Consider the sorrow contained in the paragraphs that follow – for this is the anguish of the dispossessed, ousted by modern development and deprived by it of traditional life:
“The old man remembers a better time. It was a time when the wild rivers of Sarawak ran clear and the fish were abundant, when the grand forests stretched across the vast interior of the island of Borneo, teeming with deer and boar, leopard and rhinoceros; a time when the cry of birds, not the scream of chainsaws, filled the air, and when the great orang-utan were not reduced to a caged circus act for gawking tourists.
“That was the time of childhood, before the Japanese came upriver in World War II in search of the retreating British, before the logging companies came to strip the ancient forests, and before the government men arrived to tell the people that they must leave their villages and ancestral lands to make way for the big dam.”
These were the introductory paragraphs in a feature article written by Mark Baker for a weekend edition of the Sydney Morning Herald back in April, 2001. The “big dam” is the Bakun, the controversial project that has become the biggest hydro-electric project in South-East Asia and in which Hydro Tasmania subsidiary Entura has a role.
But let’s look at some more of what Mark Baker wrote of the Bakun and its impact on inland Sarawak and its native tribes (the reporter captured the essence of their concern in his with the old man, a Kayan):
“The Bakun project adds a final insult to a generation of environmental injury in Sarawak that has seen the devastation of an ecosystem regarded as second only to the Amazon. Three-quarters of Sarawak was originally covered with primary tropical rainforest – about 9 million hectares of rich jungle. Today less than 500,000 hectares of primary forest is left, apart from a few scattered national parks and reserves. With more than 14 million cubic metres of timber still being taken each year, international forestry experts estimate that Sarawak will be logged out within four to five years.
“Uncontrolled and unsustainable logging practices have had a calamitous effect on the landscape. The loggers have bulldozed their way across the State taking all saleable trees, clear-felling vast areas, destroying the generative capability of areas that have been selectively logged and even stripping the vulnerable high ground with helicopters. Landslides triggered by the logging of hillsides and the carving of access roads through watercourses have created a massive siltation problem that has turned all the State’s major river systems into muddy drains, seriously disrupted navigation and flushed millions of tonnes of topsoil into the South China Sea.
“The damage already done by the timber barons has compounded concerns about the viability of the Bakun Dam. Despite strenuous efforts to hide details of the environmental impact of the project – control of the cursory environmental impact process were transferred from Federal to State authorities and all technical studies were initially classified under the Official Secrets Act – copies of a detailed official study that were eventually made public in the early 1990s carried two serious warnings.
“The 250-page report said planned clear-felling of the dam site and logging of the catchment area would trigger soil erosion at a rate 500 times greater than in untouched forest, and siltation would reduce the dam’s capacity by 20 per cent within 30 years with, in the longer term, the possibility of a dam collapse with disastrous implications for communities living downstream. The report further warned that a fault system in the area carried the risk of major earthquakes, a risk that would be compounded by the huge volume of water held back by the dam.”
The Bakun is now reality and those serious questions remain about its future. In our State Parliament the Greens Kim Booth has demanded an explanation of Entura’s role in the project and criticised the failure of proper disclosure on this.
But will Hydro Tasmania oblige?
Earlier on Tasmanian Times (includes links to earlier articles):
If Entura’s conduct in Sarawak is ethical, why refuse to co-operate?
