For a long time, activists had believed that rainforests in the vast northwest Borneo state of Sarawak were being logged unsustainably, rapidly making way for tree (acacia) plantations, oil palm plantations, dams and secondary growth. But few listened.
Their position was confirmed when the country’s auditor-general presented to Parliament in October its 2008 annual report criticising forestry management in Malaysia’s largest state as “unsatisfactory”. The Sarawak state authorities have denied the auditor-general’s findings.
Many of us would think that the concern about hill-slope degradation in Penang and warnings of climate change are a fairly new development which began in the 1980s and 1990s.
Wrong. James Richardson Logan – the man who coined the name ‘Indonesia’ and who is honoured at the Logan Memorial outside the Penang High Court and buried in the nearby Protestant Cemetery – expressed such concern in the mid-19th century in the Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia, which he edited. The brilliant Logan, who was ahead of his time, was a member of the Asiatic Society, corresponding member of the Ethnological Society of London and of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences.
Here are some excerpts from the Journal Vol II, printed in 1848:
It was remarked that the whole of the eastern front of the range [of a mountain in Pinang] has within a few years been denuded of its forest…. In Singapore the present zealous Governor has, in an enlightened spirit … absolutely prohibited the further destruction of forests on the summits of hills…. Climate concerns the whole community and its protection from injury is one of the duties of Government….
This is a side of Malaysia you don’t often see, a world hidden from us. Here, we get a peek at the sad conditions inside an immigration detention centre.
Perak Crisis: The lessons for 2-party system in Malaysia - Talk by Nizar Jamaluddin, 4 Dec 2009, 8.30pm, Caring Society Complex, Penang. Organised by PKR Communications Bureau.
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