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Paradise lost?
Posted by belinda on 12 November 2007.
Greenpeace volunteers constructing a dam to prevent valuable peatlands being drained © Greenpeace/Oka Budhi
Belinda, senior forest campaigner at Greenpeace UK, is in Indonesia at the Forest Defenders Camp, to witness first-hand the destruction of the forests and peatlands by the palm oil industry.
Indonesia is a mass of contradictions. Two days ago, I stood on a high plateau in the middle of a national park. In front of me stretched miles of virgin rainforest, stunning and luscious, the mist rising up from the canopy. The sounds of insects filled the air, aquamarine birds skimmed overhead and in the distance, the occasional cracking of a branch as monkeys swung through the trees.
Yet today, only a few hours' drive away, I stand in a barren, burnt, and devastated land. What was once part of the same stretch of tropical forest I'd visited earlier is now barely identifiable except for the occasional blackened tree stump. And the eeriest thing is the total silence - no bird calls, no insects buzzing, no chattering monkeys. It's a land drained and devoid of all life.
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