Inspired by Pico Iyer's wonderful short, A Place I've Never Been, I started writing my own essay about a place I've never been. The essay has grown and changed shape, thanks to another wonderful short: Michael Finkel's "13 Ways of Looking at a Void." I could never have imagined this love letter without one of my favorite novels of all time, Kalimantaan by c.s. godshalk and the Ring of Fire films and book, by Lorne and Lawrence Blair
To Read:
First: Gavin Young's, In Search of Conrad and Eric Hansen’s travel classic, Stranger in the Forest. I also re-visited Lorne and Lawrence Blair's Ring of Fire films. I met Lorne Blair in Ubud not long before his tragic death. Eventually, this playful walk down imaginary memory lane led me to discover a writer, I had never heard of before: Carl Hoffman (who wrote the best seller, Savage Harvest and his new double biography called The Last Wild Men of Borneo about Bruno Manser and American tribal art dealer Michael Palmieri. He is a fantastic writer and those books really were riveting! I also picked up The Wasting of Borneo, by Alex Shoumatoff. I am a long time fan of his work and this book was very sad...
Also:
Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe (New York Times Magazine)
The Lungs of the Earth (Spiegel Online)
This was part of my Top Reads of 2019
Notes:
Recently, I re-read Eric Hansen’s travel classic, Stranger in the Forest. The book came out in the mid-80s. This was about ten years before I vetoed our trip to Borneo. It was also a time before the Internet and GPS. To prepare for his trip, Hansen had to go to a university library and read books, flip through journals, and consult maps—and to his great delight, he discovered there were still areas on the map of Borneo that were unmarked. And these were the spots he wanted to see. Beginning his journey on the Malaysian side of Borneo, in Kuching, he traveled upriver on the Rajang (every bit as legendary as the Mahakam), and made his way inland toward the Highlands, where the indigenous Dayak peoples lived.
Did I mention he was mainly going on foot?
His trip occurred just a few years before Bruno Manser’s ramble across Borneo. You’ve heard the expression “Fact is stranger than fiction?” Well, that term was invented for Swiss environmentalist, Bruno Manser’s life story. Arriving in Borneo in the mid-80s, within a year, he was living with one of the most elusive tribes in the highlands, the Penan. Carl Hoffman (who wrote the best seller, Savage Harvest) has just come out with a double biography called The Last Wild Men of Borneo about Bruno Manser and American tribal art dealer Michael Palmieri. The cover of the book has a photograph of Manser that I did not realize was a white man until I was nearly finished reading. Dressed in a loincloth and carrying a poison arrow quiver and blowpipe, his hair has been cut in the Dayak fashion, and he is shown squatting on a rock near the river’s edge. It is a touching photograph of a man who gave his life to fight for the rights of the indigenous peoples of the highlands.
For those who want to see what walking in the forest is actually like, they can take a look at the fourth documentary, "Dream Wanderers of Borneo," in Lorne and Lawrence Blair's Ring of Fire films. The book came out in 1988 and the book in 2003, based on their several month-long journey in the early 80s to find and stay with the nomadic Punan Dayaks. The brothers were themselves following in the footsteps of the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in his Malay Archipelago, who had discovered over 2,000 species of insects in the region. This is well shown in the video as the insects are relentless. One of the brothers wonder if that is not the reason why Borneo was left alone for so long, for who could tolerate the bugs? At one point Lorne becomes temporarily blind for a half hour when something stings the back of his neck.
Even as early as 1980, logging was already a huge issue. In Japan, especially, environmentalists rightly bemoaned the destruction being caused by the timber industry—so much of that wood being imported into Japan (The majority is now being imported into China). Logging was pushing the indigenous Dayak peoples of the highland into greater and greater peril as the land they considered to be theirs was being destroyed. Water was contaminated and animals were dying in great numbers. Manser realized that a people who had lived harmoniously in the interior of the island for thousands of years were now in grave danger of being pushed out--all in the name of corporate greed.
And so he fought valiantly to bring their plight to the attention of the world—including climbing up a 30-foot-tall London lamppost outside of the media center covering the 1991 G7 Summit and unfurling a banner about Dayak rights and then the following year, paragliding into a crowded stadium during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. In 1992, after meeting Manser, Vice-President Al Gore introduced a resolution into the senate calling upon the government of Malaysia to protect the rights of the indigenous peoples and for Japan to look into its logging companies’ practices. By the mid-90s, Manser had become a serious headache to the huge logging industry in Malaysia and an embarrassment to the government. Manser was to disappear in 2000 and was officially pronounced dead in 2005 (though his body was never found), and some believe the cause of his death can be traced back to Malay officials and logging executives.
It is a tragic story, with the only possible silver lining being that at least Manser was not around to see what happened next when the palm oil industry came to town. I began to wondered how much of that Borneo my boyfriend dreamt of was left? So, I picked up The Wasting of Borneo, by Alex Shoumatoff (2017) and quickly realized the situation was far worse than I was imagining. A staff writer for the New Yorker, Shoumatoff has been a contributing editor at Vanity fair and Conde Nast traveler among others. A travel writer and environmentalist, he has been to Borneo several times. In this latest book, he begins his Borneo journey with a visit to Birute Galdikas at her Orangutan Care Center near the Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan.
Have you heard of Leakey’s Angeles?
Anthropologist Louis Leakey had an unusual thought: what would happen if he sent three young women, mainly untrained in science, to go into the field to see what they see. The women being untrained would mean they had fewer preconceived notions, and he figured their observations would be valuable. The Angels were Jane Goodall (chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania), Dian Fossey (mountain gorillas in Rwanda), and Birute Galdikas in Borneo. Of the three, only Galdikas is still out there--not far from the original Camp Leakey in Borneo, where she now runs an orphanage for orangutans who have lost their mothers to poaching and fire.
And when I say fires, I mean fires so big they can be seen in space.
In many ways, the palm oil industry makes logging look like child’s play in the jungle. Slash and burn is only an understatement. A very significant percentage of the ancient rainforests on the island have already been destroyed (about 30%-50% and at this rate we will lose them all by 2050). Fires are set to prepare for monocrops. You get it: fires sending massive Co2 into the atmosphere resulting from clearing trees, which had they have been left standing in the ground would have helped lessen the carbon going into the atmosphere in the first place. Borneo’s rain forests are the oldest on the planet and contain what has one the highest densities of biodiversity in the world. So, this practice is a total lose-lose.
And for what?
Palm oil.
Palm oil is a funny thing. This oil that we never knew we needed thirty years ago is now in everything. From shampoo and toothpaste to every snack known to man-- It is nearly impossible to avoid. Shoumatoff says he is down to a drop a week in toothpaste and shampoo... I don't think I use any—but will go check my shampoo bottle (nope, I’m good). But it is really hard to avoid the stuff, since it is in everything... And so the destruction continues. After the forests are cleared, monocrop oil palms are planted, and this habitat destruction has pushed the island's animals to the brink of extinction--including our cousins, the orangutans.
How can we continue with this destruction?
5.
I recently saw a video on Youtube of a talk given by National Geographic photographer Mattias Klum. The talk could have been titled “Heaven and Hell in Borneo.” That was not the title, but the photographs he showed speak volumes. He begins with all the images we are always dazzled by when we imagine "Borneo": the rhinoceros hornbills and bearded pigs and glorious gibbons. There are a lot of snakes and monitor lizards too (I guess no place is perfect?). That blue green watery world of the rainforest is heaven on earth. Galdikas, in her 1996 book, Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo, compares the natural splendor of Borneo to the Eden described in the Bible. A terrestrial paradise? To see what she means, I got a copy of a coffee table book with photographs by Bjorn Olesen, A Visual Celebration of Borneo’s Wildlife. The book is filled with one gorgeous picture after another. And all the proceeds of the book go to support of Fauna and Flora International. But looking through it, you would never realize how endangered these animals have become. All you see is the biological splendor of the place.
Klum is right to make the point in his talk that these islands of heavenly rainforest exist in isolated spots in what is in reality an ocean of destruction. He proceeds to show his audience the horrifying images of destroyed environments, with peoples and animals pushed to the edges of survival.
6.
Sometimes we read op-ed pieces in places like the Guardian and New York Times about how our consumer choices don't matter. We have to hit the systems that are causing the destruction. It's true--without over-turning our current vulture-capitalism we won't make huge dents; but at the same time, they don’t do us any favors by saying what we buy doesn’t matter. Because it does. Every time we vote with our dollars by consuming this palm oil poison, we are part of the problem. Even if just a small part of the problem, at the very least we are enablers, and it makes it that much harder to overturn these practices. This is a point that Shoumatoff takes some time to make at the end of his sad story.
I mentioned above that Hoffman’s The Last Wild Men of Borneo is a double biography. The other subject of Hoffman’s book, tribal art dealer and collector Michael Palmieri, is in many ways a mirror image of Bruno Manser. In a story that reads more like a Hollywood movie, we follow Palmieri from his surfing days in LA deep into the rainforest of Borneo; where he has fled after dodging the draft and traveling overland from Paris to Goa, by way of Kabul. In Indonesia, he buys a longboat and—you guessed it—heads upriver to buy artifacts. This is where Hoffman’s book really shines. Because the rainforest is not just being threatened by loggers and palm oil corporations, as it turns out the cultural treasures of the Dayak are being plundered as well. In what seems to be a typical story, we follow Palmieri upriver where he bargains for masterpieces. In one case, he gets his hands on a priceless wood statue, which he somehow manages to trade for a Swiss Army knife. He would then sell this statue for an enormous sum of money to a dealer, who then sold it to the Dallas Museum of Art. In the book, we watch this happen again and again. Priceless work of sacred art is purchased for laughably small amounts of money, sometimes traded for a generator or even stolen right out of graves.
The tribal art market is worth over $100 million dollars today. And now we have a vanishing Borneo—from its animals to its ancient forests, to its peoples and cultural heritage.
My boyfriend did eventually take his trip upriver on the Mahakam; while I can only imagine Borneo in my dreams.When I dream of Borneo, nights often come to mind. Air wet and sticky with the sweet perfume of all the night blooming flowers intoxicates. And no, I am not referring to the big stinky Rafflesia flower, which looks and smells like rotting meat and draws bugs from miles around. What I am thinking of are the jasmine, ginger, and honeysuckle that sweeten those velvety, salty breezes blowing in from the sea at night Does that ocean breeze come for me alone? For no other reason than to caress my skin? I daydream of orchid covered-hills veiled in mist. And of fireflies that light up the jungle. I can almost hear the sound of Borneo's famed birdsong; insects loudly humming; and sometimes when I close my eyes, I can catch the music of the sape guitar and a dancer's feet stamping rhythmically against the polished wooden floors of the longhouse, her small head adorned in black hornbill feathers, turning turning...
Shoumatoff might call this the sound of sad dispatches from a vanishing world.
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