JALUNG AYU has brought along his spear as well as his hunting dogs. The dogs are sniffing through the undergrowth, looking for bearded pig, but it doesn鈥檛 look as though we will be catching any meat today. No matter; it鈥檚 not what we came here for.
We are in the rainforest to look at the flora. This area of the remote Malinau watershed in Indonesian Borneo is Jalung鈥檚 home turf, and he knows the local plants well. He points out two species of rattan: one is used for making baskets and mats, the other is ideal for making rope. Towering above us is a huge silver-barked Koompassia tree, a species valued for the bees鈥 nests which hang from the upper branches. 鈥淲hen we collect honey,鈥 Jalung says, 鈥渨e burn the bark of this tree, belefan鈥 鈥 he taps a large specimen of Tristaniopsis whiteana with his spear 鈥 鈥渢o frighten away the bees, and then scrape the honey into a basket made of another bark and lower it down to the ground with a rattan rope.鈥
Jalung鈥檚 sister, Awing Ayu, has accompanied us. 鈥淪ee this small tree?鈥 she says. 鈥淲e use its root to reduce fever when we get malaria.鈥 Awing鈥檚 husband is an expert on traditional medicines. Another root found round here is used as an antidote to snake bites and bee stings, she says. It also prevents hangovers.
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I am impressed by the breadth and detail of their knowledge, and I am not alone. I am here in Indonesia to find out about a radical new approach to assessing biodiversity that has been developed by an international team of scientists from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). The CIFOR team say their innovation is paying enormous dividends. And yet it couldn鈥檛 be more straightforward: they have started asking the locals what they think.
鈥淢uch of what we do probably seems blatantly obvious,鈥 reflects Douglas Sheil, who leads the project. 鈥淎sking local people what they think isn鈥檛 difficult. The bizarre thing is that so few scientists do it.鈥 Traditionally, western scientists have assumed that local people would have little to say about rainforest biodiversity. But listening to the locals turns out to be well worth the trouble; it is providing a richly textured view of landscape and wildlife. Not surprisingly perhaps, the perspective from the forest floor is startlingly different from the conventional biodiversity surveys, but this novel view is helping the locals and the conservationists to implement plans that work for everyone: governments, logging corporations, and, of course, the locals.
鈥淭he villagers are used to outside 鈥榠nvestors鈥 looking to exploit the rainforest, but not to requests for help鈥
It鈥檚 certainly high time something changed, Sheil says. Old-style assessments, long lists of species and value judgments that reflect western perceptions about what matters, seldom provide decision-makers in developing countries with the guidance they need. Nor do they describe how local communities fit into the landscape, and what will happen if, say, an area of forest is set aside for conservation or converted to plantations. In a country like Indonesia this matters enormously. The failure to consider the needs and rights of Indonesians, especially during the three-decade-long autocratic rule of President Suharto, has led to widespread illegal logging, encroachment and violent conflict in and around forests and protected areas. Suharto鈥檚 presidency ended in 1998, but the problems his rule created live on.
鈥淕ranny鈥檚 cough medicine and king cobra venom scarcely got a pebble鈥
CIFOR鈥檚 research in Borneo has focused on seven villages along the upper Malinau river. Between them, they represent two of the main cultures in the watershed: the politically influential Merap, who are settled rice farmers, and the relatively marginalised Punan, hunter-gatherers whose livelihoods have traditionally been based on the rainforest. While some villages have the trappings of modernity and are close to schools, healthcare and markets, others are remote, entirely lacking in services and accessible only by arduous river journeys.
Jalung Ayu鈥檚 Punan village is 6 hours by canoe from the nearest small town. In his youth, the Punan seldom saw anybody other than the odd missionary or trader. Nowadays they are more used to visits from outsiders, especially 鈥渋nvestors鈥 looking to exploit the forest. They are not, however, used to being asked for help.
When the scientists arrived in 2000, they didn鈥檛 want timber; rather, they wanted to know how the Punan 鈥 widely reviled by other ethnic groups as 鈥渂ackward鈥 forest-dwellers 鈥 viewed the world. 鈥淲e were very puzzled,鈥 Jalung recalls.
But the invitation to cooperate was accepted, and the project started off with teams of around six people spending a month in each village. A mapping exercise helped familiarise the villagers with the scientists鈥 aims, and the scientists with the landscape features the villagers valued. 鈥淓ven if you鈥檙e doing a standard biodiversity survey, this sort of exercise is vital when you鈥檙e working in vast sparsely populated areas,鈥 says consultant biologist Miriam van Heist. The villagers were immediately able to tell the scientists about certain special sites such as mineral-rich salt licks, which attract favoured game species such as bearded pig and deer; limestone outcrops where valuable swiftlets鈥 nests, the raw material for Chinese soup, are found; and patches of forest rich in gaharu, an incense-bearing wood prized in the Middle East. For many Punan, gaharu provides their main income.
While one group of scientists stayed in the village to gather information about local perceptions, a field team conducted soil surveys, collected plant material 鈥 over 12,000 specimens were sent for herbarium analysis 鈥 and identified as many species as they could with local help. The scientists were deeply impressed. 鈥淢any of the sites have a rich and distinctive flora and fauna,鈥 explains van Heist. 鈥淲ithout the villagers鈥 help, we would never have known where most of them were, and our species inventory would have been much poorer.鈥
By the end of the first phase of research, over 2100 species of plants had been recorded, 1457 of which had one or more local uses. This, Sheil says, is one of the richest rainforests in the world.
Of course, however rich, a simple inventory of the rainforest鈥檚 contents is not much use to anyone who has to make decisions about conservation or land use. The next step 鈥 ascribing quantifiable values to different landscapes and species 鈥 involved spending many days with the villagers, much of it sitting in wooden huts, surrounded by swirls of cigarette smoke, babbling children and querulous dogs. The lifestyle can be tough; weeks of sleeping on hard floors and washing in rivers wouldn鈥檛 suit those of a precious disposition, but Sheil and his colleagues are quick to point out that the experience was largely pleasurable 鈥 give or take vicious intestinal parasites and the odd bout of malaria.
鈥淭he villagers gave rattan, used for basketry and gathering honey, one of the highest values鈥
The scientists and local communities together identified 14 categories of use for plants, animals and landscapes. They could be used to make boats, for food, to take as medicines, or as places in which to hunt, for example. They also identified nine principal land types, including villages, gardens, swamps, cultivated land, fallow land and forest. To find out which land type topped the list in each of the 14 categories, the researchers used a pebble scoring system. They provided small groups of villagers with 100 pebbles or maize seeds and the villagers allocated the pebbles to the different land types for each category of use in a way which reflected their importance. So the older women of Long Jalan, to give one example, put 54 pebbles on forest and 46 on village for the medicine category; 32 on forest, 20 on cultivated areas, 11 on riverside, 19 on gardens and 18 on village for marketable items. 鈥淲e were surprised to find that even in villages which have lost most of their forests, people still value forests more highly than any other landscape, including their rice fields,鈥 says van Heist.
The villagers were then asked to list the 10 most important plants and animals for each category, and to score them in order of importance. It was all very well, the scientists reasoned, having a list of 47 medicinal plants, identified by Unyat Iman in Lio Mutai, but they needed to distinguish between a plant that had been used decades ago, and one in common use today. 鈥淭his was one of the most interesting parts of the exercise,鈥 explains Imam Basuki, the soil scientist who acted as my translator, 鈥渁s it immediately identified the animals and plants which really mattered to local communities.鈥
Granny鈥檚 cough medicine and king cobra venom 鈥 used by Punan on their blowpipe darts during the days of tribal warfare 鈥 scarcely got a pebble. In almost every village, the same small number of animals and plants were given the highest value. These included the elusive bearded pig, a vital source of fat and protein; various timber species; rattan, used for basketry as well as honey-gathering; sago palm, an important source of carbohydrate when people run out of rice; gaharu and swiftlets鈥 nests, valuable tradable commodities; the hornbill, whose feathers are used in rituals; and the python and sun bear, valued for medicinal reasons. It also became clear that certain places, such as salt licks, limestone cliffs, ancestral grave sites and old village sites, were particularly important.
This sort of information simply wouldn鈥檛 emerge from classical biodiversity surveys. And it is precisely the sort of information, argues Sheil, which decision-makers need in an area like the Malinau watershed. With its resources coveted by loggers and mining companies, and local government under pressure to generate income, fencing off large areas of land for conservation simply isn鈥檛 an option. However, formulating land-use policies which help to protect areas that matter most for local people, and improving logging practices, is a real, workable possibility.
Save the graves
鈥淥ur research shows that there are certain win-win situations which local and national government could support immediately,鈥 says Sheil. For example, logging companies frequently destroy grave sites and salt licks. Protecting these would not only benefit local people, but would be good for conservation too. The same applies to limestone caves and limestone cliffs; protecting these is vital if the cash-earning swiftlet colonies are to survive. It would also benefit conservation, as the limestone harbours a diverse and unusual flora. Preventing logging on riverbanks would make little odds to logging companies, but benefit the villagers by conserving a fruit-eating carp, their favourite fish, which is absent where riverbanks have been logged.
The research also suggested that there should be changes in logging practice. At present, a law compels logging companies to remove the undergrowth to encourage regeneration of timber species after logging. But this deprives villagers of scores of useful species, such as rattan and medicinal plants. It would be better, the CIFOR researchers believe, if the law were revoked. Environmentally sensitive logging practices, which stipulate that logging tractors should follow trails along ridges, also need to be revised: the ridges are where local people find their preferred species of sago palm, Eugeissona utilis.
Sheil hopes to influence politicians and scientists alike. 鈥淥ur research shows that local people are not opposed to conservation,鈥 he says. 鈥淲hat they are opposed to is anyone telling them to abandon their old way of life and find other sources of income.鈥
The villagers in the Malinau watershed certainly feel they have derived tangible benefits from the process. 鈥淲e knew that the forests were important,鈥 explains Daud Laing in Lio Mutai, 鈥渂ut we didn鈥檛 realise quite how much they mattered until we did the scoring exercises.鈥 In other words, the process made explicit what the Punan intuitively knew already. Crucially, it also provided them with the information they need to negotiate better deals with logging companies and outsiders. 鈥淲e鈥檝e told the loggers there are certain trees they have to leave, like fruit trees which attract wild pigs,鈥 says Daud, 鈥渁nd we鈥檙e insisting on other measures to ensure they cause less damage to our fields with their machinery.鈥 Before the exercise, the Punan hadn鈥檛 the knowledge or confidence to do that.
But will the research influence people with real power, the politicians and decision-makers? One of the outcomes has been a series of posters, crammed with information about every aspect of the research. These have proved hugely popular in the villages 鈥 in Lio Mutai they get pride of place besides photos of their Catholic Monsignor 鈥 and have been widely distributed to government offices and other public places.
The scientists have also produced maps that use a colour code to highlight the relative importance of different parts of the landscape. These indicate which areas matter most to local people, and should prove invaluable to those planning new roads, logging concessions, coal mines and the like. 鈥淚t鈥檚 essential that land-use planning should be based on good biophysical information, and on the views and needs of local people,鈥 says Sheil. 鈥淎t least now, decision-makers here have fewer excuses for ignoring the importance of the forests.鈥
