I don’t understand John, you are so materialist,’ Jenny complained. ‘I mean just look at you, your gold Rolex watch, your designer clothes, it’s so artificial.’
Ennis shrugged; ‘What’s that got to do rainforests?’
‘It’s your whole approach to life, you are totally detached from nature and your origins. We know what it was like here just a few years back and we can see what is happening, we don’t want a replay of what has happened in the Philippines.’
‘Maybe,’ he said sourly, ‘but what about the people, they need jobs and material things.’
‘That’s right but not necessarily your consumer society, which devours everything that comes within its grasp.’
‘Do you have an alternative?’
‘Yes, we do, we do not reject progress but not at the expense of our traditions, our way of life and the destruction of our environment.’
‘Okay! Okay!’ said Ennis.
‘It’s not okay, take your project for example, there is not one of your specialists who has the least idea what effect your project will have and what’s worse they don’t care!’
‘We’ve done an environmental impact study.’
‘God help me!’ said Jenny violently, ‘you don’t know what your talking about, that’s just window dressing, you cannot know what the impact on the environment will be, because not one of your so called experts can show a similar project in the world where the effect has not been disastrous for the local ecology.’
‘Okay let’s change the subject.’
‘Like hell were going to change the subject, face up to the facts, you know them only to well, you’ve told me enough times about the disastrous results of the plantations, about the illegal logging and the wholesale destruction in the forest operations.’
‘Well, what do you want me to do? What can I do!’
‘You can start by admitting that what I’m saying is true.’
‘I admit that there is some truth in what you’re saying, but I can’t change the world.’
‘But don’t you see John, you are changing the world, for the worst, you can at least restart, begin again, then others will follow.’
‘It’s up to the politicians, it’s they who decide. Start with your own country, you own state, Sabah.’
‘You’re right, and we are trying hard. The mill there is being built, it’s too late to stop it, but we will to try to stop other mills setting up. Our Chief Minister is fighting for our independence, you know that his brother is being threatened by the Federal Government.’
‘What could I do, if I wanted to do something?’
‘You could stop the project if you wanted to, you could find a way, by foul means if necessary, we don’t care.’
‘It’s not so easy, and what about me, I can’t live off love and thin air.’
‘You don’t have to John’.
‘I would have to.’
‘We could find a way, we don’t depend on that project to live’.
‘I do.’
‘What about all that money that you’ve told me that you’ve got stashed away in Singapore?’ she said with a sly glint in her eye.
‘That, unfortunately, is not mine’.
‘You’ve worked just as hard as the others for that, I don’t see why you couldn’t have your share.’
‘Well that’s one point of view.’
‘Think about it John, think about it.’
‘I’ll think about it if it makes you happy, in the meantime we have a dinner date with Ohlsson-and I hope he’s not going to tire us with the same subject.’
Boredom had set in as they whiled away the time, waiting for a decision from Bob Suwondo, whose was at last concluding the drawn out negotiations with Sutrawan’s family for the acquisition of the Bintang Agung Group, which was without a leader since his death. They had worried enough and had finally fallen into a lethargic numbness. There was no more energy or enthusiasm left to discuss the future of the project any further.
The phone had stopped ringing. Suarez passed the time at Cluny Road with Ennis, he would be leaving soon. There was little to do but sun themselves, drink beer and eat at the nearby hawker centre at the top of Orchard Road.
‘Hey look at that John!’ said Antonio. He rocked gently in his chair reading a week old edition of the Asian Wall Street Journal in the garden.
The article reported that an oil company, Ameroil, with a Swedish pulp company, Scancel, was to undertake forestry plantation trials in Irian Jaya, the western most part of Papua New Guinea.
It said that initial trials would be made with eucalyptus, using a few hundred hectares that had been planted on land they had acquired near a town called Sorong. If the trials proved economically successful, they intended to develop a long-term plantations programme with the long-term goal of creating sustainable pulpwood plantations.
‘I thought that project was dead.’
‘Not according to this.’
‘Let’s have a look at that,’ Ennis said taking the paper and spreading it on the garden table.
The article detailed the critical factors for the evaluation of the trials, the size and location of any future plantings, the growth rates achieved the prevailing investment conditions and the availability of suitable land.
The trials would be conducted in line with Aerial’s environmental guidelines for forestry.
‘That’s nice of them, considering they’re completely new to the business,’ he said aloud.
Natural forest areas would not be cleared to make way for plantations. In planning and operating the trials, Ameroil said the greatest care would be taken to protect the environment and monitor the effects of the plantations.
Natural forest and wild life areas would be conserved and consultation would take place with interested local and national bodies with regard to environmental matters and community issues.
‘They’re full of shit.’
Karl Sorenson a spokesman for Scancel in Stockholm says, it has no immediate plans to build a pulp mill in Indonesia, but with costs rising alarmingly in Scandinavia the possibility of such an eventuality cannot be ruled out.
‘They never admit to anything, they’ll be accused of exporting pollution and environmental problems.’
‘Sorenson, I know that guy, what’s he doing in Jakarta anyway? He knows nothing about forestry beyond the few acres of land he’s got somewhere in the frozen north.’
‘Maybe he’s on one of those Swedish package tour flights that got lost looking for Las Palmas!’
‘Listen to this!’
‘Those Ameroil guys’ interests in forestry started in 1980, with the purchase of an abandoned plantation in Indonesia, where pine trees were established.’
‘I seem to remember Riady talked about them nosing around here about that time.’
The first discussions were held with the Indonesian government three years ago, and led to the granting of an official approval to proceed with the feasibility study for the plantation project and the prefeasibility study for a pulp mill, the report continued.
‘That’s the first I’ve heard about that,’ said Ennis knitting his brow.
The project is being developed in close cooperation with Hutan Industri a state owned company.
‘Bastards they didn’t say a thing.’
‘Well I don’t know about that, but if they’re serious in Indonesia maybe I could try to join them!
‘Rats leaving a sinking ship
‘Dont be like that John, one door closes and another one opens, here have a beer, come on,’ he said going to the refrigerator on the veranda.
They sat around the dinner table chatting about the world in general and about the events of the last weeks. Jenny had suggested that they all get together that evening, taking advantage of Ohlsson’s presence in Singapore with two of his friends, James O’Shea and Miguel Mariano. They members of the Valhalla Club, who had recently formed an association whose aims, were to mobilise public opinion in support of
the conservation of South East Asian regional forests, baptised the Rainforest Conservation Society. Its actions were to include the boycott of tropical timber in the developed countries.
They had finished dinner, which Ennis had helped Jenny prepare, lightly cooked fresh vegetables from the local market, boiled rice, lacquered duck, crispy fired chicken, soft boiled pork with beer and black tea, followed by fresh mangoes and rambutan.
Led by Ennis they picked up their glasses and stepped out onto the veranda, the dining room had started to feel chilly with the blast of the air-conditioning. Outside Ennis was pleased to feel the soft warm air, though he was obliged to switch on the ceiling fan to please the others. The settled down in the rattan chairs whilst Jenny brought a bottle of chilled Australian white wine and several bottles of cool Singa beer from the kitchen.
Apart from the slight breeze from the fan the evening was still and clear, they could see the glow of light in the sky in the Orchard Road direction and heard the distant rumble of the traffic. In the shadows of the garden the form of the umbrella palms could be seen and over to the left the huge crooked branches of an unidentified tropical giant dominated that side of the garden, it had without doubt been there long before the house had been built back in the thirties.
Miguel was forty-one, the son of a wealthy Philipino-American family who had lived in San Francisco since before the World War II. The family still had business interests in the Philippines, mainly in plantations. He had been a brilliant student completing a masters degree in plant genetics at UCLA and then graduating in anthropology and economics at Columbia.
He had fought for two decades without success against the disastrous deforestation of the Philippines and the economic calamity that it had brought to the poor of his country.
He been confronted with overwhelming opposition from business and corrupt political interests, especially the logging lobby, and he had on several occasions received threats to his life,
‘So what’s the news from the Philippines Miguel, any results?’ asked Lars.
‘If it wasn’t so serious I’d say you’re joking, I’m really very sorry to say back home its finished, I don’t have to tell you that there are practically no more primary forests, the little that is left will be gone within five years, there’s nothing we can do.’
‘Is it really that bad?’ asked Ennis.
‘Yes, very definitely yes, today there are only eight hundred thousand hectares, twenty percent less than last year and in the thirties there were seventeen million hectares.’
‘I thought that logging had been banned in many provinces.’
‘Sure, and starting next year logging will be banned in the remainder of the primary forest.’
‘Well that’s positive,’ said Ennis questioningly.
‘Unfortunately illegal logging continues and it is perpetrated by members of the Armed Forces, as well as local officials and their relatives. Corruption and the lack of forest wardens, only one for every three thousand hectares, an impossible task.’
‘The logging lobby and the association of logging concessionaires have even taken the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to court, its incredible but true.’
‘They don’t care a dam, they’re interested in money, fucking money, I’m sorry, I’m doubly sorry because my family is not without guilt and I’m one to talk, living in the lap of luxury.’
‘What Miguel is saying is entirely true,’ said Lars, ‘for example a logging moratorium was imposed in the island province of Samar and is still in force. That province was ravaged by the loggers, creating terrible poverty for the local population who had no other economic activities than the traditional exploitation of the forest, which is infinitely less disastrous.’
‘What about the loggers?’
‘What about them, they’re pirates, they pillage and leave, the forest resources have been incredibly under priced compared to their real value, the forests are irreplaceable.’
‘And plantations’
‘They’re a joke,’ said O’Shea, ‘they talk about reforestation, about planting tens of thousands of hectares each year, you know what that means?’
Ennis shrugged it was his business to know, he was weary of their constant criticism, but in front of such distinguished specialists it was best to let them get on with it.
‘It takes ten minutes to floor a three hundred year old giant, it takes tens minutes to scrape the soil and stick in a goddamned nursery seedling, and then what happens?’
Ennis shrugged again feeling uncomfortable as they all looked at him.
‘I’ll tell you what happens,’ said O’Shea forcefully, ‘in the Philippines and many other tropical countries most of the plants die or are waning, in the best natural conditions in the tropics the survival rate is low, under-financed reforestation cannot work miracles.’
‘Irreparable loss of primary forest can’t be compared to marginal gains in plantations, it takes a successful plantation up to twenty years to become productive,’ Miguel said.
‘I thought that trees reached maturity after only ten years or so,’ said Ennis.
‘Sure, but don’t confuse an individual tree with the success of a plantation, that’s another story, remember the barelands of South Kalimantan, they started there twenty years ago, where are they today?’
Ennis looked into his beer, he knew the answer, they hadn’t produced a single tree, it was a political charade, it was not that they had not tried, they had, but as O’Shea said it was not as easy as sticking a seedling in the sun baked soil.
‘We estimate that the rainforest in the greater part of South East Asia will have definitely and irreversibly disappeared I another ten or fifteen years.’
‘It’s quite incredible, these forests have existed for some 70 million years in their present form and in thirty or forty years man and his greed and ignorance will have destroyed this incredible work of nature forever,’ said Ohlsson.
‘I couldn’t agree more and when we think that the real exploitation of these forests began on a large scale only after World War II, it’s a real disaster, our stupidity has squandered one of the most priceless heritages of our planet.’
‘In only ten or fifteen years the rainforest will have become like the Panda, just a few isolated parks kept artificially alive for tourists or scientists.
‘Almost ninety percent of the genetic pool of the planet gone, destroyed!’
‘The business world and it’s corrupt ignorant short lived politicians don’t care a dam, why should they, they’re there for graft most of them. You only have to look at the record; they refuse to address the real problems, galloping population growth, economic growth in the form of window dressing, as industrialised nations like Japan literally pilfer the heritage of these developing countries.’
‘Maybe it was always like that, when you look at the many deserts of North Africa and the Middle East and you consider that in historical times these were fertile regions, you can see what ignorant exploitation can do.’
‘Of course, we were certainly not the first, but we have their experience to look back on, after all we are supposed to be scientifically aware of the consequences of this situation.’
‘The thing is what can we do, politically we don’t stand a chance even in the western democratic societies people have only recently become aware of the dangers of their actions.’
‘We have to use all means at our disposal,’ said Ohlsson.
‘Even foul means,’ added Jenny.
‘Were not going to become terrorists are we?’ said Ennis mockingly.
‘Why not, our cause is certainly more noble than one of those never ending disputes as to who owns a few miserable square kilometres of fly blown desert,’ she replied.
‘Listen it’s not my fault.’
‘No, but you must admit you’ve never thought for a second about the future of the local population, apart from a couple of thousand jobs or so.’
‘You know the way
those people think.’
Ennis knew only too well, thinking of the attitude of specialists back in Europe. Their view on non-productive environmental protection, capital loosing, as one of them had recently put it, with no thought to the forced expenditure of natures capital.
‘What can we do then?’ said Ennis, standing up to get out of the line of fire.
‘First we have to stop or delay all forestry industry projects,’ said Miguel.
‘My God, what will these people do for a living, or more to the point what will I do for a living,’ exclaimed Ennis lifting his arms into the air.
‘You can help us John, we need an ally with industrial experience, you know our idea is not to keep the forests as an exclusive reserve for scientists and wealthy tourists but to imitate nature living in symbiosis with the forest, a mutually beneficial relationship, think about it John,’ O’Shea said proposing an alliance to a very doubtful Ennis.
‘Don’t worry we’ll find a way so that you won’t starve,’ he said laughing and putting his hand in a fatherly manner on Ennis’ shoulder, breaking the tension. He stood up stretching and looking around for the beer, whilst Jenny soothed the discomforted Ennis with her caresses.
THE OASIS