Nature Alert: Rainforests: Going, Going …………….. Almost Gone

Saturday, 28 March 2009

Rainforests: Going, Going …………….. Almost Gone

Letter published in The Jakarta Globe 28th March 2009 in response to an article published a few days earlier regarding the impact of palm oil plantations on indigenous people.

Rainforests: Going, Going …………….. Almost Gone

Scarcely a day goes by without another negative media report concerning deforestation (illegal and otherwise) and palm oil plantations.

Forestry Minister Kaban is the man responsible for the expansion of both, and all credit to him; his enthusiastic efforts to ensure both are pursued with the utmost speed are having the catastrophic environmental and humanitarian effects presumably seemingly so desired of by his government.

Does anyone wonder how Kaban can sleep at night knowing as he does that millions of trees and animals have been destroyed during his reign as forestry minister? Indigenous people, no strangers themselves to suffering, are also being deprived of their rights by the very same logging and palm oil industries policed by the Ministry of Forestry.

What is the future for the children of Indonesia? Does no one in government give a damn about them? Will they ever see a rainforest, maybe an orangutan, even a tiger? Not if the Ministry of Forestry carries on doing what it has always done for the environment: destroyed it. It’s the stuff of nightmares unless you are a government minister, whose sleep is hardly likely to be troubled by such thoughts.

Sean Whyte
Chief Executive,
Nature Alert

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/opinion/letters/article/14237.html

Hall of Shame for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and the Palm Oil Industry.

Nothing can prepare one for the sight of the systematic extermination of orangutans by the government of Indonesia.

Look at the photos and news articles on these pages in the context of a statement the President made to the media on 10th December 2007.

“In the last 35 years about 50,000 orangutans are estimated to have been lost as their habitats shrank. If this continues, this majestic creature will likely face extinction by 2050,” President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said at the launch of an orangutan conservation plan at the climate talks in Bali.

“The fate of the orangutan is a subject that goes to the heart of sustainable forests … To save the orangutan we have to save the forest.”

Statements like these are most welcome, but unless backed up by action, such words fall on deaf ears within the Ministry of Forestry....who are busy granting licences to cut down the very forests the President says they should protect!

When you think you are to busy to help, please could you reflect for a moment on .........

The following extract refers to environmental problems in general. I just hope you find it as thought provoking and relevant to orangutans as I have.

"This is such a shocking and unpalatable fact that most people deny it, or they just don't want to think about it. They believe as individuals, they can do little about it, so push it to the back of their minds. But I can't do that.

When something has to be done, we need to do it. It doesn't matter how big the challenge is or how hard the solution; if I know something is wrong, and I am in a position to help, I will do my best to make it right." Duncan Bannatyne, successful British businessman.