US VS THEM: Why tribal people and nature get screwed by Asian governments and business leaders
Posted on 17. Oct, 2020 by Paul Sochaczewski in Environment, Environment EarthLove
This short article is inspired by EarthLove. The book is fiction, the issues are real.
US vs THEM
Why tribal people and nature get screwed by Asian governments and business leaders
In Borneo, paternalistic governments and avaricious businesspeople devalue rural folks and the environments on which they rely. Such arrogance often leads to environmental destruction, a subject at the heart of my new satiric eco-adventure EarthLove.
Here’s how it works.
I’ve written numerous articles and books about the plight of the Penan tribe in the Malaysian Borneo state of Sarawak–human rights abuses and destruction of their rainforest home. Decades ago, in an attempt to get the other side of the story for my novel Redheads, I interviewed James Wong Kim Min, who played an important role in determining the future of the tribe and forests in which they lived. Wong was concurrently Sarawak’s State Minister of Tourism and Local Government and one of the state’s biggest timber tycoons, with substantial timber operations in the rainforests where the Penans lived.
Wong loved to talk with foreigners about the Penans, whom he felt the foreign press had idealized as a group of colorful, innocent, downtrodden, blowpipe-wielding, loinclothed rustics.
Most of Sarawak’s Penans have been resettled into “mainstream” communities. I defended the right of the remaining few hundred semi-nomadic Penans to live peacefully in intact forests.
In return, Wong lectured me, as I have been lectured by numerous Asian officials when I raised similar concerns. In effect he said, We just want our cousins, the naked Penans, to enjoy the same benefits we civilized folk enjoy.
Wong was clear. The Penans needed the help of the powerful decision makers in the capital. The Penans were just one step above savages and Wong and his colleagues were doing them a favor by bringing them into the modern world. And the subtext is that the Penans live in the “unproductive” jungle, which is ripe for exploitation.
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This paternalism is partly a result of our need/fear relationship with nature, which accelerates the Us vs Them conflict.
And within that complex relationship we can find the reasons for destruction of nature as well as the hope for conservation of nature.
Let’s look first at the “need.”
We come from nature, we are part of nature. This connection is very deep, ancient, and very Jungian in its impact on our collective unconscious.
But what about the “fear?” We define ourselves partly by what we are not. We are no longer “savages” who compete with animals; we are civilized; we have left the darkness. Our ancestors learned to use plants for medicine, build complex shelters, and, after much trial and error, to dominate nature by mastering fire, making tools, growing crops, and domesticating other animals. We became the masters of the universe. Ask a well-educated city dweller in Jakarta if she wants to go into the rainforest and she’s likely to reply: “Ugh! Snakes! Demons and magic! No Starbucks in the jungle.” It’s all a way of saying the forest is alien, it’s dangerous, it’s filled with people having strange animistic beliefs who worship spirits that reside in the trees and streams and volcanoes.
This is near the core of our confused relationship with nature. We need nature but we fear it. We’re part of nature, but we want to dissociate ourselves from anything too wild. On one side we have what could be termed a female-yin approach to nature: we are part of the global scheme of things, the interwoven tapestry of life, mysterious, complex, sharing, questioning, supportive, fertile. On the other hand we are very male-yang: logical, goal-driven, suspicious of outsiders, confident, potent. Conquerors.
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In political and social realpolitik this need/fear conundrum can lead to a Brown-Brown colonialism that has largely replaced the White-Brown colonialism that was so prevalent when Europeans imposed their perceived moral and intellectual superiority.
In the Southeast Asian context, the decision makers in Kuching, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Bangkok, and Manila are sophisticated, educated, well-coiffed and well-dressed people who speak the national language, follow the majority national religion, have technology, and cultivate wet rice. They control things. And they look down their noses on the country bumpkins who live in the hills, who might speak different languages, don’t have electricity, worship different spirits, and grow dry rice. By denigrating these rustics the city dwellers become entitled and feel they have a manifest destiny to “civilize” their poor naked cousins so they can be, as one Asian official told me, “more like us.” That’s a best case scenario. The worst case is that the sophisticated city dwellers view the wilderness as territory to be conquered. “It’s just useless rainforest,” one businessman told me. “Much more money in converting to oil palm.” And to make that conversion it’s essential to remove the backward and increasingly disruptive Penans and members of a dozen other indigenous tribes from the equation.
* * *
I sought out James Wong Kim Min for guidance.
James Wong loved to talk with foreigners about the Penan, whom the foreign press has idealized as a group of innocent, down-trodden, blowpipe wielding, loinclothed people who are wise in the ways of the forest but hopelessly naive when faced with modern Malaysian politics.
“This is my message to the west. If they can do as well as we have done and enjoy life as much as we do then they can criticize us. We run a model nation. We have twenty-five races and many different religions living side by side without killing each other. Compare that to Bosnia or [Northern] Ireland. Economic development, racial integration, and religious tolerance. We’ve achieved a form of Nirvana, a utopia.”
Well, the reality is more nuanced.
In many ways he was right; Sarawak is, in many ways, a model society. People’s lives are improving. Education is important. Health services are common. It may be poor in spots, but in general Sarawak is one of the most harmonious places I’ve ever lived. You can walk anywhere safely, and see smiles and eat good food cheaply and buy whatever you need and … well, forgetting the forest destruction, corruption, vote-buying and related social and environmental dilemmas for a moment, it’s a pretty good corner of the world. Yet the state suffers from deforestation and corruption at the highest level, which has had a severe impact on the social structure of the country.
James Wong was generous with his time. I explained my experience with Penans who had been encouraged by government incentives to resettle into longhouses. How their natural environment had been hammered, how their faces were devoid of spirit and energy, how they had seemingly tumbled even further down the Sarawak social totem pole.
In reply, James Wong lectured me, as I have been lectured by numerous Asian officials when I raised similar concerns. In effect, he said: We just want our cousins the naked Penan to enjoy the same benefits we civilized folk enjoy.
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EarthLove is available at Amazon.com, or on order from any bookstore.
978-2-940573-34-9 Paperback KDP (Amazon)
978-2-940573-35-6 Paperback IngramSpark
978-2-940573-36-3 E-Book
You might enjoy watching the two-minute EarthLove video trailer. I wrote the script; it was produced and directed by Marton Varo, brandefy.com .
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For more on the Us vs Them concept, you might enjoy the chapter “Headhunters fight for control of the forest” (which contains James Wong’s famous poem asking Penans to cross the Rubicon,” and “Bruno and the blowpipes,” both in Curious Encounters of the Human Kind-Borneo.
In An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles the chapter “Trust Me” contains a longer version of how various sacred and secular “religions” fight for people’s souls, the chapter “Up Against the Wall Colonialists” asks whether men with bows and arrows can control their destiny,” and the chapter “Helping our poor brown naked cousins” quotes a shudderingly aggressive letter Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Bin Mohamad sent to a ten-year-old British boy who had dared to challenge Mahathir’s conservation credentials.