Giants of the Monsoon Forest

by Giants of the Monsoon Forest- Living

  What about Brunei? A small and lesser-known sovereign state on the northern coast of the island of Borneo, Brunei is within the Asian elephant’s natural range. Since its major industry is offshore gas rather than agriculture, it has a generous amount of forest cover. Its towns become highly flood-prone during monsoon, as does its one major city, called Bandar Seri Begawan. The country’s gas deposits have made the country extremely wealthy, not just by Southeast Asian standards: Brunei has one of the top five gross domestic products per capita on earth—ahead of those of the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Norway.

  Brunei is so small that elephants from the Borneo interior rarely wander into its forests. Generally, the country doesn’t even turn up on official lists of countries with wild Asian elephants. Yet the herds of Borneo elephants are present—if not literally within Brunei’s borders, then certainly in the nearby Malaysian and Indonesian sections of Borneo’s huge forest interior. The Borneo elephant, which is a subspecies of the Asian elephant, has a nebulous past. Some experts say that Borneo’s elephants are actually the last remaining Javanese elephants, who were brought to Borneo by the Sultan of Sulu in the seventeenth century, prior to elephants’ eventual disappearance from the island of Java.

  An alternative theory is that Borneo’s population of elephants is indigenous and goes back for millennia.13 The elephants got there, this theory goes, the way they got to Java and Sumatra: some ten thousand years ago, all three of these islands were connected to the Asian mainland. During that epoch, Southeast Asia was not divided into a mainland half and a maritime half, as it is today, but rather constituted a huge and united subcontinental landmass that paleogeographers refer to as Sundaland. The southern half of Sundaland rapidly flooded during the melting of the Arctic ice sheet, which raised global sea levels. All that remains of southern Sundaland today is the Indonesian archipelago west of Lombok (at the so-called Wallace Line), in particular the three large islands of Java, Sumatra, and Borneo. Of course, it’s plausible that both theories are right, that Javanese elephants transplanted to Borneo mated with indigenous Borneo elephants. All these animals are, after all, simply Asian elephants.

  I visited Brunei in 2016, not to see elephants but to see Brunei’s main city. Could this place have elephants, I wondered, even though it is a modern urban environment? Bandar Seri Begawan feels very much like two completely separate cities superimposed on top of each other. One is a kind of “pile dwelling” settlement. Residential neighborhoods built entirely on stilts sprawl into the city’s main waterway, the Brunei River, linked by a labyrinthine network of wooden planks and gangways.

  These districts exemplify a traditional Malayan urban form, the kampong, or water village, built partly in anticipation of periodic flooding. Bandar Seri Begawan has several of these water villages, the largest of which, Kampong Ayer, is effectively a man-made island on stilts in the middle of the river. People get from kampong to kampong on private boats or water taxis, which are well organized throughout the city. The kampong style of settlement, where many urban residents live over the water rather than in the city’s plains and hills, keeps many of those plains and hills clear of development, so the city is heavily penetrated by lush forest.

  The city’s other layer feels much more like the Islamic petro-metropolises of the Persian Gulf. While some of Brunei’s gas wealth has gone toward the kampong settlements, most of it has gone toward a more conventionally modern city. This other urban layer has wide streets, concrete apartment buildings, an office downtown (with a rather colorless shopping complex), and a distinctive neotraditional gold-domed mosque. The city was a British imperial outpost during part of its history—called Brunei Town then—and this legacy shows up in the demographics of the city’s workforce, which often hails from India, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. Workers come from nearby Malaysia and Indonesia as well. To a solitary visitor wandering Bandar’s streets, the city feels a bit like a large American college town during the summer months when everything is a bit too quiet and one’s only company is the chilly wealth on display in the surrounding institutional architecture. At the same time, Bandar Seri Begawan is very much its own place, with a unique and startling presence of nature in the heart of the city. During my visit, macaque monkeys were everywhere, sometimes lingering by street markets. Enduring the hot midday sun in one of the kampong districts, I spotted small crocodiles and a monitor lizard lurking in the water below.

  Several forest corridors begin near the downtown area and wind their way toward the larger forest country beyond the city’s edge. These corridors are full of bamboo and vines and creepers, as well as many macaques and the famous Borneo proboscis monkeys. To me, the fact that the city already had these urban forest corridors in place, virtually all them with a substantial amount of uninterrupted connectivity to the vast Borneo rainforest beyond, seemed extraordinary. Of course, the city has had the luxury to be developed in this way because of the offshore gas, which is environmentally damaging but not in ways that a wanderer here would perceive or experience directly. Given the spatial layout of the city, its wealth, its kampong-like structuring around the inevitability of annual flooding, and its proximity to the Borneo rainforest, I thought it incredible that the place didn’t have a few domesticated elephants already.

  It could. Trained work elephants here could assist in transport and logistics during the rainy season, moving passengers and supplies across flooded roads, both within the city and between the towns and villages that dot Brunei’s forested hinterland. A Bruneian department of floodtime logistics could hire mahouts from the Trans-Patkai region or from central Burma—areas where mahouts still tend to be skilled at using their elephants during the rainy season. Over time, these skills might be picked up by Malay-speaking Bruneians, Malaysians, Indonesians, and other groups already in Brunei, just as the Kachins learned mahoutship skills from the Hkamtis. Administrative expertise could come from the Burmese forestry department, with its knowledge about setting up elephant villages, and from the Kachin Independence Army, with its knowledge about conducting elephant-based transportation during floodtime on a systematic basis.

  The work elephants, too, would likely at first come from elsewhere. The elephants could spend much of the year in the rainforest beyond the limits of Bandar Seri Begawan, tended to by their mahouts. During the rainy season, they would come with their human attendants into the city, to do far safer work than elephants did in Banda Aceh in early 2005. If such a model were shown to be effective in Brunei, it might be replicated in other parts of South and Southeast Asia, as other regions urbanize and develop. Even some cities in China, within the Asian elephant’s range dating from ancient times, could foster these kinds of government-managed elephant teams for floodtime logistics.

  Using elephants in this way could open up exciting new possibilities in planning human-inhabited landscapes around “soft,” flexible infrastructure. Rather than requiring every new development in flood-prone terrain to involve construction of huge new levees, concrete run-off channels, and expensive, hulking road viaducts, more watercourses could be left to meander naturally. Communities could live alongside these courses, following some version of the Sissiri river-crossing model: temporary bridges would cross the rivers during the dry season, barges would cross during transitional times of year, and elephants would cross during the wet season (when unpredictable channel shifts create problems for barges). Not only would such communities be well positioned to absorb the shock of major flooding events, they would be able to capitalize on the benefits (agricultural and aquacultural) of being set on riparian ecosystems with healthy, dynamic flooding cycles.

  It’s just a dream, of course. But elephants’ usefulness in flooded areas, rural and urban, is real. Investing in elephants to help during floods is the kind of thing that could connect elephants’ unique abilities to a set of human needs that is likely to grow in coming years—a linkage that could even, in turn, help reverse Asian elephants’ population decline. Until now, th
e Asian elephants’ principal working alliance has been with those who ride them in the forest. But this alliance could grow to include many other human beings as well.

  CONCLUSION

  THE PROSPECTS FOR THE ASIAN ELEPHANT ARE BLEAK. Just twenty years ago, there were sixty thousand Asian elephants on Earth, already a calamitously small number. Today the number seems closer to forty thousand. This drop has occurred despite the efforts of a vigorous international conservation community and despite the presence of relatively stable political conditions throughout South and Southeast Asia. In fact, elephants have done relatively well in areas adjacent to zones of political instability (in particular around Burma’s Kachin State), while improved economic development throughout this part of the world has gone hand in hand with dramatic rates of deforestation. In the section of the planet most densely settled with humans, little room is left over for the planet’s second-largest land animal.

  Any hopeful future for the species likely has to entail those who know them best: the people who fetch elephants out of the forest every morning and return them every night. Such people have the most sophisticated understanding of how humans and elephants can coexist within the same social and environmental setting. And yet in the global community of professional conservationists, veterinarians, scientists, and development experts committed to protecting Asian elephants, virtually no one involved hails from mahouts’ camps or villages. The global elephant conservation community holds many conferences. Fandis like Miloswar and mahouts like Mong Cho ought to be involved in them. The conferences are usually held in major cities—London, Singapore, Bangkok, Bangalore—but sometimes they should be in Chowkham, Miao, or Tanai, places with lots of people who’ve spent long years living and working with elephants deep in the forest—catching them, training them, riding them, fetching them, finding that one has become pregnant, raising and training the calf, and so on. Their involvement would broaden and improve the professional conversation about what to do with these giants in an upcoming era when Asia’s human population and agricultural output will surely continue to expand.

  Also usually in attendance at these conferences are representatives from the forest and wildlife bureaucracies of the states that have large elephant populations. But people like Colonel Nan, who is in a quasi-governmental, militant independence organization, ought to be there as well. Indeed, the demographic and environmental situation of Asia in the twenty-first century may make the Kachin Independence Army’s “elephant brigade” model, which organizes an elephant management bureaucracy around the imperative of transportation, even more valuable and instructive than the Burmese government’s current “timber enterprise” model, which organizes elephant management around the goal of logging.

  Asian elephants would likely also benefit from a correction of a few misperceptions that are still widespread among many people in parts of the world that do not naturally have elephants of their own—and this includes most of the developed or “first” world. An all-too-common perceptual conflation of Asian with African elephants, combined with frequent and visually graphic news reporting on ivory poaching in Africa, has left many people with the mistaken impression that the main problem afflicting elephants today is that they’re receiving insufficient antipoaching protections from police. And that impression may be accurate for parts of Africa and may correctly comprehend a significant threat facing the African elephant species.

  But the fact is that Africa has half a million elephants, while Asia has a tenth the number. Even if we grant that ivory poaching is a major problem and that better protections are needed, the main problem afflicting elephants in Asia is not ivory poaching but deforestation. The reason Asian elephants’ numbers are so low compared with those of African elephants is that thus far, deforestation between the Indus and Yangtze rivers has been a vastly more intensive historical process than has deforestation between the Senegal and the Zambezi. This strongly suggests that whatever hope the Asian species has rests in the hands of those human communities with a proven, ongoing ability to base their livelihoods on elephant domestication practices that keep elephants situated within the forest.

  This problem of the perception, or misperception, of ivory poaching gets to a much deeper issue, a moral one. To many outsiders interested in the welfare of the elephants, support for antipoaching measures, or for larger wildlife reserves, may seem morally very intuitive, offering a particular appeal to the conscience, whereas the capture and conscription of individual elephants is much more morally fraught. Even if one of the core aims of forest-based domestication, looked at in totally “utilitarian” terms, is to keep a larger percentage of Asian elephants situated within forest ranges, and to give them plenty of free roaming and mating time in the forest, the sheer domination of these elephants’ lives—they are literally in chains, after all—may strike a morally distressing note for many outside observers, and for readers of this book, who want to see elephants free and in the wild.

  I have attempted to complicate this picture of domination. The chains are breakable. Many elephants seem to have profound feelings of loyalty and protectiveness to their mahouts and their mahouts’ comrades. The whole system of the nighttime release depends upon the elephants’ not taking advantage of a constant opportunity to escape. The elephants might even, to some extent, be the ones innovating some of the work tasks that they perform, or aspects of those work tasks, as a kind of collective strategy of survival. What I would urge outsiders concerned for elephants’ long-term welfare to consider is that the desire (an all-too-human desire) to gravitate toward holding the “pure” or “perfect” positions is not the same thing as Asian elephants’ desire to survive in a human-dominated world. The elephants do not have the luxury to ignore Voltaire’s old aphorism that the perfect is the enemy of the good.

  The relationship between the elephants and their forest mahouts certainly contains problems and frustrations. Currently, mahouts have to fetch their elephants in the forest on a daily basis, sometimes for many years on end. This keeps the mahouts more or less permanently wedded to the forest, as long as they’re attending to their elephant. For some mahouts, like Mong Cho, even visiting close family members in a nearby village occurs only on occasion. Camp and forest life, and the bond with the elephants, reign supreme.

  This situation could perhaps be ameliorated by the introduction of recent technology. For instance, the elephants could wear lightweight GPS devices, allowing mahouts to find them even if they’ve wandered many miles away. During the off season, elephants could be given multiple days or even weeks in a row in the forest, with fetters loosened, and the mahout could get more time participating in village or town life. Perhaps an elephant could be given months—years, even!—in the forest, permitted to wander for a hundred miles or more, as the mahout watches the route on a computer screen and eventually “fetches” the elephant in a truck-pulled portable stable.

  This GPS-enabled scenario would grant more personal freedom and autonomy to both forest mahout and elephant, allowing them to live as more “regular” members of their respective species. Of course, overlong separations could pull the human and elephant apart. But perhaps carefully staggered, short “vacations” could improve the interspecies bond rather than undermine it.

  UPSTREAM FROM the fording spot where Burmay-Moti and her mahout Pradip cross the Sissiri with their passengers and cargo, a concrete viaduct is under construction: the Trans-Arunachal Highway. Intended to follow the long, Himalaya-hugging arc of Arunachal Pradesh, and to help assert Indian sovereignty in territory still claimed by China, the highway must pass over many high viaducts to traverse the floodplains of Himalayan rivers draining toward the Brahmaputra: the Sissiri, the Dibang, the Siang, the Lohit, the Dihing, and others, all of which have a gigantic water discharge during monsoon and can become, in multiple cases, several miles wide. The viaducts have to be both higher and wider than the reach of the most severe floods, so as not to be submerged. The viaduct projects are attempting to
overcome a daunting engineering challenge, and once completed, they may prove insufficient in the event of a major rivercourse-altering earthquake, of the type that struck in 1950 and forced the total abandonment of the town of Sadiya.1

  These lumbering concrete viaducts are, of course, the sort of transportation infrastructure with which the modern world is very familiar. Their construction should not come as any great surprise. The greater surprise for most outside observers is, surely, the persistence of elephant-based transportation as the highest-value means of passage across the Sissiri during monsoon. And visiting this spot and watching Burmay-Moti and Pradip at work, I could not help but suppose that if the Indian state involved itself more in such elephant “ferries,” at river-crossing points along the forest frontier, and less in throwing huge sums of money at concrete projects of questionable soundness or finishability, it could in fact project far greater control over the area than it is currently able to do. The predictable, prosaic insistence of the modern technocratic state on the great concrete highway may actually undermine control. Thus far the only form of state leverage the project has brought is the ability of government officials to give out payoffs to local tribal leaders.2

  No doubt, many development projects in Arunachal and elsewhere in the region do require investment in the form of concrete and steel, but there are limits to what this kind of hard infrastructure can do. The landscape of Arunachal Pradesh, like the landscape of the Kachin Hills, is not the hard, arid earth of, say, southern California—that is, the sort of landscape where the distinction between land and water is more rigid and predictable, and where the automobile seems most to come into its own as a creature of transport. The Trans-Arunachal Highway project is an attempt, and one not yet proven effective, to harness modern building materials at a massive scale to erect a huge fiction that the landscape is something other than what it is. But the hydra-like advance of water, mud, and silt in the area during monsoon is sublime—thunderous forces conjured up by elemental gods. Ultimately, such power may prove to be too much for the new paved leviathan.