Humans Intrude on an Indonesian Park (Part 1 of 2)

KUTAI NATIONAL PARK, Indonesia — Countless houses and shops built by squatters flank the 40-mile, two-lane road slicing through this national park that, once rich with orangutans and lowland rain forest, now symbolizes Indonesia’s struggle to protect its rare wildlife.

As construction has intensified along the road here on the island of Borneo, it has also brought a sometimes surprising diversity of businesses to the park, including a brothel, the Dika karaoke bar and the Mitra Hotel, which was marking its recent opening with discounts of 40 percent. A new bus terminal and gas station, nearly complete, will perhaps be greeting customers soon.

At one spot by the road, Mursidin, a farmer in his 50s, was one of many people building a home from the park’s trees. Using a sander and a saw hooked to a red generator, he was polishing and laying sheets of wood on the house’s frame as his wife, Nuramanah, looked on.

“We’re worried because the forest rangers warned us several times that we weren’t permitted to build here,” Ms. Nuramanah, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, said as her anxiety seemed punctuated by her husband’s hammering.

If the new houses lining the road were any indication, however, the couple had little to worry about. Forest rangers have been powerless in checking development inside the park as the local authorities have urged people to settle and open businesses here.

Control over the country’s 50 national parks, including Kutai, has grown murky in the past decade as authority has shifted from the central government to the provinces as part of a decentralization of power. Local governments, emphasizing economic development over conservation, have seen parks bursting with natural resources as a way to fill their coffers.

At the same time, Kutai National Park, like others, has been losing trees to illegal loggers, at a rate of one to two truckloads a day, according to forestry officials. Mining companies have also been pushing to explore inside the coal-rich park here, which is already surrounded by coal, fertilizer, gas and timber companies. More than 27,000 people lived inside the park in 2007, according to a government survey conducted that year.

“It’s difficult to control the construction of new houses, which is increasing, because the local governments simply ignore national laws,” Tandya Tjahjana, who took over the Forestry Ministry’s office here a few months ago, said as trucks rumbled by his headquarters here.

As many as half of the park’s 490,000 acres have been damaged because of development and illegal logging, Mr. Tandya said, adding that he had only 27 rangers to patrol the entire park.

Half of all the mammal species in Borneo are said to inhabit Kutai National Park, including the Sambar deer, wild ox, proboscis monkey and orangutan. Aside from a population of orangutans at a research center inside the park, the number of great apes — estimated at 600 — has sharply decreased in recent years because of two fires and human encroachment, researchers and forestry officials said.

Widespread illegal logging and deforestation have reduced Indonesia’s overall orangutan population to about 60,000, an estimated 80 percent reduction in the past decade, said Anne Russon, an orangutan expert from York University in Toronto who has done extensive research on the apes in Indonesia for the past 14 years, including in this park.

Much of the timber is used to make furniture for domestic and overseas markets, while the cleared land is often turned into palm oil plantations. The shrinking of the forest habitats, which threatens some of the world’s rarest wildlife, regularly pits animals against human beings.

In recent months, Sumatran tigers, which face extinction, have killed illegal loggers pushing into the animals’ territory on the island of Sumatra and have been killed in turn by villagers. Also in Sumatra, wild elephants have been fatally poisoned near a palm oil plantation, reportedly by villagers running the site.

The Kutai National Park here was established in the 1980s but, located in what is Borneo’s most developed area, it faced threats from the start. Pertamina, the state oil company, was permitted to operate here and still pumps oil inside a fenced-in enclave. And years before the road was built in the mid-1990s, people had begun squatting here.




Source:
New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/world/asia/14borneo.html?_r=1&ref=earth
Originally written:
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: June 13, 2009