The Ragged Edge of the World (5 page)

I've been to Borneo several times, reporting on the plight of both its indigenous animals and its indigenous people. In even a moderately just world, Borneo's forests, orangutans and inhabitants would have been left alone in perpetuity. The place has a good deal of oil offshore, and an enlightened government might have used that resource to lift the lives of those who desired modernization without destroying Borneo's unique ecosystems and cultures.

But it is not a just world, and Borneo has had nothing even close to an enlightened government. In the states of Sarawak and Sabah, members of a Chinese clan that controlled logging also managed to get themselves installed in key agencies that regulated the logging industry and protected the environment. Indeed the minister of environment in the early 1990s, Datuk James Wong, was also part owner of the Limbang Trading Company, one of the country's largest logging companies. His environmental sensitivity was revealed in a remark he reportedly made when told that cutting the forests could lead to a drying-out in Borneo: “We get too much rain in Sarawak. It stops me from playing golf.” The obnoxiousness of this remark was underscored during the droughts of 1997-98, when vast fires torched the island, sickened tens of millions, and brought commerce to a virtual halt in much of Southeast Asia.

Wong and his ilk were enriched thanks to a peculiarity of Malaysian politics. The national government, then headed by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, needed the support of the governments of the states of Sarawak and Sabah to maintain its hold on power, and essentially offered the kleptocrats who ran the two regions an implicit deal: We'll take the oil; you get the trees.

Malaysia and Indonesia largely divide Borneo (the small, immensely rich nation of Brunei takes a chunk out of Malaysia's portion of the northern coast). While Malaysia and Indonesia have very different governments, they have been equal-opportunity exploiters of the giant island. On the Indonesian side of the island the federal government (with the encouragement of the World Bank) used the state of Kalimantan as a dumping ground for people forced off their land on other islands. While the poor cut the forest to survive, the rich razed it to grow richer. In recent years more than half the wood exported from Indonesia has come from illegal logging, and throughout Borneo, even where lands were designated for cutting, timber operations have proceeded with scant regard for ecological consequences.

The predictable result has been ecological and cultural tragedy. In the late 1990s the combination of an El Niño with uncontrolled land conversion resulted in the aforementioned calamitous fires. Ordinarily the peat that lies in Kalimantan's many swamps would be under water, but the combination of forest clearing and agricultural planting has reduced the water table to the degree that the peat is periodically exposed to the sun, which dries it out. When farmers burn cleared brush nearby, it easily catches fire.

Though they might seem merely a faraway curiosity for those living in the United States, these fires make remote Borneo a significant contributor to global warming. Indonesian estimates are that El Niño peat fires alone contributed 2 billion tons of CO
₂
annually to the atmosphere through smoke and accelerated decomposition of unburned peat that is exposed to air. That figure represents more CO
₂
emissions than are produced by all of Japan and more than 25 percent of total U.S. emissions.

I went to Borneo in April 1989 not to investigate its surprising contribution to climate change, but rather to look into a largely invisible conflagration. Indeed, my most memorable trip to the huge island was prompted by a casual remark.

In Djakarta, Indonesia, I had run into an anthropologist named Tim Jessup whom I'd met years earlier through family connections. We got together for a drink with some conservation-minded Indonesians and expatriates, and the conversation turned to the loss of indigenous knowledge around the world. Tim mentioned a story he'd heard about the Penans, the last hunting and gathering tribe that still pursued a nomadic lifestyle in the highlands of Borneo. He explained that while those in the highlands would hunt wild boar timed to the appearance of a particular butterfly, their children away at school in the towns were already forgetting this tidbit of local knowledge. They might vaguely remember that their uncle would pay attention to this butterfly, but they couldn't say why he cared about it, or which kind of butterfly it was. While such knowledge might seem trivial, Tim noted that the relationship between the butterfly and the boar might be linked to the fruiting pattern of a rainforest tree, and such ecological connections could be invaluable to scientists trying to understand the dynamics and vulnerabilities of the local ecosystem.

That story offered the perfect metaphor for a worldwide phenomenon I was then studying—the loss of indigenous knowledge—and suggested that learning it could be as elusive, fragile and evanescent as a butterfly itself. Even though traditional lore might have been passed on for generations—perhaps for hundreds, or perhaps for just a few—it might vanish silently without any sense of loss in those who were losing it. And so I set about trying to get to Sarawak to hear more about the elusive butterfly and to meet the Penans.

I got in touch with a remarkable young man named Harrison Ngau. A Sarawak-born lawyer and environmental activist, Harrison had taken up the cause of the Penans, who, having failed to get a fair hearing in any Malaysian or international forums, had taken to blockading logging roads to stop the remorseless cutting of their forests. This gesture, in which diminutive hunter-gatherers stood up against the police and powerful logging companies, did draw the world's attention, though it only marginally slowed the logging.

When I showed up in Borneo, these blockades were still going on, while Harrison was fully occupied trying to deal with the cases of the many Penans who had been arrested (for trying to get the government to enforce laws already on the books). He invited me to meet him in the principal town in the highlands, then a sleepy backwater called Marudi, situated on a bend in the Baram River. Many of the Penans who had been arrested at the blockades had assembled there for their court cases, and that offered me an opportunity to chat with chiefs from many remote longhouses.

Harrison had told me that the best way to get to Marudi from Miri (my port of entry) was by motorized longboat up the river. The two-hour trip was anything but the peaceful tropical river sojourn I had envisioned. The captain kept the tachometer redlined the entire trip, while a television blaring Asian martial arts B movies competed with the roar of the engine. I arrived in Marudi shaken, if not stirred, and since I wasn't scheduled to meet up with Harrison until the next day, I settled in at a local hotel and set about finding dinner. The only restaurant seemed to be an open-sided, thatch-roofed structure set on a lovely promontory overlooking a bend in the river. Through gestures I found a seat, and with elaborate formality the waiter handed me an English-language menu. There were pages upon pages of fish, chicken and pork dishes, and using sign language I pointed to some intriguing Malaysian concoction. The waiter shook his head. I pointed to another—this one? Again, the disappointed no.

This went on for some minutes until I shrugged in capitulation. The waiter took the menu and turned to the very last page, where a piece of paper had been pasted to the laminated menu. It offered two selections: “fish meat” and “pig meat.” I pointed to the latter and enjoyed what turned out to be a delicious four-course meal.

The next day I found Harrison at an office where various Penans had gathered to prepare their cases. Sitting in the antechamber was a Penan happily reading a newspaper that he was holding upside down. I was brought into a small conference room and there, in various forms of dress ranging from shorts and T-shirts to loincloths, was a who's who of the Penans of Sarawak: Juing Lihan, the head of the South Penan Association; Peng Hulu Wan Malong, the major chief of Sungai Layun, which comprised twenty longhouses; Debaran Siden, a chief from Long Balau; Kurau Kusin, the chief of a group of Penans who were settled but who still pursued nomadic hunting; and so on. I don't know what Harrison had told the group about why I had come, but everybody was eager to talk, and Harrison graciously offered to translate.

From an anthropologist's point of view it was an extraordinary gathering, consisting of chiefs from settled tribes, seminomadic tribes, and nomadic tribes, as well as Harrison himself, who, while completely Westernized, had not forgotten his roots. The Penans may be among the oldest peoples on earth. One line of thinking places the tribes of Borneo near the roots of a radiation that eventually populated points north and ultimately the Americas. Indeed, my first impression was that I could see all races in the faces arrayed before me.

While the Penans assumed I wanted to talk about the blockade, they agreeably shifted topics when I brought up the question of traditional knowledge and the difficulties of maintaining that knowledge as tribes abandoned nomadic ways. One of the first to speak up was Kurau Kusin, the chief of a settled village, who was a bit defensive about his tribe's decision to settle. Demonstrating a distinctly Western gift for proactive argument, he noted that they still ventured far into the forest to hunt and gather, and that such activities kept the knowledge alive.

As he spoke, it became apparent that his tribe had developed something of a generation gap. From his comments I inferred that he and the other older members often waxed eloquent about the joys of a nomadic life. Like any exasperated elder dealing with a sassy younger generation, he noted that the young would ask him why they had settled if life had been so damned good back when they were nomadic. He said that his answer was that it was useful to have a permanent base from which to hunt. Well, yes, but one of the ecological benefits of nomadism is that moving around allows the forest and its game to recover. Kurau explained that while they did have to go deeper and deeper into the forest to find game, he blamed destruction by the logging companies and not the effects of settlement for the change.

The chief also said that although students regularly left the longhouse to go to secondary school, they usually came back. “If the land is there, the school is not a problem,” he told me. “They will always come back. Their heart is still with us. Maybe they dress different, but their heart is still with us.”

To some degree, poverty kept the tribe's traditions vital. I asked the chief whether they used guns to hunt. His somewhat ambiguous response was that it was traditional to use a blowpipe, which helped maintain knowledge about where to look for wood for the pipe and poison for the darts. But then he explained that if they used guns instead, they would have to buy both the gun and bullets, an answer that left the door open on whether the group might actually switch weapons should that financial problem be solved.

Kusan also said that the tribe transmitted its knowledge to its children by sending them into the forest to find bark and other plants. As an example he told of an accident that had occurred when a child playing with a blowgun accidentally shot another child with a dart. What could have been a tragedy had a happy ending, because the shooter knew where to find the antidote for the poison involved—a plant called
tebaran siden
.

The gun/blowpipe question frames how profoundly difficult it is to maintain traditions once a tribe becomes aware of the power of labor-saving technologies. Those like me who feel that something precious will be lost when the last Penan puts down his blowpipe always risk being accused of paternalism and hypocrisy, as well as inflicting needless hardship. What right do we have to insist that anyone hold on to traditions that we ourselves abandoned centuries ago?

Those tribal peoples who have tried to negotiate an entente with modernity have discovered that it's a slippery path. I witnessed the reductio ad absurdum of such compromises when I visited a tribe on Hudson Bay in Canada that used helicopters to commute to its traditional hunting grounds (at least until its money ran out). While the people may still feel a kinship with their forebears, the intimate bonds that tied this tribe to the landscape and its ecology were long ago broken.

While the dilemma of wrestling with how a tribe can accept the life-prolonging /labor-saving technologies of the West without losing its soul is a moral problem for outsiders like me, it is an ontological struggle for the proud elders of the Penans, who realize that maintaining their identity carries with it the price tag of living at a material disadvantage to those in the towns. The elders can only offer largely intangible rewards and philosophical arguments when the government or the younger generation urges them to abandon their backward ways.

The chiefs do try to muster a line of reasoning that the traditional life is better than life in the towns. Penans rarely get high-paying jobs, and they do not receive the quality of medical care typical of Western medicine. One of the chiefs observed that, in the case of the boy who had been wounded by a dart, a Western doctor would have cut the affected area to drain the poison, unaware of or unconcerned with the fact that the toxin could be neutralized by rubbing the puncture with herbs. Other chiefs cited various trees they used for common ailments like diarrhea, and named three—
getimang, nyekup
and
buhow
—whose bark could be chewed or boiled as a treatment for stomach disorders. Turning the conversation again to the blockade, they pointedly said that these trees were getting harder to find, and that if the trees disappeared, the knowledge of their medicinal benefits would vanish with them.