A couple from Germany, regular visitors to Penang, won’t be coming back again after seeing the northern coast of the island turning into a concrete jungle.
This letter is from today’s Sun:
May 242011
Apr 062011
Sarawak Chief Minister Taib Mahmud says that 70 per cent of the rainforest in Sarawak is intact and he is prepared to invite independent and international inspection teams to verify this.
But Mark Bujang, the executive director of Brimas, says that 85 per cent of Sarawak has been deforested. He says the Sarawak government includes plantations in its calculations of forest cover. Continue reading »
Nov 282009
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….