Environment

Unsustainable logging of Temengor lags behind international precedent

admin Letters to the Editor
Unsustainable logging of Temengor lags behind international precedent
Published 15 August 2006
Above: A view of the Temengor rainforest, courtesy of KH Khoo and the Malaysian Nature Society.

Recently there was news that the Gola rainforest, an important biodiversity site in Sierra Leone, in Africa, was to be set aside for conservation, and logging was to stop. His Excellency Alhaji Dr Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, President of Sierra Leone, commented: “This is a new approach in forest protection that will address not only the protection of the forest and its biodiversity, but will also provide sustainable benefit to the local community in perpetuity.”

And why would this be of interest to Malaysian readers?

Sierra Leone is ranked 170 in the World Bank’s list of 179 nations, with a GDP of just $903 per capita. Malaysia is ranked 61, with a GDP per person of $11,201. There is obviously a huge difference between the two, and yet a nation as poor and troubled as Sierra Leone is can still see the importance of protecting its forests.

Malaysia, despite its development, is still logging critically important biodiversity hotspots, in particular the Temengor Forest Reserve just south of the East West Highway. This is one of the last bastions of virgin forest, home to tigers, elephants, gaur, seladang, leopards and our almost extinct Sumatran rhinoceros, that is large enough to provide sufficient space for these animals when combined with Belum to the north and the Hala Bala sanctuary across the border in Thailand.

Temengor presents our last chance to protect a sufficiently large swath of landscape scale forest that is 130 million years old, older than the Congo and older than the Amazon, and therefore much more complex in its biodiversity. We cannot pin all our hopes on Taman Negara as the only reserve for our biodiversity, especially as the forests of the north harbour different species, particularly in the plant kingdom. The Federal Government’s National Physical Plan recognizes the importance of Temengor as a protector of soils, water, biodiversity and our landscape, but state politicians hold the key to the future of our forests, not the federal government.

The Perak Integrated Timber Complex (PITC), the only timber company in peninsula Malaysia to have been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) recently had its certification suspended, meaning that it no longer meets international standards for sustainable logging. PITC operates, along with other concession holders, in the Temengor Forest Reserve, extracting the big trees that anchor the structure of the forest.

The state government of Perak says that the logging must go ahead to support the state’s timber industry that employs 9,000 people; but there are also approximately 10,000 Orang Asli living in the area who depend on the same forest reserve for their livelihood.

The forest is worth far more as an intact organism, than if it is turned into tables and doors. Malaysia has developed at a massive rate in recent years, and now it is time to consider our priorities, and protect what we have left rather than see it damaged, perhaps irreparably, for the sake of keeping the timber industry in business. They should, in an ideal world, be employed instead in restoring the landscapes that they have worked over, so that our already logged forest reserves can be harvested profitably in the future.

If we don’t protect our irreplaceable natural assets we may face the ironic situation in which Sierra Leone’s drive for sustainable development may be more successful than ours.

Angela Hijjas
Chairman, Steering Committee,
Malaysian Nature Society Temengor Campaign 2006

Could Forests Worsen Global Warming?

admin Letters to the Editor
Published in The Sunday Star, 15 January 2006

The recent research findings that forests generate methane, a gas responsible for global warming, should not really surprise us, as it highlights how little we understand how ecosystems work. But loggers take note: this is no reason to cut more forest or to avoid our responsibility to rehabilitate damaged forests.

The chemical forces at work within a forest ecosystem have bigger consequences than just locking up carbon or emitting methane. We must take stock of the free and vastly valuable ecological services that forests provide us before we commit yet more damage that may have unforeseen consequences. As a species, we have already seriously mutilated our own ecosystem, to the extent that there is a real possibility that civilization as we know it may cease to exist within the next century. We know that forests and oceans generate the oxygen, water and food we depend on for our very survival, but we extract so much from both for our short term gains and fail to appreciate that these systems can only be taxed so far before they quickly spiral into irreversible unproductivity.

We must therefore apply the cautionary principle: don’t cut forests because one study shows that they generate greenhouse gases, as they are incalculably valuable for other reasons that we have not bothered to quantify. Healthy forests ensure clean water supplies and safe habitats for the myriad of species that make up these unique chemical and biological systems. The plants in Malaysia’s, the oldest, forests in the world are yet to be studied in detail but they surely harbour an entire pharmacopoeia of cures for all man’s ills and needs.

Forests have supported mankind for millennia, and as long as there are healthy forests I believe there will be healthy people.

I appeal to the Prime Minister to realize the impressive National Physical Plan prepared by the Federal Government, by supporting the States financially so that they can protect our forests rather than logging them for short term gain. I believe we face a critical watershed right now: if our forests are allowed to be devastated for the sake of an insatiable world timber market, then the ecology of our tropical paradise may well collapse.

I for one would willingly pay an environmental tax to keep our forests intact.

Angela Hijjas
Member, Malaysian Nature Society

Proposal to Transform Paya Indah Into Illegally-traded Protected Species Sanctuary

admin Letters to the Editor
Published in The Star, 1 March 2005

Dear Sir,

I was concerned by the articles in the Star of 22nd February about the
captive breeding programme operated in Janda Baik without legitimate
authorization. It seems apparent that this particular breeder has a special
relationship with someone in Perhilitan, and the fact that it can’t be
explained in an acceptable manner is extremely worrying. The trade in and
ownership of protected species is a crucial test of Malaysia’s commitment to
the preservation of biodiversity, and I strongly support the initiative of
the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment in questioning the
legality of this breeder.

The problem of the trade in protected species is not easily solved. It is
the third largest illegal international trade after drugs and weapons, and
government officers need much support if they are to contain it. It is a
sophisticated business that readily resorts to violence.

The recent closure of the Paya Indah Wetlands Sanctuary, however, might
offer a unique opportunity to improve the fate of illegally traded animals.
At present, I believe most animals that are recovered from the trade by
Perhilitan are destroyed, as Perhilitan does not have a sanctuary that it
can use as a transit point to stabilize these animals before they are
returned to the wild or to the countries where they were captured. (Some of
the more valuable species are placed in the Melaka Zoo, which is already
overcrowded.)

I would suggest that Paya Indah be turned into such a sanctuary. It could
be a vital showcase for eco-tourism, where some animals could be on display
and an educational programme would inform the public about our fauna, as
well as demonstrating Malaysia’s commitment to the preservation and
protection of its biodiversity.

I believe Paya Indah failed as it didn’t have a clear mission statement and
the concept of eco-tourism was poorly understood. By converting it into a
working institution with a definite conservation role that would engage the
public and tourists alike, it could be a unique destination for eco-tourism,
conservation and volunteerism.

Currently, many of our forests are developing the ’empty forest syndrome’,
where even if the forest is protected, the animals are no longer there. The
long term survival of the forest depends on the animals to pollinate
flowers, disperse seeds and ensure their germination. By reinforcing the
role of Perhilitan by providing the resources they need there is a chance
that we can reverse this trend and put some of the animals back where they
belong.

I do hope that the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment will
consider this suggestion.

Yours sincerely,

Angela Hijjas
Chairman, Selangor Branch
Malaysian Nature Society

Crisis in Captive Breeding for Sumatran Rhinos

admin Letters to the Editor

The recent deaths of all five captive Sumatran rhinoceroses at the Sungai Dusun Sumatran Rhinoceros Conservation Centre in Selangor is yet another step towards extinction for this unfortunate species.   Despite the successful breeding of other endangered species in captivity, it is unlikely that the entire process can be achieved for the rhino.  The objective of captive breeding must always be to release the young into the wild and to repopulate their original habitat.  No species can be artificially sustained in pens forever.

Breeding in captivity is the first problem and this is elusive enough, but the subsequent problem is just as difficult: where is the habitat into which the young are to be released? Malaysia is losing more and more lowland forest every year and with fragmentation and depletion of species diversity as forest reserves are logged, no matter how selectively, there is not enough habitat to sustain wild breeding populations.

To ensure sufficient genetic diversity of any species, biologists believe there must be at least five separate breeding populations of any plant or animal.  We cannot save an animal if there is only one breeding pair as eventually inbreeding saps vitality.

Extinction is not necessarily an easily identified point in time for any species.   Some idealists believe that merely mapping DNA will be enough for future generations to recreate a lost species and that even if all specimens are dead there is a chance to clone it later.  This might produce a zoo exhibit, but it has nothing to do with protecting biodiversity for the long term.

Unfortunately, if an animal no longer has a place in the world, apart from in zoos, genetic banks and breeding centres, then its path to extinction is pretty well determined.  Captive animals are never as vigorous as in the wild and they are easy prey to Sungai Dusun type events. 

This will be the fate of many species in the coming decades as long as we believe that we can have it all.  Unfortunately, we can’t have it all and we must plan now if we are going to really protect our biodiversity rather than just give lip service.  Taman Negara alone is not enough to protect our biological heritage, we need more parks in fragile areas that must be sacrosanct, and a proper network of links between protected areas needs to be planned and enforced so that isolated populations of a species can interbreed naturally.

If they have to depend on man for their breeding, without enough space in the wild, they are doomed;  and so are we.  Our selfishness as a species has made us extraordinarily successful, but we will so easily become victims of that success if we cannot see that the destruction of our shared, broader habitat for short term benefit is not good for our long term survival.  Losing the rhinoceros, tiger, orang hutan and elephant, and the forest ecosystems they have occupied for millennia, will impoverish our own habitat and once that impoverishment spreads to other systems it will impact on us in serious ways.

Angela Hijjas
Chairman, Selangor Branch
Malaysian Nature Society.

Protecting the environment strengthens our culture

admin Letters to the Editor

Dear Sir,

Regarding the article in April 22nd’s edition of the NST, I would like to express similar concerns about the recent poaching incidents in the Endau Park, Johor.

If we cannot protect our tigers, elephants and rhinoceros in designated reserves, then there is little reason to be optimistic that they will survive into the next century. The numbers of tigers and rhinos, particularly, without counting plants, birds and other animals, has fallen precipitously over the last twenty years.

I welcome the initiative of the Prime Minister to reorganize the federal ministries so that forests are no longer included in Primary Industries; this is a major shift in thinking about our natural assets. Without protecting our forests we will not only lose the animals within them but also the incredibly valuable natural services that forests generate: more and better fresh water, the absorption and retention of carbon dioxide and other green house gasses, and not least the retention of the natural landscape that has shaped the region’s culture for millennia.

What is Malay culture without the kampong and the forest? It provided the only livelihood before the developed era, shaping thinking and ways of life. Now that we have left the kampongs and forests with scarcely a backward glance, we are in danger of losing our sense of place and who we are in the face of globalization. It is this sense of place, engendered in the forests and our natural landscapes, that will shape a new culture for the future.

In so many other ways Malaysians are divided from each other, be it by language, religion or food, but our feelings of ‘Malaysianness’ inevitably come down to the special characteristics of the place that we love and belong to. Looking at the remarkable diversity of Malaysia’s cultural heritage, it is the landscape alone that we truly share with each other. The beaches, the rivers, forests and mountains, give us all a profound sense of place and pride. Malay place names have always followed the predominant physical or botanical features that made the place special, be it Sungai Buloh or Kuala Lumpur. This importance of place is part of our culture, and we stand to lose it if we fail to protect those features of our natural heritage that have sustained us in the past.

I appeal to the government, in particular to the Prime Minister, to protect our landscape, protect our forests and all that is within them, give some real teeth to the enforcement of forest and marine protection. Otherwise, our descendants will be left with a blighted landscape and a blighted culture.

Angela Hijjas

Permaculture in the Tropics

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by Angela Hijjas

from The Malaysian Naturalist, vol. 55 no. 1

Permaculture is a name coined and patented by the Australian visionary Bill Mollison. Mollison alerted Australians to the importance of protecting biodiversity and agricultural land. As well as promoting an organic, interlinked and labour saving agricultural approach, he also encourages gardeners to plant indigenous rather than exotic in order to provide sustenance for birds and wild life. He has been outstandingly successful as an arbiter of what is appropriate in Australia, and has, I think, contributed greatly to the sense Australians have of occupying their particular place.

Thanks to him, people recognize not just a genera of Banksias or Grevilleas, but specific species, and gardeners vie with each other to collect and nurture many varieties. To sustain the interest, he started indigenous nurseries to produce the plants that people wanted in their gardens and thus initiated a whole new trend in gardening. Gardens, by the way, sustain a multi-billion dollar industry around the world.

I was surprised to learn that a permaculture garden has been started in a suburb of KL and was delighted to be reacquainted with the methodology. The objective of the garden in KL is to show terrace house residents that they can grow enough to sustain, or at least significantly supplement, a family with home grown vegetables, fruits and herbs. It is organic in the sense that no pesticides are used and the application of natural fertilizers is minimized, but there are no complicated sequences of crops or treatments to protect the tender plants. The whole system works on common sense and labour saving planning, so I will try to paraphrase the principles without sacrificing too much of the content.

Most important is the soil, which should never be left exposed, but covered instead with a constantly maintained layer of mulch (and this can be anything from grass cuttings to leaves) that will protect it from weed growth, excessive heat and drying out. It will also sustain healthy earthworm and micro-organism populations. The concern that everything should be composted first before applying to the ground should be a bit flexible: better to place what you have on bare soil unprocessed than to tip it out. Obviously some mulches are better than others, sawdust is not as good as fallen leaves, for example, but if sawdust is all you have, then put it on but try mixing different sources of nutrients.

One warning about fungal attacks bears repeating: keep the mulch about 2″ from the stems of plants to protect them from fungal attack, especially in the wet season.

Place your vegetables where they will get the morning sun but not the hot afternoon sun. Apparently plants grow most in the mornings and ‘shut down’ when the heat threatens to overwhelm and dry out of the plant. Protection from the afternoon sun is important, either by a wall or other plants that provide shade.

Plant slow maturing vegetables at the back, faster ones at the front. Enhance this by making path loops into the garden bed so that access can be had to all plants but tramping over beds is minimized, because this can damage the soil structure.

Mix your planting, place individual leafy vegetables in amongst the herbs or tomatoes, don’t group them together where a pest can readily destroy the lot. If you lack planting material to create this mix, scatter pre-soaked kacang hijau about. They will readily sprout and will provide the nitrogen fixing that will be advantageous to the neighbouring plants. Mix the legumes with fruit, leaf and root crops all together.

Compost and liquid manure are supplements that are needed in the tropics because of the heavy rainfall that leaches away nutrients so quickly. Where there is space, and you don’t need much, chickens can also be introduced into the equation. Especially in an orchard, they will control weeds and limit pests, as well as provide fertilzer for the garden. In exchange, you can enjoy an occasional rendang ayam and fresh eggs!

The garden in KL has tried to develop a water retention system involving a pond and a water route for run off to be reused before discharging into the drain. A pond increases the biodiversity of the garden and encourages frogs and toads that are beneficial for a pest free environment. In the pond, this particular garden had tillapia, which did not sit too well with the ethics of Permaculture, as Mollison always stresses the importance of using indigenous animals and plants. As table fish they may be easy to grow but once escaped into our rivers they out compete indigenous fish and ultimately reduce the aquatic biodiversity. I would suggest sepat (gouramys) as they are very hardy, can feed of anything available, including mosquito larvae, they don’t eat the aquatic plants and they can be harvested from time to time.

The garden we visited actually had a ‘grey water’ area, where kitchen water is discharged into a depression in the ground. Kangkong, bananas and ubi could thrive here and make use of the waste water and the nutrients in it. Obviously used cooking oil cannot be disposed of this way, nor can it be added to a compost heap, but a sand filled hole in the garden permits micro-organisms to break it down further.

Creating a sustainable system to produce safe food that utilizes nutrients that would otherwise be lost or wasted has always been my preoccupation, and it is intriguing that you can do it on even the smallest plot. It may require a bit of ingenuity to salvage runoff or to save rain water, but I think this is the ultimate challenge for a gardener: creating something that is worth more from your effort and ingenuity than it was before, and to see the benefits to other creatures, plant and animal. Keeping in touch with these natural processes and learning how to manipulate them for our advantage without harming other things is a great achievement, and it is so rewarding to eat your own kangkong or cucumber that you have nurtured through the hazards of pests and floods.

The word permaculture is a combination of ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’. The objective is to create a mixed garden of fast and slow maturing plants that will gradually develop into a forest garden. Taller trees will bear fruit and provide nesting sites for birds that will help maintain the balance, and protect the more tender plants below. The immaculately laid out KL garden is designed to minimize labour input, and once established it will be a joy, but gardens will always need a degree of personal care and observation. By checking on plants regularly, you get to understand what they are likely to need, and the challenge is to transform these needs and our own into a compatible garden that supports us and wildlife on a sustainable basis.

Tending the Garden

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by Angela Hijjas

Recently the Selangor Branch showed the new three hour BBC series by David Attenborough called ‘State of the Planet’, and I have been mulling over it ever since. The main issue he explores is the impact of humans on the global landscape of plants and animals and he demonstrates quite conclusively that the process of impoverishment of species is unrelenting once mankind arrives on the scene.

Islands provide the most easily read examples of what happens after the arrival of man. Hawaii was first settled some centuries ago and the impact on biodiversity has reduced the number of species by a half and counting, to the extent that there is little remaining of the original habitat, hence the application of the term ‘impoverishment’.

Easter Island experienced the same process in a more dramatic form. The people who occupied the islands made boats from forest wood that enabled them to fish, but eventually with the growing success of the human population there were fewer and fewer trees for boat building until all were gone. Diets changed without these boats, demonstrated by archaeological middens. Fish were no longer a source of protein, nor did the people have any way to leave the islands. Eventually they all died and left their plaintive monuments of huge stone faces staring out over the ocean, perhaps as a prayer for rescue from their devastated island.

The famous biologist Edward Wilson was interviewed extensively in the series, and summarised man’s impact as not intentionally destructive, but that we ‘succeeded too well’. Hand in hand with a technological revolution that enables us to extract the vast majority of the world’s resources for our own consumption means devastation for forests and oceans. As our numbers increase with greater security of food supplies so our impact explodes.

To continue like this can only mean the destruction of our habitat, just as on the Easter Islands.

We may think of our own immediate habitat as being relatively intact, but with globalization our foot print is actually widespread; Japan provides an interesting example. For decades the Japanese have not cut their own forests, believing that they enshrine an irreplaceable essence of Japanese culture. But rather than using other materials instead of wood, they buy their timber from lower cost countries where the environmental or cultural impact is not added to the cost of extraction. But in the long term, if we degrade the habitat of other countries, we degrade our own.

But how long is the long term? How long will it be before we feel the impact of our over extraction of resources? I think within this decade we will see significant changes in the Malaysian lifestyle. Already we eat less seafood, not because we lack the boats, but because we have over ‘harvested’ most of our tropical fishing grounds and the international market takes the best of what remains. We will no longer be able to afford wood for construction, so our housing and interiors will be unrelenting concrete. Our sources of water will be severely polluted by the destruction of forest cover, clean water will be a rarity, and tap water will be undrinkable (in fact many already refuse to drink it). Most power will not come from renewable sources in the foreseeable future, and until it does we continue to live off our capital. In fact, our whole present lifestyle is ‘off our capital’, and until we reverse that the future does not look bright.

Sustainable development is something that banks and governments do not consider enough in their cost-benefit analyses, but by ignoring the people who have to make a living from the small things and concentrating only on those who make on the big things, the balance will invariably be upset.

As the biologists know, it is the small things that make the big things work.

The global threat of the disenfranchised poor, eking out marginal lives in desert lands like Afghanistan, is not going to go away as more and more areas become biologically impoverished and can no longer support the life they did before.

On a positive side, there are some relatively painless things we can do to moderate the problem. First and foremost, we must introduce population control of our own species. The days of successive horizons of economic growth are gone. Even Malaysia which is blessed with a small population (by Asian standards) needs to take immediate steps to control population growth to a level where economic growth is not a prerequisite to provide jobs for everyone. We need to determine what population our land can support on a sustainable basis and make that our target.

The belief that God will provide for however many children there are is patently untrue, as God did not provide for the Afghanis. If the war doesn’t kill them, the drought will. However, God did provide a garden, which should have been enough for all but now the garden itself is in danger of being destroyed. We submit to the will of God in the inevitable, but we are obliged to look after ourselves when it is not inevitable and not to depend on miracles. Providing jobs for all our children out of nothing would indeed be a miracle.

Second we must revitalize our rural areas where once productive land has been abused and neglected. Restore its usefulness and reinvigorate the rural traditions that nurture land rather than neglect it.

Third, we must protect as inviolate our natural assets, the forests and seas.

The tragedy of September 11th may well mark a new age in world politics, but it has certainly brought into focus the power that humankind has acquired. The wealth of the developed world expressed as the military strength massing in the Gulf compared with a devastated Afghanistan is an obscene example of what is wrong with humankind’s success. Somehow we miss the whole picture, as we strive for self fulfillment we fail to understand that our habitat is now global. There are no more hiding places for us than there are for Osama bin Laden, the fate of humanity rests with the management of our global habitat, and this requires an enormous will to realign priorities.

Possibly democracy and human rights are no longer the principal goals for humanity. As America will have to cope with restrictions on its freedoms in order to curb terrorism, so we all may find that we have to do without a great deal of what we take for granted if humanity (and the biodiversity that supports us) is to continue.

The best we can hope for is that the wealthy of the world realise they have a moral obligation to ensure the development of the poor, to clean up environmental damage and to restore our habitat to what can support humanity and the rest of global biodiversity.

Otherwise Attenborough’s view of impoverishment will develop to its logical conclusion: we will destroy our habitat and ourselves, and the final scenes will be uglier than anything you have seen on CNN.

Gardening in the Forest

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Gardening in the Forest

The early morning view from the jetty at Endau Rompin. The garden had to relate to this landscape.

by Angela Hijjas

from The Malaysian Naturalist, vol. 54 no. 4, 2001.

To lay out a garden in the world’s oldest tropical rainforest is an exciting and daunting prospect. The Nature and Education Research Centre at Endau Rompin was opened in March by the Chief Minister of Johor, and the new facilities required some planting to set them off to their best.

Built by the Orang Asli of Kampong Peta, the centre is a haven far from city life and occupies a transitional space leading into the forest. The site for the Centre was chosen because it was long since cleared of the original forest by the Orang Asli for an orchard. The continuity of landscapes is important, so it was an important objective to at least keep the sense of this space being part of their culture. One of the hard decisions had fortunately been made by the Parks Director Encik Basir who had previously ordered that the vegetation between the Centre and the river be cleared. It was a good decision that forms the Centre’s sense of place by revealing the river.

As the building was finished some time ago, there was already some regeneration on site that gave clues about appropriate planting choices. The decision to restrict the range to plants from the park was an obvious one, and the Orang Asli had collected several species of gingers, melastomas, ferns, bananas and palms that were just waiting to be laid out.

We visited Kampong Peta to see what the Orang Asli planted around their homes, and found that the villagers had brought in many decorative species, pokok kampung, as distinct from pokok hutan. The yellow flowering Alamanda is popular, and things like Clerodendron, which I had always thought a forest species, but if it is, it is not from Endau, as the villagers were definite that it did not grow in their forest.

In the penghulu’s compound the white Melastoma takes pride of place. It is a rare find in the forest, but is now occasionally available from nurseries. Rarity, though, creates value and my idea to plant a whole bank of them seemed a bit excessive!

One of the prettiest plants is the peacock blue fern-like Selaginella wildenovii. It flourishes in the surrounding forest and had naturally established itself in the shade under the edges of the buildings. I decided to follow kampong practice and clear everything else well away from the structures, as maintenance of wooden buildings is a lot easier if they are not overhung or undermined by plants. The Selaginella is not invasive, and seems to cope with the dryer soil under the buildings, so planting more will create a blue field under the structures.

A feature that I wanted to highlight is the river rock walls of the main pavilion’s building platform. Rather than planting along the base that would conceal the rocks, we opted to plant the common pink Melastoma malabathricum densely along the top of the wall, outside the roof’s drip line and in full sun. When established they will display a mass of colour, and by highlighting this commonest roadside plant visitors will appreciate the potential of local plants in landscaping.

At the higher end of the same bank we planted Curculigo latifolia, where a few self sown individuals were thriving. Their pleated palm-like leaves are an interesting feature, and I wanted them massed together as densely as possible. The Orang Asli use this plant as a sweetener: the fruits are eaten and the residual sweetness flavours the next taste of something less palatable.

The rare white Melastoma was planted just opposite the pink variety, in full sun and wet soil beside the excavated pond to help conceal the damage done by digging. The plant likes full sun and a wet position, so it should do well and create a highlight.

An existing landscape plan nominated unspecified palms for the space between the pond and the dormitory. I considered transplanting five seedlings of the Livistona endauensis to line up with the building pillars. These palms are restricted to a sandstone ridge overlooking the centre and were first identified as a new species during the Malaysian Nature Society’s expedition into Endau Rompin in the ’80s. The Orang Asli didn’t think this was a problem, although sometimes palms are difficult to transplant and I wasn’t sure about removing these unique site-specific plants. In the end a more readily obtained Caryota or fish tail palm was substituted.

Another decision that related to the nature of space had to consider the large open area cleared of secondary forest and adjacent to the river view clearing. I considered a selection of indigenous trees, like Tristania that grows along the river banks upstream that would eventually be tall enough not to block the view, but decided against it. Not only would they need more shelter than the site provides, but it meant leap frogging the immediate past landscape of the Orang Asli dusun, a sense of which I wanted to preserve. There is lots of forest around but I wanted the landscape to acknowledge that this clearing and the forest have been in the care of the Orang Asli for centuries.

Several huge durian trees and a forest rambutan remain, the rambutan totally unlike the stunted bud grafted versions we see today. I suggested that the Orang Asli collect specimens of forest fruit trees, unusual things that they would relish, to plant in the space. Their immediate interest showed that it was the right choice. These trees will take years to fruit but they will form a major landscape feature and educational asset.

And there lies the difference between naturalist gardening and landscaping. Landscaping in the urban sense is about an instant transformation from one view to another, asserting the transition from one ownership to another, whereas gardening with a historical and natural perspective continues the landscape in a modified form where one makes do with what one has and improves upon it. The relentless search for novelty and fashion, not just in our clothes and home décor, but in the print we make on the land, means that we are removing ourselves further from our natural home, further from our natural landscape.

A Gardener’s Review

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A Gardener’s Review

A variety of Eugenia, showing white flowers. A common belief among naturalists is that white flowers attract moths, yellow ones attract butterflies, and red ones appeal to birds.

by Angela Hijjas

From The Malaysian Naturalist, vol. 54 no. 3, 2001.

I was a rank beginner when I started writing on landscaping with indigenous species. Since then my interests have broadened, and my garden has become an obsession, but why did I choose indigenous, and how far am I in achieving my goals?

The common stem fig is rarely seen ripe: as soon as it is edible it is plucked by bats.

My broad ideas were initially inspired by gardens in Australia, where there has been a growing interest in Australian plants over the last three decades. There, gardeners use local plants to create a specific sense of place, to conserve water and nutrients and to encourage native birds and animals. This same sense of place is special to me here in Malaysia, because I want my garden to reflect the fact that I am here and not in Australia, nor just in some unspecified tropical country. The garden had to assert the whole history of the place and the plants that were on the site for thousands of years before it was cleared for a coffee plantation just 70 years ago.

As well, the conservation of water and nutrients presented a challenge. An organic approach seemed the most appropriate, so we set up systems to compost and mulch, and selected hardy species that can naturally withstand insect attack or drought. As in the Australian example, this choice of local species simultaneously created an instant pallet of colour and form that is particularly Malaysian.

Here there is no drought as in Australia, but everything is relative. Deplete the soil of organic matter, expose it to the tropical sun and soon the situation will resemble drought or flood. With nothing to retain moisture and nutrients, plants have to cope with extreme conditions that flatten all but the hardiest. The instant gardener would intervene chemically to help his plants: fertilize, pesticide, herbicide and fungicide. A sure step to suicide…. for the planet, if not for the gardener. Far better, surely, to choose a wider species mix and conservative gardening techniques to create a naturalist’s garden.

In my previous garden in Kuala Lumpur, a neighbour prided herself on her roses, beautiful tall bushes that produced an amazing crop of flowers considering our location just 3 degrees from the equator, but to me the price was unacceptable as several times a week the unmistakable smell of agrocide came floating over the fence.

At that stage, I had a small garden that was low maintenance, of hardy species that screened us from the neighbours. It just required an occasional pruning, and apart from the aesthetic value of looking at green rather than street, I didn’t really think about it much. When we decided to move to our 14 acre dusun, or village orchard, the garden became a major element that had to be taken more seriously.

I wanted shade most of all, and was inspired by the arboretum at FRIM, where the massive dipterocarps soar a hundred feet overhead. Planting fruit trees was not a priority as there were already plenty, and although I had a brief fling with ‘cash crops’, like sweet corn, the returns did not justify the effort. The nice thing about trees is that once they are established they need little attention.

Once the dipterocarps were on the way, I needed bulk underneath to give form and volume to the planting, so then began the hunt for local ferns, gingers, palms and ground covers.

Searching around the nurseries in Sungai Buloh and everywhere I traveled in Malaysia became an opportunity to find new and unusual plants that had some relevance to a regional garden. My most recent find is the mauve seeds of the fish tail palm Caryota rumphiana from Gua Gomantong in Sabah. I had never seen them in fruit although this magnificent solitary palm has become common in KL planted by the roadside.

The search for plants has sharpened my awareness of species in the forest, and I was delighted to recognize, also in Sabah, the beautiful palm Arenga undulatifolia, growing on the limestone outcrops along the Kinabatangan River. I have tried to germinate seeds of this rare species that I collected from the Singapore Botanic Gardens, but failed. Now at least I know its natural growing conditions so can try again to replicate the alkaline, well drained habitat.

While many bananas are considered inedible by humans, they make excellent food for wildlife: insects visit the flowers, and birds, mammals and bats take the fruit. This Musa sp. called pisang belali gajah in Malay provides hundreds of fruits that ripen progressively over months, providing a stable food supply.

An important continuing project is the herb garden, which is more a spice garden with lots of ethno-botanically relevant plants: toddy palms, cinnamon, cloves, nutmegs, meninjau, pandan, chillies, vanilla orchids, lemon grass, pepper, turmuric and tamarind, as well as local medicinal plants. Organic vegetables make the garden useful, while the fragrant blooms of gingers and creepers provide the atmosphere of the ‘exotic East’ which is actually the here and now, not the remote and romantic.

We started Taman Sari by taking a leaf from the Chinese vegetable gardeners’ practice. We burned the clay left over from the house excavations, and if one can talk of a transforming experience, verging on the religious, this was it. Creating a garden is all about making something beautiful and productive that wasn’t there before. Burning clay, the worst kind of soil one could be blessed with, transforms it into a soil that is porous, retains and releases water slowly, that crumbles easily and is sterile and ‘sweet’, blessed as it is with charcoal fragments from the burning. Transubstantiating fire converted my gardening into a religion: to do everything as naturally as possible.

As I became more aware of birds in the garden and the processes of establishing plants, I realised how rewarding it is to share my space with other creatures. I am delighted to say that in the last month I have seen in my garden a pangolin, a two-meter keeled rat snake, chestnut bellied malkohas, crested serpent eagles getting their daily lift from the hot spot on our plaza, a blue winged pitta, large biawaks, a pair of hill mynas calling from the fruiting kenanga trees, and millions of iridescent flies attracting masses of swifts as the flies fed on a flowering Terminalia bellirica. I look forward to the spectacled leaf monkeys feeding on the Terminalia fruit in a few months time.
Not all is resounding success, though. Despite my mix of species I have recently had a plague of white ulat bulu, hairy caterpillars, that have completely defoliated several of these Terminalias. Without spraying, I just have to pray for some natural predator to arrive, but am none the less anxious about the monkeys’ food supplies. They must find enough forage elsewhere in the kampong, where trees are being cut every day to make way for more houses.

I experience a real sense of urgency about wildlife, not unlike worrying about one’s children, so I continue to plant as many species as I can to supplement available food sources. So rather than farming for people, which was the original objective of our dusun, I am now gardening for wildlife, and the animals make the seasons of my garden just as much as the plants do. When we have come full circle, I hope my garden will resemble the forest that was here for thousands of years before it was thoughtlessly replaced by a mono-cultural farm that was destined to fail.

I have one relic of that pre-agricultural era, a worn stump that has eluded all attempts to remove it, and it silently reminds me every time I pass of my mission.

Conservation for Children

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Conservation for Children

by Angela Hijjas

Now that my children are adults, I look back on my record of creating awareness about conservation issues with them and realise that communicating knowledge about our environment is not necessarily automatic just because the parent is concerned. I generated one child as actively involved, joining me bird watching and botanizing, while the other is more intellectually engaged rather than practically. I have realized that the key to creating involvement and intelligence is creative play, and you need to start as young as possible.

Play in Malaysia is denigrated as a shameful activity for children. As parents complain about their children’s playfulness, equated with being ‘naughty’, they refuse to validate the activity with encouragement. Children learn pretty soon that it doesn’t please parents. Malaysian parents are less likely to get involved and engaged with their children’s activities, and this is the really shameful part. Children learn through play, and they learn more if parents reinforce what they learn by participating.

Now if you think here is some Mat Salleh who doesn’t understand the value of discipline and hard work, my credentials are impeccable, thanks to two very clever daughters, both graduates of Harvard, one a Rhodes scholar and writer, and the other an anthropologist-naturalist studying choreography.

Looking back on those first essential years together with my daughters, I suppose I taught them things that interested me. Look at the birds! See that flower! Teaching them to read the landscape around them for signs of other natural occupants of the spaces we inhabit made our afternoon walks and travelling all the more interesting for us all and encouraged them to feel part of the wider environment. But we also played with water, mud, sand, looked for shells, examined rubbish washed up to the shore. There was lots of fossicking and plenty of time for them to wander freely around and discover things for themselves.

I was surprised recently when a three-year old expressed delight at sitting in a car with the windows open and the breeze blowing in her face: she had never experienced that before! It’s something that we take for granted that everyone knows about movement and wind, but this child had never travelled anywhere without airconditioning. Children need to experience all aspects of their environment to begin to understand that they have a place in it and basic play activities out in the open are crucial to children understanding about the world and how it works. Otherwise they are in danger of seeing everything insulated and separated from them, through the window of a car, or on the screen of a television.

The most important tools must be sand and water. I am yet to meet a child who tires of playing with shovels and buckets, digging, smashing, filling, draining, creating battlements and fantasies, but at the same time learning about how water flows, how it is impeded, scavenging for shells and seaweed for decoration, and seeking new things to play with.

A little direction on activities provides them with insight into the whys and wherefores, and a favorite of mine is to demonstrate centrifugal force. What child would think you can stop water from flowing downhill? I score points every time with that one, merely by swinging a bucket around in a circle and not spilling a drop! It’s called centrifugal force, tell them, give them the right name, and they will remember better than you do. If they can remember the names of dinosaurs, they can remember any word or information that you give them. This is the time to build vocabulary and language skills, with poetry, rhymes and repeated story telling. I don’t believe children should be spoken to as anything other than small people, patronising and limited ‘baby talk’ is an absolute non starter.

Look for shells together, provide them with a shell book that illustrates all the different families (Periplus has recently issued one about Malaysian shells that is not difficult and illustrates and names all the important families). A segmented box where the collection can be stored and pored over could be the beginning of a lifetime interest. My young visitors are delighted to be allowed to pore over my daughter’s collection and discuss what they have, where they found it and (mainly) if she will part with it! Far more interesting than single faceted Pokemon, but if that is all they have access to, then single faceted the children shall be!

Afternoon walks were always a great opportunity to look under the most obvious rocks and probe inside likely looking puddles, finding where the tadpoles lived, finding the imprint of raindrops on clay pans which we took home to start our own natural history museum of fossils. We checked daily on all the local animals, watched the bats darting to catch swarming flying ants after the rain as they poured out in spiraling columns towards the street lights. We named the Erithrina indica the ‘restaurant tree’, because the sun birds regularly probed for nectar and we could watch them from our balcony. We checked the house for toads, especially the lower floor, and respected their right to occupy the guest room as they in fact did us a service by keeping the insect population down… a simple lesson in ecology that required guests to be a little tolerant!

When we traveled we visited museums and exhibitions everywhere. The Natural History Museum in London is a favorite still especially when it has interactive displays on things like the decay of an organism, in our case a rabbit, with graphic photographs of rot and maggots, concluding with the exclamation (after initial distaste) of ‘let’s recycle another bunny!’ The daily drive to school usually presented some form of roadkill that we could check in passing as to its state of decay…. such is life in Malaysia, you won’t see it in a museum but you will see it on your daily rounds! Museums here commemorate human accomplishments rather than celebrate the glory of the world around us, so we need to go round with our eyes open for interesting creatures and processes, stop and look, discuss and read.

One self indulgence that I always splurged on was children’s books. I bought everything as there was no library for us to use, but do be selective. Don’t go for the mass circulation Enid Blyton type of book, look for clever illustrations, something that will intrigue and encourage children to be curious, avoid books with simple drawings of daisies as the only garden flower. Children need visual stimulation as well as information, they need a reason to look at a book again, on their own after you have read it to them because visually there is something more to discover, even if they can’t read. Reading to children can never be overdone. I read on demand for a decade. Admittedly I didn’t do much else, so thank god for domestic helpers!

And here lies the kernel of truth that is hardest to accept in Malaysia: there is no one else who can bring up your children as well as you would do, and you can’t expect an illiterate Indonesian maid to fill the role of parenthood. Those early years are so critical, I wouldn’t have missed them for anything and they paid such handsome dividends. Both always did well in (local) school until forms 3 and 5, although had trouble accepting the rote learning, but they became Malaysians in the process and that I wouldn’t have had them miss.

Give it some thought, and see if you can spend more creative time with your children or grandchildren. It is truly life’s most rewarding experience.