the mouth of deer cave contains a forest

Note: Please read this previous post for information about rampant deforestation in Sarawak.

Mulu National Park is in Sarawak State on Borneo Island.  It’s well known for its breathtakingly gigantic limestone caves, of which Deer Cave is in competition for the largest cave passage in the world.  If you’ve seen BBC’s epic nature documentary Planet Earth, you may remember a scene showing millions of bats streaming out of an enormous cave in a seemingly endless ribbon.  I was there!

limestone buttocks pinching a limestone loaf in Lang cave

...unfortunately, it was rainy that day, so there were fewer bats than usual. despite this, each time a dragon-like formation of bats emerged from the cave, i unconsciously gasped in wonder.

if you enjoy bug-watching, pay special attention to the wooden handrails lining the trails in Mulu National Park. we saw spiders, ants, mantises, millipedes, caterpillars, predatory flatworms, and countless other unidentifiable invertebrates. those who hate bugs, keep your hands off the rails!

Penan woman playing nose flute. Â boat tours to Clearwater Cave stop by a village where nomadic Penans have been forcibly settled by the government.

The Penan are a group of traditionally nomadic hunter-gatherers who live in the rainforests of Sarawak.  They were one of the last groups of truly nomadic hunter-gatherers in the world, using no agriculture, no animal husbandry, and no permanent shelters.

In the 1980’s, when the Sarawak government started cooperating with logging companies to exploit the forests for lumber, it began forcing Penan people to live in permanent villages and adopt agriculture.  Since then, Penan activists have fought, without much success, to protect their right to access, use and maintain the forests as their traditional livelihood requires.  Of the 10,000 or so Penan people who live in Sarawak, only several hundred manage to continue their nomadic lifestyles.

One of the difficulties in the Penans’ fight appears to be that Malaysia’s law concerning Native Customary Rights requires indigenous people to show that they have cultivated an area of land for some amount of time before they can claim rights to it.  Clearly this law brings no benefit to nomadic hunger-gatherers who by definition do not cultivate.

Without deeper research, it is impossible to determine whether the Penans’ traditional nomadic lifestyle was entirely sustainable.  Did they employ long-term resource management and planning? Was their spiritual respect for the natural world enough to overcome humanity’s penchant for pursuing short-term gain at the expense of long-term sustainability?  How did they control their population?  Though it is anecdotal, and perhaps tainted by the romantic ideal of the “noble savage”,  here is a captivating article describing a westerner’s first-hand experiences travelling through the forest with a group of Penan.

Whether or not the Penans’ traditional lifestyle was eternally sustainable, it is certain that Sarawak’s logging policies are neither sustainable nor morally defensible.  The government has colluded with logging companies to make a quick buck.  Why worry about the future of Sarawak when they can make their money today, ship the money out to some other country, and then leave the indigenous people to suffer and languish in this decimated wasteland?

I am not absolutely against globalization, but I do believe that the evils facilitated by globalization must be minimized through the use of appropriate incentive structures and fair power sharing.  Decisions resulting in actions that affect the long-term productivity of an area of land must be made with the participation and approval of the people whose long-term interests are tied to the land, and full information must be provided to these people.  Looting, not globalization, is the evil we must fight.

Survival International has some additional information about the Penan and what you can do to help them out.

An interesting aside is this provocative article by Jared Diamond (badass bird biologist and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse) arguing that human health peaked tens of thousands of years ago when we were all hunter-gatherers, and that the development of agriculture and private property pulled us into a dark age (in terms of nutrition and health) from which we are only now, after the industrial and scientific revolutions, beginning to emerge.

In Sarawak, we are tragically destroying a way of life that could eventually provide the foundation for a future, more enlightened human civilization.