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JOHN HIGSON: Man with a mission
Championing ecotourism: EcoRegions Indonesia CEO John Higson (left) and ERI cofounder I Gusti Putu Ekadana
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Championing ecotourism: EcoRegions Indonesia CEO John Higson (left) and ERI cofounder I Gusti Putu Ekadana. JP/Lynda Mills
John Higson is a happy man. The Lombok-based company he helped to establish three years ago, EcoRegions Indonesia (ERI), has gone from strength to strength and is about to expand, with plans for a marketing office in Jakarta to promote what is promising to be a far greater endeavor than even Higson may have dreamed of.
'Things have just been exploding,' Higson said recently in Mataram. 'We thought when we first came here that we would do one or maybe two ecoregions, but the Indonesian government is asking us to look at several other areas in the country.'
How Higson, who was born in 1961 in Nottingham, England, ended up in Indonesia is a fascinating story in itself.
Shortly after graduating university, Higson left the UK in 1984 and headed for Stockholm, Sweden, where he set up his first business. Eight years later, he created what would become one of Sweden's largest alcohol import businesses, importing British beers and ciders.
'One of my jobs was to break open the alcohol monopoly in Sweden. So I was pushing tons of alcohol products, and I was very good at it,' he said.
Despite all his success, however, Higson gradually began to question what he was doing. 'I woke up one morning in a hotel room in Amsterdam and realized I was creating value for things that didn't have any value. So I decided to change my life.'
In 1997, Higson fired all his customers and in his own words, 'went walkabout', while he figured out what to do next.
'When I was doing branding, I noticed there were tons of small, individual products and people who were doing things that had true value ' social and environmental value. But they were divided and isolated,' he said.
'And my thought was, if you gathered all those fantastic people with their passion and knowledge, and those really righteous products and ideas, and put them all together in one big platform, what would happen?'
What happened was the creation in 1999 of the world's first nationally branded Farmers' Own Market (Bondens egen Marknad) in Stockholm, which won several awards and, according to Higson, created a mini food revolution in Sweden.
Higson went on to develop a string of other sustainable development platforms, culminating in the establishment in 2009 of Drömgârden, Sweden's first consumer-owned farm.
'For a while, I considered leaving Sweden and doing something in another country, but I hadn't actually thought as far as Indonesia. That was way off my map,' he joked.
However, one of Higson's friends, Peter Barkhammar, had set up an ecovillage on Gili Meno, and he invited Higson to join.
When he visited in 2010, there was just one plot left in the ecovillage ' in exactly the same part of the island where he had stayed during a holiday several years earlier.
Taking this as a sign, Higson decided to become part of the ecovillage, but bigger plans were in the offing.
Barkhammar introduced him to some local government representatives from Lombok. With the island's new international airport being built, they were working out what they were going to do about tourism.
'They'd seen what had happened in Bali: Local people displaced, money going to Jakarta and other people, and the environment trashed. So I started talking about large, regional platforms, which they thought was a fantastic idea and together with our partner, Pak Ekadana, they offered us this land [Tanjung Ringgit, East Lombok regency] and asked if we could do an ecoregion here.'
Having been, as he put it, 'blown away' by Tanjung Ringgit's beauty, Higson launched himself into action.
Drawing on his extensive Europe-wide network and with initial funding from the Swedish government, Higson persuaded around 40 sustainability experts to travel to Lombok to start developing the plans and just a few months later, in January 2011, EcoRegions Indonesia was born.
Reflecting on how smoothly and quickly everything had slotted into place, Higson said, 'Some things are meant to be. This is the right place at the right time.
'If you want to set up a large-scale regional development platform, there's actually no better place than Indonesia. The state of development in many areas is quite low, so you can start from scratch; and the kind of biodiversity in the country ' both marine and land ' is some of the best in the world.'
' JP/Lynda Mills
