Mirrors

Whenever I anticipate travel to a new part of the world, I inevitably create for myself a picture of what that place looks like. Before arriving in Borneo, my mental map of the island was filled with wide, slow-moving rivers winding sinuously through tangled jungle forests for mile after mile. Yesterday, a part of that vision was realized when we boarded a houseboat and headed up the beautiful Mahakam river. We passed countless small villages perched on pilings over the river where children would run out to wave at us before returning to a bicycle race along the boardwalks. Tugboats floated by hauling barges piled high with monstrous mounds of coal or logs.

This was the first time on our trip that I’d been confronted so continuously with the visual evidence of resource extraction. Loaded barge after loaded barge, I found myself thinking how incredible it was that extraction continued at such a rate when it seemed obvious that such activity was completely unsustainable. How can people cut down virgin forests indiscriminately with little thought not only to the environment they are destroying by also to their future resource needs? It is because this is the precedent that has been set. This is how the western countries developed, and when they ran out of resources, they exported those needs to places like Indonesia. But when the forests of Borneo are gone, there will be nowhere left to export resource needs to. There is nowhere left to serve as an Indonesia for Indonesia. When we approach developing countries to discuss environmental degradation, it must be with suggestions and pleas rather than demands. Suggestions, because we’ve been there before and we know the consequences of our development strategy. Pleas, because we degraded the first half, so perhaps they have some right to do the same to the second. But there is no third.

Up the Mahakam River

When out houseboat could go no further, we divided up into brightly colored three-person motorized canoes and continued on through a vast and shallow lake filled with grasses and village islands. At the far end of the lake we entered the forest where proboscis monkey stared down at us zipping farther up the Mahakam. Occasionally, our canoes would pass through rafts of floating trash – soda cans, discarded sandals, and plastic packaging. Living in North America where littering is not only socially unacceptable but carries a sizeable fine, I find myself wincing at the way people throw their garbage onto streets and into rivers here. But just as Indonesia’s resource management reflects our own, their waste management does as well. We also cast our trash out into the world where it breaks down only over the course of hundreds or thousands of years. We’re more removed from the process – our trash passes through waste bins and garbage trucks before it reaches the natural world, and there it is covered with dirt to assuage our conscience. We’re littering too; Indonesians are just more honest about it. Just because we push our piles of garbage around with heavy machinery and cover it with dirt doesn’t mean that we’ve taken care of it.