The Penan – Still Struggling to Save Our Jungle [FILM TRIBUTE]
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Bruno Manser - who died for the Penans.
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The Penan are the iconic people of the Sarawak jungle. Most
communities had settled into villages and rural life of one form or
another over the last hundred years, but the Penan steadfastly stuck to
their nomadic ways.With just a few possessions, easily carried on their backs, they have had nothing to lose but the jungle they live from. Which is why they are the community that has fought hardest and longest to prevent its destruction by greedy and relentless logging.
However, we would be unwise to dismiss them as simple or backward people. One should reserve that judgement for those narrow-minded, unimaginative IQs who can think only of the ringgit and jewels and houses they can buy from cutting it down.
The Penan understand the deeper value of the Borneo jungle, the world’s oldest and most bio-diverse environment on earth. If Taib had not been so eager to get rich as quickly as possible, he too would have done well to consider the pharmaceutical, DNA, tourism, scientific and other values of this region of enormous weatlh, variety and promise.
Instead he is turning it into a single crop plantation that will soon run out of soil due to to massive erosion and turn to desert. He is also converting one of the earth’s two key ‘lungs’, the great jungles that breath water into the air and suck out dangerous carbon dioxide, into on of the major causes of Global Warming.
Film and MORE HERE at Sarawak Report
