Travelling down the Melawi River. Photo by Paul Daley

We jut across the windy river, travelling on small colorful speedboats that dash across rapids and interconnecting channels. It’s only been a few days since being in Borneo and the journey has officially begun. We travel down the Melawi River, one a thousand rivers traversing the West Kalimantan province, heading deep into the heart of the rainforest. As we reach deeper and deeper into the interior, we leave all signs of civilization behind and enter an unknown world.

Along the river we pass by small villages with wooden huts, fisherman paddling wearing rice hats, children bathing in the water and the only thing in the sky is the canopy of a the rainforest covering the heavens. Yet as remote as we go, we could not escape an ugly reality. At seemingly every turn we were reminded of the industrial axe this land faces. There was illegal logging with pile-ups of timber as tall as buildings, illegal gold mining spewing toxins into the water stream and the rows of palm oil plantations further beyond the riverbanks. These were the last of the primarily rainforest in Borneo, supposedly protected, and even they were disappearing.

Near nightfall, we finally arrived at a Dayak village in the Serawai region where we are greeted with a wonderful eruptions by the entire tribe and their many children. Swarmed by seemingly a thousand tribes people gleefully greeting us, shaking our hands and taking pictures with us.  For many we were the first foreigners they had ever laid eyes on.

Eco-Warrior Ben Dessen greets Dayak community. Photo by Paul Daley

We were then taken to join neighboring tribes in a traditional Dayak ceremony. There was electric dancing of our numerous cultures, piles of food handed to us and gulps of wins taking a pounding on our livers. At the end, we we’re made honorary Dayak tribes members and accepted as one of their own, each given a bracelet to bind this new relationship.

The next few days we travelled up river by boat to the villages of the Serawai and Ambalau regions. We had meetings with the tribes people. We told them of why we came, to help support their fight and to hear their stories of what was happening. What we heard brought many of us to tears.

They told us how their land is being stolen from them, as the palm oil companies make claim by bribing local officials to sign off on permits, turning tribes against each other resulting in bloodshed, and abusing the Dayak’s lack of land certificates for their own gains. It can be as simple as one day the palm oil companies makes claim to their land by spray-painting the trees, sometimes without any prior notice or compensation to the owner. A week later the land has been demolished with palm oil saplings crudely planted. For the Dayak, everything is gone: their farm, their livelihood and their ancestral land.

In these conversations, it becomes clear that they are desperate for us to hear them. For they so gravely want a voice in a world where they are voiceless. In one meeting in particular we begin to hear their voices loud and clear:

A Dayak farmer impacted by palm oil. Photo by Paul Daley

“We do not want to be slaves on our land,” says an anonymous tribes leader.

“This is our land, our water, don’t let us loose this because soon we won’t have a home,” says another. “We will become poorer than we are now.”

These are powerful words that stay with me. It was beginning to sink in that protecting the rainforest of Borneo is life or death for the Dayak. This wasn’t just about protecting trees – this was about human rights. With their voices, it is clear that both survival of people and the planet are at stake here.

Four days later, we said our goodbyes to the villages, some tears and hearts full for these communities. As we leave, they ask us to do one thing, to tell their stories and to make their voices heard.

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The Borneo Diary is the story of Emily Hunter’s eco-campaign with DeforestACTION. The DeforestACTION project is a youth driven movement to protect the Borneo rainforest of Indonesia. Fifteen young people, including Emily, took part in a campaign in September on the on-ground in Borneo, with the support of millions of students & schools around the world.

         Twenty days before I had first set my eyes on Borneo, descending from a small plane onto Pontianak, a major city in West Kalimantan, the west side of Borneo. As we landed, all I could notice was a thick haze covering the city. It wasn’t fog or an overcast day, but smog that made a city look like a ghost town. Just then it began to sink in that the problems here are numerous. Deforestation wasn’t just about treehugging anymore. You could feel it in the air that it was about something greater than that.

Disembarking from the plane, the dry and arid heat hit me like a wave. It was evident that the climate had been reshaped from a once moist rainforest to desert-like conditions. Prior to this, Borneo was a unique place, the third largest island on Earth and home to the oldest rainforest at 130 million years old (older than the Amazon). It has been estimated that nearly half of the world’s plant and  animal species once existed on this island, with many thousands of species that are endemic only to Borneo including the endangered Orang-utan.

Yet the land here is being transformed into an unrecognizable biological desert from rapid deforestation – and becoming part of the problem. For deforestation accounts for 16% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with Indonesia releasing more CO2 though deforestation than any other country. That piece of the carbon puzzle is more than the entire transportation sector – meaning that’s more than every car, truck, boat and plane on the planet.

Climate change was one thing, but there were also rich biological values in the rainforest that were at stake. Everything from medicinal plants that could hold the secrets for a cure to AIDS and cancers, to unique animal species found nowhere else in the world. Yet every time the forests are cleared these biological treasures are being lost, destroyed, or in the Orangutans’ case, use for entertainment, sold in body parts or exploited for the sex trade.

But that was purely the environmental side of the coin; what was happening in Borneo was also about human rights, something that was unchartered territory for me an eco-activist. Soon, I would come to find that deforestation meant the lands was being stolen from  the Indigenous people of Borneo, called the Dayak. The very lands that the Dayak depend on for their food, their water, the parts to build their homes, their jobs with farming and for their very survival. I would also come to learn that when they fought back for their lands, they were beaten, arrested, humiliated and in some cases, killed. Much worse, the world wasn’t listening to them; they were voiceless in this struggle.

So why was this all happening? The driving factor was the palm oil industry. Palm oil is a small red fruit whose oils are increasingly desired by the West for cooking oil, cosmetics, cleaning products and ironically for biofuels. In industrial-scale palm oil, these plants flourish in vast monocultures that is to say single-specie agriculture. Imagine rows upon rows of palm trees as far as the eyes can see, the previously existing rainforest hacked away leaving but a few plants in its wake. This is a palm oil plantation. This is deforestation. And tthis is what we must stop.

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The Borneo Diary is the story of Emily Hunter’s eco-campaign with DeforestACTION. The DeforestACTION project is a youth driven movement to protect the Borneo rainforest of Indonesia. Fifteen young people, including Emily, took part in a campaign in September on the on-ground in Borneo, with the support of millions of students & schools around the world.