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‘Catatan dari Tepi Hutan’ Communities honor local wisdom to manage forests
Personal note: Author Bambang Supriyanto poses with his book, Catatan dari Tepi Hutan (Notes From the Forest’s Edge) during its launch in Jakarta
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ersonal note: Author Bambang Supriyanto poses with his book, Catatan dari Tepi Hutan (Notes From the Forest’s Edge) during its launch in Jakarta. (A.Kurniawan Ulung)
A new book reveals how local people exercise their local wisdom to manage forests in a sustainable way.
For people in Ammatoa Kajang village in South Sulawesi, the forest is a stairway that connects Earth and the sky through which departed spirits go back and forth.
They, therefore, will drive anyone who damages the forest out of the village, along with his or her family members — the highest form of punishment imposed. They are not allowed to return to the village.
“For indigenous people in Kajang, the forest is like the self. If we damage it, we damage ourselves. The [responsibility] to take care and protect the forest is preserved from generation to generation there,” said Bambang Supriyanto, the Environment and Forestry Ministry’s director general of Social Forestry and Environmental Partnership.
He recalled he was asked to walk barefoot during his visit to the village. He was told that the Earth was like a mother and that humans were supposed to unite with it. Therefore, footwear that separated the two entities was forbidden.
He shared the story in his book, Catatan dari Tepi Hutan (Notes from the Forest’s Edge), during its launch in Jakarta.
Published by Tempo Publishing, the book highlighted the government’s social forestry program that enables local communities to manage state forest areas not only to garner social and economic benefits but also to protect it on the back of their local wisdom.
Bambang said the book aimed at making more people understand that local communities no longer needed to be afraid of being chased and arrested by forest police or being accused of forest encroachers when they had a management permit.
The customary forest in Ammatoa Kajang is part of 3.3 million hectares of state forest area that is now managed by local communities through the social forestry scheme.
In the book, Bambang gives his observation of the implementation of the scheme in 11 sites; from Langkat in North Sumatra, Gunung Kidul in Yogyakarta to Wakatobi in Southeast Sulawesi.
In Lubuk Siberuk village in Ogan Komering Ilir, South Sumatra, the scheme helped end a conflict faced by transmigrants living around a state forest. During the conflict, which took place from 1998 to 2008, a local was burned to death in his house for claiming to own a plot of land in the forest.
Bambang said that these days, the transmigrants lived in harmony, joining hands in maintaining and protecting the state forest while growing rubber trees to make money.
Meanwhile, in Langkat, local communities use the social forestry program to farm crabs and shrimps in ponds in a mangroves forest. They had revived it after winning a lawsuit against a palm oil company that previously cut down the mangrove trees.
Dahniar Andriani, executive director of the Association for Community and Ecology-Based Law Reform (HuMa) who attended the launch, praised the book for having the courage to criticize the government, even though the author is part of the government circle.
Catatan dari Tepi Hutan, for example, bemoans President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s commitment to providing 12.7 million ha of forest area for the social forestry scheme. He is expected to increase the figure because it is just one-third of corporate-managed forests.
University of Indonesia (UI) sociologist Imam Prasodjo, who attended the launch, expected Bambang to reveal more challenges that local communities faced in getting land management permits.
To get the social forestry scheme implemented in state forests is not as simple as it seems because local communities who live around the forests are required to meet social forestry regulations and procedures the government has set.
“In the book, Bambang did not explain how difficult and complicated social forestry regulations and procedures are,” he said.
Imam said that complicated regulations were the reason why only 3.3 million ha of state forests are managed by local communities as of September last year. This number is far from 12.7 million ha the President earmarked in 2014 for the social forestry scheme.
Imam understood that to realize the President’s commitment requires strong collaboration with many parties and urged Bambang to reveal the problems he faced in collaborating with other ministries to make the public understand the reason behind the slow progress.
Despite his criticism, Imam praised the way Bambang explained the social forestry scheme in his book, reminding him of John Brockman’s The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, which tells of scientists who simplify their language to make the general public easily understand their work and ideas.
“When I read this book, I see a bureaucrat who is trying to dialogue with ordinary people. The issues that he was dealing with are explained in a way that is easy to follow to make readers quickly understand.” (ste)
