Images from a vanishing forest

Posted by jamie — 13 November 2007 at 3:01pm - Comments

Lately, I've been working a lot on our palm oil campaign, so my spider senses are highly atuned to anything coming out of Sumatra and Indonesia in general. But two stories I found this morning, both on New Scientist, really underlined what's going on west of Java.

The first article features some astonishing images from the Zoological Society of London, caught by a motion-sensitive camera left in the middle of the forest. The impressive snaps include a herd of elephants and a golden cat, but the stand-out picture is of an inquisitive and rare Sumatran tiger, it's eyes glowing in the camera's flash. Take a look at the slideshow - they're incredble.

Natural beauty aside, what's remarkable is that the images were taken in an area of forest adjacent to Bukit Tiga Puluh national park in Riau province (the same province where our Forest Defenders Camp is to be found). This area isn't protected and, as the New Scientist reports, is being offered up to companies to exploit for timber and oil palm plantations on the assumption that it isn't significant in conservation terms.

On the flipside, Fred Pearce - who provides a regular column in which he assesses his own ecological footprint with some rigour - was recently in Sumatra visiting a paper mill churning out pulp made from acacia. What was once rainforest has been replaced by acacia plantations, and as Fred notes:

"When I came here, I thought Sumatra was still largely forested. But I hadn't read the small print. The "forests" are now mostly monoculture plantations. The real forest is largely inside a handful of national parks, as the companies complete the government's plan to "convert" the rest of the land to "productive use"."

The maps of remaining forest we published last year go some way to confirming that - look at Sumatra and it's a large grey smear, much of which was once forested but is now degraded or completely replaced by plantations. We have to save what's left from being utterly destroyed, otherwise those photos of the Sumatran tiger may be all that remain.

About Jamie

I'm a forests campaigner working mainly on Indonesia. My personal mumblings can be found @shrinkydinky.

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