Growing up in rural Canada, I was always surrounded by forest. From a young age, I learned how to protect myself from wild animals, identify edible plants, deconstruct bear poop, and navigate in the wild.
The forest was always abundant in my life, and I never once worried about the possibility of it vanishing. Living in Asia, I miss being so close to the forest. Until recently, I never once thought about the rainforest — somewhere so exotic and foreign to me. But rainforests, which are amazingly biodiverse, are decreasing at an alarming rate.
So a few months ago, I decided to visit Borneo and witness the last remaining parts of the rainforest there. In a previous post, I wrote about my time in Brunei , the country containing the largest amount of protected rainforest in Borneo. But what about the rest of the island of Borneo? Although seeing the orangutans was a delight in Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre, I still wanted to find out more about the rainforest itself.
What amazing plant species could be found there? Why was it being cut down at an alarming rate? What could I do to help its conservation? RDC is run by the Sabah Forestry Department and aims to raise aware awareness of forest conservation and sustainable use of forest resources.
The reason why I loved visiting RDC so much is because it was quiet , unlike the Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre which was crowded with tourists. It was peaceful and calming to walk through the beautiful gardens, and truly magical to witness two wild orangutans while I was completely alone.
The only thing to be careful of are snakes! There were signs everywhere alerting guests to the various venomous snakes in the forest. There are two different types of sun bears. The Malayan sun bears are found on the Asian Mainland e. The Bornean sun bears are the smallest bears in the world, reaching only cm in height, half the size of Malayan sun bears. Scientists think this is an evolutionary adaptation to a lack of food.
It has of the species in existence. Ten of the emergent dipterocarp species have beautiful, hard wood and are sought after by the logging companies, most of which are Chinese. China is the main market now for lumber from Borneo. It used to be Japan. Fantastic butterflies and moths, like the gigantic Rajah Brooke birdwing, have come into being in this primordial forest. And the Bornean wild pig, the Bornean pygmy elephant and pygmy rhinoceros, and Pongo pygmaeus , a different species of orangutan from the Sumatran.
And orangutans are easy to have an interspecies experience with because they share 97 percent of our genes and are fantastic facial mimics. Orphaned orangutan babies at the International Animal Rescue center on Borneo. There are still hunter-gatherers in the heart of the island who hunt with blowguns and leave different signs of bent branches and folded leaves for each other in the forest and have 1, names for different trees and their corresponding spirits and until two generations ago believed that this is only one of nine different worlds in the cosmos.
The mountainous thickly jungled heart of Borneo was one of the last blank spots on the map, terra incognita, through World War II. The most remote bands of nomadic blowgun hunters were not reached by missionaries until the late ls. Now they are all Christians and live in modern longhouses with TVs and electricity, but they still go off into the forest and hunt for days at a time, and a few bands still circulate in the forest and make new camps of raised pole huts every few weeks.
Even the most isolated and traditional people in the central highlands are acutely aware of the modern world. Loggers are taking out their biggest trees, their rivers are being polluted and impounded by hydroelectric dams. In the ls, as synthetic rubber largely put an end to the natural rubber business, chainsaws and Caterpillar tractors arrived on Borneo.
The following decade, the eradication of the rain forest began in earnest. First the commercial dipterocarps were felled and hauled out, then the remaining mangled forest was torched, a few days before rain was expected. An area cleared for an oil palm plantation in Central Kalimantan province in Borneo. That is what happened in l when a pall of smoke from peat fires in Kalimantan, smothered southeast Asia and drifted east, all the way to Japan. Language English.
A mosaic of landscapes Although Borneo conjures images of dense tropical rainforests, the landscape offers a mosaic of varied habitats: mangroves, peat swamp and swamp forests, ironwood, heath and montane forests. These areas form part of a complex ecosystem that has evolved over thousands of years. Some, like the Penan, are nomadic hunter-gatherers while the majority, the Dayak, are settled and cultivate rice through shifting techniques dry swiddens and paddies wet rice cultivation.
Beyond the intrinsic values of the Heart of Borneo, there are many other reasons to protect this area Forestry Around half of the Heart of Borneo and its surrounding areas are covered by logging concessions.
Forests inside these concessions can be logged according to national sustainability certification standards. These concessions bring employment opportunities and economic revenue for local and state governments. Water catchment Well-managed natural forests provide high-quality drinking water to urban and rural populations.
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