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Borneo Threatened by Green Gold Rush

New ideas on conservation needed with island's biodiversity under attack

By Michael Roston, Newser User

Posted Oct 27, 2008 1:16 PM CDT

(Newser) – Borneo, the Texas-sized island whose rain forests are astonishingly rich in biodiversity, has been plundered for its other riches—everything from rhino horns to coal to oil—for centuries. Now, with the market for palm oil, dubbed green gold, booming, oil-palm plantations threaten the remaining forest, Mel White writes in National Geographic. "Borneo's future may well be the most critical conservation issue on our planet," he writes.

But protecting plant and animal life will be impossible without fighting extreme poverty and widespread corruption. And it will require "rethinking old ideas, accepting new truths, and adopting new models of conservation.” Even logging, for instance, is better than palm-oil plantations: "You can log forests and still save that biodiversity. But the thing you can't do is convert the whole thing to monoculture plantations. Then you lose everything. It's a biological desert."

[Images (7)]

[Quotes (3)]

A group of Pygmy elephants cross a road in Taliwas forest in Malaysian Borneo in this 2005 file photo. (AP Photo)

Logging company workers put marks on a tree inside rainforest eastern Malaysian Borneo state of Sarawak Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2007. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

In this Nov. 5, 2006 file photo, a young orphaned orangutan plays with other orphans, and their human "babysitters" , at an orangutan rehabilitation center in Palangkaraya, Kalimantan, Indonesia. (AP Photo/Ed Wray, File)

A worker marks timber logs at a concession area in the eastern Malaysian Borneo state of Sarawak, Dec. 11, 2007. (AP Photo)

A resident runs from a burning forest making its way to nearby homes October 4, 2002 in Palangkaraya, Borneo, Indonesia. (Getty Images)

A baby Orangutan sits on the back of it's mother while eating fruit September 1, 2001 near Camp Leakey at the Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, Indonesia. (Getty Images)

An young Orangutan plays in a tree in the Tanjung Puting National Park on Borneo. (Getty Images)

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Considering the island's unsurpassed biodiversity and the rate at which its forests are being lost, Borneo's future may well be the most critical conservation issue on our planet. -

You're trying to get people who have economic opportunities right now to forgo those benefits for other benefits years down the road.
- Orangutan conservationist Paul Hartman

In the multilevel structure of Borneo's rain forest lives the world's largest collection of gliding animals: Apart from flying squirrels there are flying lizards, flying colugos, flying frogs, and—the stuff of nightmares for some—flying snakes. -

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Borneo Threatened by Green Gold Rush