Borneo Revisited: Kenyah native peoples resistance movement against Baram Dam

Blockades against the Baram Dam have been a huge success, after years of campaigning and protest, the Baram Dam in Sarawak has now been shelved. Demonstration at blockade site. Baram Sarawak 2015

The first of 12 mega-dam projects, was the Bakun Dam, which produced a reservoir of 700 sqkm, the size of Singapore, whose flooding began in 2010 and displaced around 10,000 Kenyah people, in Rajang and Belaga. The second phase at Murum would displace a further 24,000 native people, and Baram some 30,000. This huge development program has been overseen by Sarawak's former Chief Minister, Abdul Taib Mahmud, who is now under investigation by Malaysian authorities for corruption, and who has amassed a personal fortune of more than 35 billion US dollars.

Borneo native peoples and their rainforest habitat revisited two decades later: 1989/1991 and 2012/2014/2015.

Sarawak's primary rainforests have been systematically logged over decades, threatening the sustainable lifestyle of its indigenous peoples who relied on nomadic hunter-gathering and rotational slash & burn cultivation of small areas of forest to survive. Now only a few areas of pristine rainforest remain; for the Dayaks and Penan this spells disaster, a rapidly disappearing way of life, forced re-settlement, many becoming wage-slaves. Large and medium size tree trunks have been sawn down and dragged out by bulldozers, leaving destruction in their midst, and for the most part a primary rainforest ecosystem beyond repair. Nowadays palm oil plantations and hydro-electric dam projects cover hundreds of thousands of hectares of what was the world's oldest rainforest ecosystem which had some of the highest rates of flora and fauna endemism, species found there and nowhere else on Earth, and this deforestation has done irreparable ecological damage to that region

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Contained in galleries: Borneo Revisited Selection, Sarawak: Borneo revisited 1989-2015

Blockades against the Baram Dam have been a huge success, after years of campaigning and protest, the Baram Dam in Sarawak has now been shelved. Demonstration at blockade site. Baram Sarawak 2015<br />
<br />
The first of 12 mega-dam projects, was the Bakun Dam, which produced a reservoir of 700 sqkm, the size of Singapore, whose flooding began in 2010 and displaced around 10,000 Kenyah people, in Rajang and Belaga. The second phase at Murum would displace a further 24,000 native people, and Baram some 30,000. This huge development program has been overseen by Sarawak's former Chief Minister, Abdul Taib Mahmud, who is now under investigation by Malaysian authorities for corruption, and who has amassed a personal fortune of more than 35 billion US dollars. <br />
<br />
Borneo native peoples and their rainforest habitat revisited two decades later: 1989/1991 and 2012/2014/2015. <br />
<br />
Sarawak's primary rainforests have been systematically logged over decades, threatening the sustainable lifestyle of its indigenous peoples who relied on nomadic hunter-gathering and rotational slash & burn cultivation of small areas of forest to survive. Now only a few areas of pristine rainforest remain; for the Dayaks and Penan this spells disaster, a rapidly disappearing way of life, forced re-settlement, many becoming wage-slaves. Large and medium size tree trunks have been sawn down and dragged out by bulldozers, leaving destruction in their midst, and for the most part a primary rainforest ecosystem beyond repair. Nowadays palm oil plantations and hydro-electric dam projects cover hundreds of thousands of hectares of what was the world's oldest rainforest ecosystem which had some of the highest rates of flora and fauna endemism, species found there and nowhere else on Earth, and this deforestation has done irreparable ecological damage to that region