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View all search resultsSave our forest, save our soul
We need not only tougher laws and regulations on the use and conversion of forest land by plantation and mining companies, but also tighter supervision and credible enforcement of these rules.
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Residents wash clothes and bathe in a drainage ditch on Saturday, Dec. 6, in Central Tapanuli, North Sumatra. A week after landslides and floods hit the area, locals still have no access to clean water and are forced to use ditch water for their daily needs. (Antara/Muhammad Adimaja)
B
laming nature for the deadly floods and landslides in Sumatra is not going to take us very far beyond stating the obvious and long held wisdom that, if we cannot beat nature, we have to try to live with it.
As long as we are in the blame game, however, we should look at the role we humans played in this havoc that has led to more than 800 deaths and massive destruction displacing more than 1.2 million people.
Indonesia is no stranger to many deadly natural disasters, from volcanic eruptions and earthquakes to tsunamis, these are beyond our control. The Sumatra floods tell us that now we have to add cyclones to the list, something which regularly hits the neighboring Philippines but rarely our islands, and rarely as deadly as we just saw in Sumatra.
But we cannot let the government, and the greedy corporations whose interests it serves, off the hook. Some of the destruction in Sumatra, maybe even a large part of it, could have been prevented had they not colluded to strip the island of its tropical rainforests that are essential to absorb rain water.
It is tempting to say “we told you so” but for decades environmental experts and civil society organizations have been warning about the dire impacts to the environment of the rapid deforestation in Sumatra and other islands in our archipelago.
You can forgive the government for its failure to anticipate Cyclone Senyar and the tropical rainstorms that hit Sumatra, but it has had plenty of advance warning about the devastation made much more likely by their collaboration in destroying large tracts of forest.
The government chose to ignore these warnings, insisting that plantation and mining businesses bring economic development, creating jobs for millions of people, and that therefore they are essential to the nation’s poverty alleviation program.
