Blowpipes Against Bulldozers

Blowpipes Against Bulldozers

The haunting echo of Voices for the Borneo Rainforest, 30 years later.

It was like one of those nightmare existential questions from Philosophy 101: โ€œYour entire familyโ€”though youโ€™ve never met themโ€”is on a train careening toward a cliff. What, if anything, can you do to try to save them from certain death?โ€ In the summer of 1989, that question was beyond classroom quandary. It was a literal nightmare of existence for the tribal peoples of the rainforests of Sarawak, the western state of Malaysian Borneo.

Four thousand kilometres to the north, the Japanese economy was booming. By 1989, its annual imports of tropical timber hit close to 115 million cubic metres, feeding a construction explosion unseen since postwar reconstruction. The majority of this timber (used as cast concrete forms) originated in the pristine rainforests of Sarawak.

Timber was cheap because it was effectively stolen from the communities and peoples who had lived there for 40,000 years. Although customary land rights had been acknowledged by the British Raj, neither the federal nor state governments chose to observe such niceties and effectively considered this vast and largely uncharted territory to be a treasure trove of raw resources there for the taking.

Borneo, the third-largest island in the world, is truly immense. With a vast network of towering mountains, racing rivers, steep gorges and labyrinthine cave systems, it was, until recently, cloaked in the most ancient, intact forest on earth. Highest biodiversity. Greatest density of plants, insects, animals. Anywhere.

The peoples who lived here were also a diverse mosaic of languages and cultures; some were agrarian and lived, much like the First Nations peoples of the B.C. coast, in extended family dwellings of permanent villages surrounded by small farm gardens. Travel was through the network of rivers, more so than by foot, given the dense forest understorey. And yet, there were nomadic peoples too, who expressed no desire or interest in creating permanent dwellings or settlements, whose ancestors had moved through vast territories to follow the wild boar and monkeys as the animals followed the fruiting trees in a cycle both rich and timeless in this equatorial paradise. The best known of these nomadic hunter-gatherers were the Penan.

Bruno at Marubeni 1990

Bruno Manser was a Swiss Army knife of ability. After high school, he left academics and pursued a traditional lifestyle of self-sufficiency in the mountains. He wrote: โ€œIโ€™ve tried already in Switzerland to find my way back to the roots, to the Indigenous people in Switzerland who lived in their own economy without money, producing their food and whatever they needed themselves. I went to handicraftsmen, all different kinds, to learn how to work with wood, how to fell trees, how to build houses, to breed cattle, to work with sheep, with cows, making cheese, making gardens, trying to make my own pots, bowls, leather, a knife โ€ฆ but in Switzerland, itโ€™s really difficult to go back to the roots.โ€

And then, Bruno came across a reference to the Penan. In 1984, the accomplished mountaineer and spelunker joined a caving expedition to the Gunung Mulu caves and essentially โ€œoverstayedโ€ his tourism visa to try to find the Penan.

โ€œIt was my wish to join people, a tribe who still lives in their own economy, who live self-sufficiently and most of what they need for their lives, they produce themselves so their economy is in a circle. From our society, the economy is not in a circle, itโ€™s just linear, so eventually it will break down.โ€

Blowpipes Against Bulldozers

The issue of customary land ownership and rights is globally contentious, to say the least. Thirty years ago, coastal First Nations in British Columbia blocked logging roads to protest unsustainable clear-cut logging on their lands, and sometimes won in the courts. Clayoquot Sound and Haida Gwaii are two familiar cases.

In Sarawak, the judicial system and land rights issues were considerably more complex and definitely less transparent than those in British Columbia. History, ethics, ethnicity and ownership, political and corporate nepotism, multinational corporations and international trade were all enmeshed in a complicated web of relationships and โ€œquid pro quoโ€ that played out, seemingly far above the day-to-day lives of small communities of nomads in the upper reaches of the deepest jungles. And then, that all changed.

By 1989, the escalating logging threatened not only the Penan traditional way of life, but it also literally threatened their survival. Rivers were polluted with toxic saps from the felled trees, while silt runoff from the damaged ecosystem killed the fish and also made the water undrinkable for people and animals. The hunters needed to travel farther and farther to find enough game to feed their families, and the network of logging roads being punched through the jungle was expanding inexorably, with chainsaws before and behind, feeding the building frenzy in cities far, far away. The people attempted to reason with the companies, the authorities, to send delegations to the chief minister, all to no avail. Finally, they began to set up blockades across the logging roads, to literally put their bodiesโ€”man, woman, child โ€“ between the forest and the bulldozers.

What would you do, if your entire family, even if youโ€™d never met them?

That summer, Anja Light came to Tokyo. She was a young Australian ecologist and musician, and a member of the Australian Rainforest Information Centre. She had come to support Japanese environmental groups to increase public awareness of the connection between Japan and Sarawakโ€”particularly when it came to their interwoven economies and โ€œlifestyle.โ€

Anja brought first-hand witness, having spent considerable time in Sarawak, some of it with Bruno. Her original songs and heartfelt stories of what the Penan and others were experiencing touched many Japanese people deeply, initiating a groundswell of support for the environment that was distinctly at odds with the overall thrust of the country and its economy at that time.

I became involved through my work in Tokyo as a journalist and cultural mediator. In Haida Gwaii that summer, I had been introduced to โ€œindustrial clear cutโ€ by Haida artist Jim Hart, who took me to see what was going on up the logging roads. As 500-year-old cedar trees came down like thunder and shook the ground, he said, sadly, โ€œTheyโ€™re shaving the fur off the earthโ€ฆโ€

It was easy to see the parallels with Sarawak. Throughout that autumn, I came to know Anja well and offered my tiny flat as Tokyo HQ for her while she was in town. Faxes arrived daily of the increasing number of blockades going up, as community after community joined in the struggle to protect their forests. Thousands of men, women and children joined in this massive act of peaceful civil protest that some called โ€œblowpipes against bulldozers.โ€ The international media began to cover the story, especially given the curiosity about Bruno Manser, who had by then been living with the Penan for almost 6 years. Even in Japan there was a smattering of interest. But still, the logging continued as the authorities ramped up laws to break the protestors and dismantle the blockades.

In the spring of 1990, Bruno slipped out of Sarawak to return to Switzerland, convinced that he could do more to help the Penan from the outside than as a fugitive with a 50,000-ringgit (Malaysian currency) bounty on his head. His first stop was Tokyo.

Six months later, I joined Bruno, three Indigenous spokesmen and an American photographer at the Malaysian Hotel in Bangkok, to begin the Voices for the Borneo Rainforest World Tour. We had worked around the clock since Brunoโ€™s first trip to Japan in May, organizing and connecting with international supporters; over 60 rainforest and human rights groups around the world had agreed to host us and organize public and private meetings for the Penan. We travelled for almost 3 months to 14 countries and 27 cities; we were seen by tens of thousands of people and collected over 60,000 signatures to petition the Malaysian government. All that before email, internet or cellphones.

Thirty years have passed since that tumultuous year. Though some positive results have been achieved for the Sarawak communities, for the most part large-scale โ€œdevelopmentโ€ (palm oil plantations and hydro dams) has continued to displace thousands and destroy what was, in Brunoโ€™s time, an intact tropical forest that stretched as far as the eye could see, even from the top of the highest mountain or the tallest tree.

Shortly before his 46th birthday, Bruno returned to Sarawak for a pan-community meeting: Should they continue blockading or take the company quid pro quo and accept development as their future?

Welcome to Sydney

Bruno walked away alone from that gathering to visit his Penan family upriver. He didnโ€™t arrive and was never seen again. As I write this on May 8, 2020, it is the 20th anniversary of his disappearance.

Itโ€™s impossible to condense a story of this complexity in a few pages. Impossible to estimate the loss, in human and ecological terms. Impossible to predict the potential catastrophic impact of tropical deforestation on this scale. Impossible to know the impact of oneโ€™s actions.

What would you have done? What are you going to do?


To learn more and do more, visit the Bruno Manser Foundation site at bmf.ch/en
and the Borneo Project at borneoproject.org.

Beth Lischeron

Beth's career has spanned three continents over 40 years; from theatre to journalism, narration and documentary production; fibre arts and festival production and onto developing and pioneering organic plant-based body care "from the ground up". Supporting artisans and artists, Indigenous peoples, sustainable living and ecological responsibility have been strong threads through her working life.

www.dragonflydreaming.com

Posted on Tuesday, September 21st, 2021
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