Borneo Revisited

Slash and burn cultivation by native peoples to plant subsistence crops, mainly wild mountain rice. Unfortunately the Sarawak government mostly doesn't recognise pristine rainforest as ancestral lands; it is only when the settlers cut down the forest for farming, that it is recognised as their own native lands. Limbang, Sarawak, Malaysia 2015

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: Sarawak: Borneo revisited 1989-2015

Slash and burn cultivation by native peoples to plant subsistence crops, mainly wild mountain rice. Unfortunately the Sarawak government mostly doesn't recognise pristine rainforest as ancestral lands; it is only when the settlers cut down the forest for farming, that it is recognised as their own native lands. Limbang, Sarawak, Malaysia 2015<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