Gregory Goes There

This past winter, Gregory helped support  a  National Geographic-funded expedition to Sumatra’s Leuser Ecosystem. The goal was to document environmental damage and how it’s linked to the communities in the region, raising awareness about what’s happening in one of the planet’s most fragile ecosystems (packs were needed because there’s a lot of remote, rugged terrain to travel through). The team’s goal was not only to document environmental damage; more positively, they wanted to seek out and profile examples of alternative livelihoods that support both community incomes and the environment. The team is back now, and they’re assembling a multi-media web site about their trip. Look for it soon at Distant Dipatches (you can find video updates posted during the trip there now.) One of the team members, Zarah Rahman, shown in the photos conducting interviews, sent us an update.

In 10 weeks in Aceh we traveled thousands of kilometers, interviewed illegal loggers, met villagers who had been displaced by newly opened palm oil plantations, saw tiger tracks, lived in jungle villages and ate unimaginable amounts of rice. We got the stories and images that we went to Aceh to get and now we’re back in the U.S. editing our materials and putting together our final media.

We set out last October with our Gregory packs loaded with cameras, a sound recorder, memory cards, batteries, chargers, power bars, maps, and leech socks. The challenges of accessing Aceh’s remote villages made getting the stories of rainforest destruction and illegal activity even more satisfying.

In our last update on the Gregory blog, we had just spent several weeks in villages involved in land-rights conflicts with foreign palm companies that have recently made large scale land grabs across Aceh. Land is the most crucial factor for villagers dependent on agriculture for survival. Forced off their agricultural land, many of these villagers now seek employment as day laborers in the very palm plantations that displaced them.

In the past year the price of palm oil in Aceh has dropped by 70%. This rapid decrease is linked to the global economic recession, to growing consumer awareness, and to oversupply. With falling prices, production has slowed and many Acehnese who have now come to depend on salaries from these plantations are wondering whether there will still be work for them here in the future.

After documenting the stories of these communities living in a sub-district in the SE corner of Aceh, our team loaded up the car and headed north to the tip of the island of Sumatra. The village of Lamsujen is only a few hours from the Acehnese capital city of Banda Aceh and sits at a critical point of entry into the jungle. Here where the mountains extend right up to the Indian Ocean, a fast-flowing river provides one of the only routes into the jungle and the villagers in Lamsujen control access to the forest.

Each day as the sun begins to set, a set of hard top jeeps rattle down the single road through Lamsujen, dragging trailers loaded with illegally cut logs behind them. This gravel road follows the river through the village and narrows and turns to dirt at the edge of the forest, but does not end there. The road leads straight into the jungle, where young men from the village spend their days hiking up the steep slopes and felling the largest of the jungle trees. Illegal logging in Aceh today is done mostly at the community level using little infrastructure or technology. Villagers hike into the forest on trails rather than roads and spend up to a week felling and cutting planks from one tree. Once the planks are cut, they use jungle vines to drag the logs out to the village.

We spent our first few days in Lamsujen lying low, listening to the logging trucks rattling by each day, but waiting to establish trust with the locals before asking any questions. We eventually ended up getting an ‘in’ through a friend our local team member. After a week of listening to the sound of chainsaws in the mountains, one morning our team joined a pair of loggers and headed up the mountain. The work is extremely dangerous- the jungle mud makes the mountainsides slippery and loose rocks add to the instability. Chainsaw men not only face the inherent risks of handling chainsaws, but also face the risk of fines and imprisonment if caught by the forest police.

The young men we interviewed for this project explained that they turned to logging for their income because of the lack of alternatives. In reality, only a small portion of the villagers in each village are loggers, while the remaining villagers support themselves with farming and fishing. However, those that do log tend to be young men that do not own their own land. These men have often have worked outside of their villages and are thus accustomed to making a cash income rather than subsisting from farming. Loggers seemed to understand the links between logging and landslides, floods and droughts. Though they knew the importance of the forests for their communities, the financial incentives and lack of alternatives keep them involved in the logging industry.

Palm plantations and illegal logging are the two top threats to the rainforests of Aceh. Combating the expansion of palm oil plantations will require both greater regulation of large companies and programs to address the economic needs of the local population. If locals are given viable livelihood alternatives and their land rights are protected, they won’t be driven to engage as laborers in the palm oil industry. Similarly, reducing illegal logging requires both greater enforcement of park boundaries and addressing the economic needs of communities such as Lamsujen that lie at edges of the forest.