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.

***

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.

***

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.

Check out Emily’s interview in The 2011 Story on IMPACT, a TV-documentary series on MTV News Canada. The 2011 Story showcases the brewing global revolution with the Arab Spring, Occupy Movement and mobilizations elsewhere. Emily comment on the show: “This is only just the beginning…”

Check out the show here: www.mtv.ca/impact

For more on The Year of the Uprisings, check out TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: “The Protestor” 

I need your help!  I am working on an Eco TV-show called Green Heroes and we’re in a competition to win enough money to fund the 2nd season of our show. Our show is helping people to move from Apathy to Action. You can help us win by voting/ commenting in the competition.

Here are the instructions:

1. Go to www.climatespark.ca

2. Register at the left corner & login

3. Click on Green Heroes (Finalist)l
or click here: 
http://www.climatespark.ca/node/144

4. After reading (or skimming) the proposal – Scroll below the proposal & Give us a star rating under “Your Rating” below. There are 10 stars, we hope you will give us a 9 or 10!

5. Last but most IMPORTANT step – This is what counts – Scroll down to the bottom of all the comments and leave your own comments. We need meaningful comments that are more than one-liners (as they get discounted) but at least 2- 3 lines. (Tip to save time: just read others comments and summarize your own based on that).

6. SAVE your comments & rating at the bottom of the box. That’s everything!

THANK YOU A MILLION!

Help send eco-warrior Emily Hunter on her next environmental campaign, DeforesACTION, to protect the Borneo rainforest and endangered Orangutans! 

Come join the festivities, there will be a variety show with a comedian, dance performance, DJ & a charity auction.

When: Saturday, Aug. 27th

When: 8pm – midnight (auction starts at 9pm Sharp)

Where: Disgraceland, 965 Bloor St West, Toronto (next to Ossington Subway Station)

FREE ADMISSION! 19+ Event 

Click Here to see Auction Items 

Emily is a dedicated eco-activist, she is a Sea Shepherd veteran crew, occasional host on the show IMPACT on MTV Canada and author of the book The Next Eco-Warrriors. To learn more about Emily, visit:
http://tiny.cc/sfmqo

Imagine being afraid of the air your daughter breathes, watching your family burying their friends from rare cancers connected to toxic leakage, being unable to eat the plants or animals around you because they are sick, and swimming in your local lake has become dangerous to your health. This is not the picture of a future world gone ecologically mad. This is reality right now for Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, a 30-year-old Dene native living downstream from the tar sands of Alberta.

For Eriel and many other First Nations communities living in Fort Chipewyan, ground zero of the tar-sands fallout, this eco-nightmare is everyday life. But Eriel, coming from a long line of activists, is, as she says, “standing up to the madness.” Deranger is the Tar Sands Campaigner for the Rainforest Action Network.

Uncomfortable calling herself an eco-activist, much less an “eco-warrior,” Deranger considers her work with RAN more to be defending indigenous rights. She argues that what is happening with the tar sands is just a continuation in North America of the same old genocidal tactics: trampling on the basic needs of First Nations people in the name of economic prosperity. But whose prosperity is it? In the past, it was colonialists appropriating land and resources. Today, it is the air, water, food and livelihoods of Canada’s aboriginal communities that are being poisoned because of governments’ and corporations’ get-rich-quick scheme in dirty oil.

“Whether it be environmental activism, Indigenous rights activism or any kind of activism — it all comes down to fighting for our survival,” says Deranger.

And survival is what is at stake, she says. Because what has been touted as the world’s largest energy project is also the world’s most destructive engineering project. Andrew Nikiforuk, the crusading journalist who has been exhaustively chronicling the destructive effects of this project writes in his book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent:

A business-as-usual case for the tar sands will change Canada forever. It will enrich a few powerful companies, hollow out the economy, destroy the world’s third-largest watershed, industrialize nearly one-quarter of Alberta’s landscape, consume the last of the nation’s natural gas supplies, and erode Canadian sovereignty.

Not to mention carve into the boreal forest (a larger carbon sink than the Amazon rainforest); inject toxins into the Athabasca River through tailing-pond leakage (the same chemicals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH, that are associated with the rare cancers found in First Nations communities); make Canada one of the only countries to use nuclear power to increase fossil fuel development; and blacken the sky with increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

“We need a moratorium on new tar sands development. We can’t continue to expand. It’s absurd and idiotic to push forward,” says Deranger.

Deranger is willing to achieve that moratorium with any and all kinds of non-violent means that she can. From demonstrations, rallies, days of action, and her most recent protest: scaling to the top of a Canadian flagpole at the Royal Bank of Canada’s (RBC) Toronto headquarters , dropping a banner reading “Please Help Us Mrs. Nixon.com.” This appeal, by RAN and the Ruckus Society, was directed at Janet Nixon, wife of RBC CEO Gordon Nixon, asking her to lend her strong and influential voice with her husband to pull the bank’s massive investments in Alberta tar sands projects.

For Deranger, information is power and it is her hope that more Canadians, including influential Canadians like Nixon, will get the message through acts such as these.

“All of the little things slowly add up and it is my hope that more eyes will open and more people will stand up for what is right,” says Deranger.

All of us, as Canadians, have our hands in dirty oil development, whether we realize it or not. When we pump up for gas at Shell, we are funneling money to the largest stakeholder in the oil sands.By doing our banking at RBC, our money is being invested into the largest banker of the oil sands. Not to mention how much of our taxes are being diverted into our governments’ support for the tar sands.

It’s scary sometimes how science fiction can parallel with reality. The Tar Sands dilemma has come to do just that. As we seek to find a solution to our intensive emissions, here in Canada we are putting all our eggs in one basket, with carbon capture and storage, in a scheme that resembles the story of Isaac Asimov’sFoundation series more than a realistic plan for the future.

The book trilogy by Asimov closely resembles that of our climate peril. In both, humans are aware that a catastrophic event is near, and attempt to plan for it (In our case, the catastrophe is the global meltdown that the tar sands heavily contribute to). In theFoundation books, they store knowledge for a new civilization to build upon. Down here on earth, we are instead attempting to store problematic CO₂ deep inside the earth where it will (supposedly) remain. In both scenarios, we don’t know if disaster is ultimately averted or not. The problem is, one is a work of fiction, and the other is a real question of urgent public policy.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been proposed as a catchall solution to runaway climate change by the Canadian government. The problem is, we simply don’t know if it actually is a solution, and there are too many risks involved to treat it as the silver bullet that will save us.

The idea behind CCS is that through integrated technology, carbon dioxide can be captured directly from industrial sources — including coal plants and the oil sands — treated, liquefied, and pumped deep into the earth where it will do no harm. Something that would have seemed like science fiction 20 or 30 years ago is now seriously being considered by Canada’s political leadership.

The federal government and the government of Alberta are together pouring $3 billion collectively into this project. By 2015, the province hopes to have five or six CCS project on the run, pulling 10 million tonnes of CO₂ a year from our air.

But CCS technology is in its infancy and it could be 10 or even 20 years away from being commercialized and affordable on a large enough scale to deal with the carbon emissions of the tar sands, according to The Hill Times. Meanwhile, we are continuing and expanding emissions. And there are environmental regulations and long-term liabilities that have not even begun to be established.

The science fiction scenarios contiue, in which we’re threatened by a human-made carbon tsunami. Leakage or bursts of compressed stored carbon would be deadly, suffocating every living thing in its radius. This kind of carbon disaster has already occurred in Lake Nyos, Cameroon. In August of 1986, carbon at the bottom of the lake surfaced roaring in invisible form in a 19 kilometre death zone, killing 1,700 people, 3,000 cattle, countless birds, and insects — essentially, everything in sight.

True, carbon nightmares like these are rare. Carbon can store for millions of years underground safely in the right geological chemistry, as found in a study in Nature. Even the Pembina Institute, a tar-sands watch dog, says the chances of leakage is slim. As well, Alberta is prime land for carbon storage as the province has stored oil and gas underground for millions of years already.

“(But) you can never factor out human error, pipelines and earthquakes. So why would we take that risk when we don’t have to?,” said Emily Rochon from Greenpeace in an interview with the Canadian Press.

Disingenuous politicians are claiming CCS technology could be a panacea, with all its many uncertainties, but call renewable energies like wind and solar the “risky” ones. Sure, solar, wind and biomass are not the stuff of utopian dreams either, as Jeremy Nelson pointed out recently in This. But shouldn’t reducing GHG and promoting energy efficiently be our ultimate goal — not aiding further climate crimes?

Sure, it’s not all bad. CCS can assist positively in our tar sands and climate perils. As according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, CCS could contribute 15 to 55 percent of the world’s total GHG reductions between now and 2100 if successful. In Canada, we could potentially reduce 40 percent of our emissions by 2050. This is good news. But it will still not be enough to bring Alberta’s emissions down, which at present are 58 million tonnes a year and are only expected to increase with oil sands expansion. Let’s face it: CCS is being wielded as a distraction in order to support the status quo today.

Therefore, putting all our eggs in one basket to stave off “thermageddon” is a science-fiction writer’s fantasy – not a realistic plan. At best, CSS is one of many transitional solutions to creating our green economy. It is not our one and only shining star.