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Bill Laurance wrote a compelling and very dour piece in The Conversation this week. He asked for some ‘link love’, so I decided to reproduce the article here for ConservationBytes.com readers. Full credit to Bill and The Conversation, of course.
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What comes to mind when you think of Indonesia?
For biologists like myself, Australia’s northern neighbour provokes visions of ancient rainforests being razed by slash-and-burn farmers, and endangered tigers and orangutans fleeing from growling bulldozers.
This reality is true, but there is also hope on the horizon.
Indonesia is a vast, sprawling nation, spanning some 17,000 islands. Among these are Java, Sumatra, half of New Guinea and much of Borneo.
Some of the planet’s most biologically rich and most endangered real estate is found on this archipelago.
Today, Indonesia is losing around 1.1 million hectares of forest annually. That’s an area a third the size of Belgium, bigger than Australia’s Wet Tropics World Heritage Area.
With forest loss now slowing in Brazil, Indonesia has the dubious distinction of being the world’s deforestation “leader”. No nation is destroying its forests faster.
In Sumatra, where I visited recently, the world’s biggest paper-pulp corporations are chopping down hundreds of thousands of hectares of native rainforest to make paper and cardboard.
Some of these corporations also fund aggressive lobbyists, such as World Growth in Washington DC [CJA Bradshaw’s note: see our piece on one particular patron of WG – Alan Oxley], to combat their critics and dissuade major retail chains from dropping their products. Read the rest of this entry »
ConservationBytes.com 