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Dedy Darnaedi : The frequent gardener
“Ladies, you may have heard about this big tree, the Kompasia exelsa, indigenous to Kalimantan, only found in Indonesia, and now a rare species due to frequent felling,” Dedy Darnaedi told a group of women visiting the Bogor Botanical Gardens recently
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“Ladies, you may have heard about this big tree, the Kompasia exelsa, indigenous to Kalimantan, only found in Indonesia, and now a rare species due to frequent felling,” Dedy Darnaedi told a group of women visiting the Bogor Botanical Gardens recently.
JP/Theresia Sufa
The former head of the botanical gardens has been giving seminars of this type almost every week since 2001.
Dedy Darnaedi, born in Kuningan, Cirebon, West Java, on June 15, 1952, is a taxonomic researcher of ferns at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) and also director of the Plant Resources of South East Asia Association (PROSEA).
As head of the Bogor Botanical Gardens, he used to carry out routine inspections of all the plants around the compound every day and talk to visitors, mostly school students and women from various organizations. Now that he works with PROSEA, he only inspects the gardens once a week.
“By introducing Indonesia’s indigenous plants to visitors, I want to make the public aware of the importance of the garden’s collections because the presence of vegetation creates fresh air and produces oxygen vital to our life,” he said.
Dedy often uses Kalimantan’s Kompasia exelsa as an example, as it does not exist in other countries. The day this tree will no longer exist in nature, the garden will still have some of its seedlings. Attentive tourists are generally gripped by his revelation, gazing at the mighty tree now and again.
“I hope they will pass on this knowledge to their families, friends and neighbors so as to arouse public concern over the environment, particularly forests as the habitat of diverse species of vegetation, and prompt people to grow trees in their backyards,” Dedy added.
Indonesia has 47 types of ecosystems including beaches, seashores, mangrove areas, peat land, high- and lowlands, mountainous zones, undergrowths, the ice-capped Sukarno summit, river basins, savannas, down to the deep sea and coral reefs, all forming a vast environment of great diversity. The World Conservation Monitoring Centre, an agency of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), calls Indonesia a megadiverse country because of its rich biodiversity, only second after Brazil, besides its abundant endemic plant species.
“But we are not yet certain about the exact numbers of species of flowers, ferns, lichens and algae as well as various animal species, fungi and microbes in our ecosystems. It is no surprise biologists continue to classify new species of flora, fauna and micro-organisms from Indonesia,” noted Dedy.
Natural disasters like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and wildfires are threatening to annihilate the country’s biodiversity, which is not yet fully documented. However, according to Dedy, human greed and poverty presents a greater threat to Indonesia’s biodiversity, leading to species becoming extinct before they can be identified, let alone used.
The million trees program currently being implemented should avoid monoculture and only planting selected trees. While it is a good scheme, this drive will not replace the loss of species diversity in nature, nor will it restore ecosystems, because ecosystems are not just filled with commercial and shady trees, but contain various complex biotic elements interacting in dynamic homeostatic balance.
The director of PROSEA, who has undauntedly been voicing the importance of safeguarding Indonesia’s biodiversity, has been named committee chairman of the Association of Tropical Biodiversity Conservation (ATBC) meeting slated for July 19-23, 2010, in Denpasar, Bali. Around 700 participants from 50 countries will attend the session. ATBC, set up in 1963, is the world’s largest professional organization of tropical biology and nature conservation.
The Denpasar meeting will discuss issues of food resilience, alternative energy and the climate crisis. Food resilience is a particularly fascinating topic because Indonesia is facing what is called “genetic erosion”, species loss and ecosystem degradation, which take place simultaneously as a result of primary forest tree felling, illegal logging and over-exploitation.
“For instance, we’ve lost several paddy genes, including swamp paddy in Riau. Genetic erosion may also affect corn in addition to paddy and banana genes,” warned Dedy.
“Farmers used to be treated as heroes for always keeping their best seeds from harvests, such as paddy, corn and nuts. Nowadays, farmers are easily persuaded to buy seeds in village cooperatives.
They then consume their best yields, while buying the hybrid type of seedling with limited genetic elements,” he said.
It is therefore crucial the government and its policies help preserve Indonesia’s biodiversity. Society as a whole, and regional administrations in Indonesia should also be supportive of the 18 botanical gardens already established in several regions.
Replanting is only one form of biodiversity conservation, the most important being the natural habitat like in national parks. Dedy is therefore calling on concerned parties to stop reclaiming primary forests and converting land representing various types of ecosystems, and to rescue different endangered plant species by building botanical and biodiversity gardens in all regions.
