturists in tropical forestry.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Ludwig ploughed ahead with his plans and a paper pulp mill was built in Japan.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m more or less familiar with the rest of the story, but fill me in on the details.’

  ‘Well, as you know, the mill was built on a couple of barges. They towed all the way from Japan, across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, then across the Atlantic and finally down the Amazon to the Jari River.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember it was a really quite a pharonic achievement.’

  ‘You’re right, the barges were beached at the final destination, a ready prepared site on the banks of the river.’

  Collins pointed to the bay ahead of them, ‘That’s Loh Liang, the landing point, we’ll be there soon.’

  ‘The mill was started up on time, but the plantations had fallen way behind schedule, so the mill lacked raw material. Because the plantations could not provide all the wood needed, so they started cutting down the natural forest to fuel the power generating plant that fuelled the mills boilers for steam to run the power generating turbines.’

  ‘What about the rest of the project.’

  ‘Well then they hired some Japanese agronomists but they also ran into trouble.’

  ‘Are you saying there was some kind of sabotage?’

  ‘That’s really difficult to say, but my opinion is there were too many coincidences. The whole thing was a complete economic disaster after Ludwig had poured in hundreds of million of dollars. They were hiring and firing project directors one after the other, in total over a period of fourteen years, there were about thirty of them.’

  ‘And you were one of them?’

  ‘Yes and no, I wasn’t one of the project directors, I hired as a consultant to put order into the forestry projects and plantations. I was there six years altogether, a miracle.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘Well the whole thing practically came to a standstill. Ludwig could not obtain any more money from the Brazilian government to extend his operations for a second stage of the pulp mill. Finally he threw in the towel and sold out to a consortium of companies.’

  ‘What about the plantations then?’

  ‘Well they didn’t exactly give up, but the Gemilina plantations were abandoned in 1982, too expensive. It wasn’t what could be called an outstanding success story!’ he said slapping his knee and laughing.


  ‘What about Komodo?’

  ‘Well, you could call it, hot, dry and hilly. It’s about three hundred square kilometres with a lot less rainfall than just about anywhere else in Indonesia, it’s not volcanic like Flores that’s further east, where there’s a huge extinct volcano called Keli Mutu.’

  They sailed around the rugged south coast of the island with its sheer cliffs, the result of volcanic activity in the distant past, evidenced by the crater bay in which Nusa Kode lay, then north up the Linta Strait to the Bay of Loh Liang where they anchored twenty metres off the beach. They were met by the Park’s rangers who were to guide them on their tour of the island and discover the dragons at the feeding site. Komodo Island was thirty-five kilometres long and fifteen wide, with a low range of mountains running along the north to south axis. Most of the island was a palm type savannah with the vestiges of rainforest and bamboo forest on the mountains.

  The dragons or monitor lizards measured over three meters long and weigh up to 165 kilos. They were fearsome creatures the largest lizard on earth with enormous jaws, preying on live deer, goats and wild pigs. Until the end of the nineteenth century beyond Indonesia they were thought to be nothing more than a legend.

  They made their way up to the feeding station about half an hour from Loh Liang noting the signs ‘Danger Zone’ and heeding the warning of the guide.

  ‘Don’t forget they’re big and powerful with very sharp teeth and claws -- so don’t try to annoy them. They can open their mouth like a serpent and even swallow a whole animal, you know a goat or a man.’

  They looked at him unbelievingly.

  ‘I’m not kidding, they’re also very fast over short distances.’

  ‘Not as dangerous as Jakarta right now!’

  ‘You’re right thre, it’s looking bad.’

  ‘How do you see things in Indonesia Paul?’

  ‘Well, to be frank I agree with you, things are looking bad.’

  ‘Do you think it will affect the expedition?’

  ‘If things get out of hand yes.’

  ‘Like what.’

  ‘They can get pretty wild, if they start running amok as they often do when things get out of control.’

  They planned the night on board the yacht the accommodation onshore consisted of a few cottages. Dinner was grilled fish on the beach, freshly caught that afternoon by the local fishermen.