Oil spill ship's owners misled us: Australia

Yahoo News 15 Mar 09;

MELBOURNE (AFP) – The operators of a ship that spilled oil along the popular tourist beaches of northeast Australia misled authorities about the extent of the disaster, the state government said Sunday.

Officials initially believed the Hong Kong-flagged "Pacific Adventurer" had lost 20-30,000 litres (5,300-7,900 gallons) of oil but it has since emerged that almost a quarter of a million litres spilled from the vessel.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, whose government has been accused of reacting too slowly to the disaster that has blackened dozens of beaches, said the ship's operators had not been candid about how much oil it was carrying.

"Without a doubt, we were misled early by the operators of this ship about how much oil was in the water," she told ABC television.

With a state election looming in Queensland next Saturday, Bligh defended efforts to clean up in the wake of the spill, which occurred early last Wednesday when the ship hit heavy seas whipped up by a cyclone.

She said there was no point in clearing the oil that was fouling beaches until it had finished washing ashore.

"I can understand people think it's a good idea to get out there from day one and start cleaning up," Bligh said.

"But the reality is we still have oil coming onto the beach. You don't take it off the beach until you know it's all there otherwise we are stripping layer and layer of sand that has already be eroded by cyclonic activities."

The ship's owner Swire Shipping denied lying about the amount of oil that has spilled.

It said the initial estimates proved incorrect because they took into account only one hole in the ship's hull, unaware there was a second, larger hole below the waterline that allowed more oil to escape.

"At all times the master and officers of the ship and its owners have supplied the authorities with the best information available," the company said in a statement.

Swire faces 1.5 million dollars (977,000 US dollars) in fines if found guilty of environmental or maritime breaches and has already said it will cover the costs of the clean up.

The cargo ship also lost 31 containers -- or 620 tonnes -- of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, which authorities will attempt to locate with sonar.

Apart from the oil damage, experts fear the fertiliser could cause harmful algal blooms, suffocate fish and kill natural habitats.

Hundreds of people are working to clean the beaches and save affected wildlife.

Creatures great and small surviving deadly oil spill
Glenis Green, The Courier-Mail 15 Mar 09;

Saving creatures, great and small, from the toxic oils spilled along the Sunshine Coast a week ago has become a delicate, painstaking job.

Volunteers and wildlife carers have united to wipe the deadly oil from the tiny claws of ghost crabs right up to the scaly skin of a venomous sea snake and the rugged shell of a green sea turtle.

Fears are rising that the pollution will have a far greater impact on marine and foreshore animals than initially thought.

Species ranging from grey nurse sharks, to turtles, dugong, dolphins and tiny creatures that live in the sand on the waterline are all expected to be impacted.

Pelicans have been hardest hit - with 17 currently being cleaned up and rehabilitated by wildlife officers. Others include pied oyster catchers, turtles and a sea snake.

Environment Protection Agency senior director Clive Cook said so far only about 30 birds or other wildlife had been impacted.

Mr Cook warned the ramifications of the oil spill on the ecosystem could drag on for more than a year.

"The more oil we can get out of the system the better it is, but obviously it does have a flow-on effect - if animals start to ingest oil, other animals eat those animals," he said.

Mr Cook said he expected the clean-up to take at least another week to 10 days but it could be longer.

"The initial report we received in terms of the quantity of oil discharged from the boat was 20 tonnes or something, and now we're finding it's well over 200, so that is an issue in itself," he said.

Mr Cook said more than 350 officers were helping with the clean-up, of which about 20 were from the EPA.

The first casualty received by the Australian Wildlife Hospital at Australia Zoo at Beerwah was a sea snake rescued from Marcoola Beach, coated in the sickly goo.

Hospital spokeswoman Carolyn Beaton said the snake had been picked by a concerned resident and taken to a Coolum vet clinic before being whisked down to the zoo's emergency clinic.

"It's very messy stuff and the best thing to use to get it off (animals) is actually dishwashing liquid," Ms Beaton said.

"So far the volume of animals seems to be manageable, but it may take one or two days for the real effects to be felt," she said.

At UnderWater World at Mooloolaba, general manager Julie Cullen said special attention was being reserved for turtle nests which were in the middle of hatching.

"People monitoring the nests along the coast are ensuring they are being caged so that they collect the baby turtles and bring them in here ... so they are not going out into the big seas and then swimming through the oil slick," she said.

The turtle hatchlings would be held until the waters had cleared and they could be released safely back into the wild.

Ms Cullen said there were big turtle nesting areas from Dickey Beach to Sunshine Beach and up through the Noosa National Park and the big seas whipped up by Cyclone Hamish were eroding the nesting sites as well.

"That oil slick is right across some of the most beautiful breeding grounds and marine parks that we have here on the coast so the potential for damage is significant and is being monitored," she said.

"At the moment people are bringing in animals like sea snakes and urchins and some can be poisonous, so we're asking them to call us in the first instance to find out whether they are safe to pick up or not and then we can contact the appropriate authorities. There are different groups trained to take care of different animals.

Anyone who finds injured or affected wildlife is being urged to call UnderWater World on 54586280 rather than try to move the animals themselves.

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Best of our wild blogs: 15 Mar 09

Butterfly of the Month - The Cruiser
on the Butterflies of Singapore blog

A Casual Walk at Lower Peirce
on the Manta Blog

Blooming Rhu
on the wild shores of singapore blog

Pellet casting by non-raptorial birds
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

Yellow Bitterns eating a damselfly
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

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Number of dengue cases in Singapore down in last few weeks

Satish Cheney, Channel NewsAsia 14 Mar 09;

SINGAPORE: Dengue killed three times more victims in 2008 than in recent years in the Asia Pacific region. With the dengue season set to begin in Singapore in May, health authorities are keeping close tabs on the number of reported cases.

Experts said 1.8 billion people in the Asia Pacific region are at risk of getting dengue fever. Dengue is the most widespread tropical disease after malaria and about 3,000 people died from it in Southeast Asia last year.

The problem is currently being discussed at a ten-day workshop attended by Asian dengue specialists in Singapore.

Singapore saw a 26 per cent jump in number of dengue cases in the first nine weeks of the year, compared to the same period the year before. But in the past few weeks, the number of cases has been dropping.

136 cases were reported in the second week of February, but in the first week of March, the figure went down to 88.

Right now, there are 13 dengue clusters on the island. One of them – Ang Mo Kio Avenue 10 – has already seen 19 cases reported.

To spread the dengue prevention message, the National Environment Agency (NEA) will be working closely with Community Development Councils (CDCs).

Senior Parliamentary Secretary Amy Khor, Environment & Water Resources Ministry, said: "To make the programmes and campaigns more effective, the CDCs, together with the NEA, are planning to target the programmes with specific groups of people – the young, the elderly, the students living in the hostels and even the foreign workers living in the dormitories."

There are also plans to provide better designed bamboo pole covers to needy residents to prevent rainwater from collecting in the pole holders where mosquitoes can breed.- CNA/so

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Artificial trees and brightened clouds may help to cool us down

Techniques for geo-engineering are coming under serious scrutiny as temperatures and CO2 emissions continue to rise
Richard Woods and Jonathan Leake, Times Online 15 Mar 09;

THE threat of devastating climate change is now so great that some scientists say it is time to investigate a Plan B - geo-engineering on a planetary scale.

Such methods of altering the world’s climate may become necessary, they say, unless emissions of greenhouse gases fall within five years.

Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction - such as creating artificial trees to absorb carbon dioxide, or reflecting sunlight away from the Earth - are coming under serious scrutiny as temperatures and CO2 emissions continue to rise. The issue has become so pressing that the Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, is preparing a report on the feasibility of geo-engineering.

Professor John Shepherd, chairman of the working group, said: “Our study aims to separate the science from the science fiction and offer recommendations on which options deserve serious consideration.”

The report is not yet complete but the personal view of Professor Brian Launder, one of its contributors, is that without CO2 reductions or geo-engineering, “civilisa-tion as we know it will end within our grandchildren’s lifetime”.

At present, global emissions of greenhouse gases are still rising by 2% to 3% a year, according to the Met Office. If that continues, average world temperatures are projected to rise by as much as 5.5C by 2100.

Launder, professor of mechanical engineering at Manchester University, reckons that extracting carbon from the atmosphere would be too slow a process to prevent significant warming. In his view “the only rational scheme is to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth and to reflect back more of it”.

One method under detailed analysis is to make clouds brighter – especially in the Pacific where the ocean temperature has great influence on world climate. “If these clouds can be brightened so you increase the sunlight reflected even by a couple of per cent, it looks as though that could be enough . . . to prevent most of the effects of global warming,” said Launder.

Professor Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University is investigating how ships could spray droplets of sea water into the atmosphere where they would evaporate, leaving tiny salt crystals to rise on air currents into the clouds.

The crystals would act as “nuclei” around which water vapour could condense and thus increase the reflective power of the clouds, bouncing more of the sun’s energy back into space. But critics warn that although such schemes might lower temperatures swiftly, they would have to be maintained for long periods and the side-effects are unknown.

Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “Anything that alters the climate in a different way from reducing carbon has inherent dangers because we don’t understand the climate well enough.”

For this reason Professor Tim Lenton, another climate scientist, prefers technologies that could suck CO2 out of the atmosphere: “We should push for the strongest mitigation [of CO2 emissions] possible. But among the geo-engineering options there are some that might be useful add-ons.”

One idea is to create plantations of fast-growing trees such as willow and turn them into “biochar”. Plants grow by extracting CO2 from the air and converting it to wood, so the idea would be to turn the wood into charcoal, using giant ovens. Then it would be buried so the carbon could never be released back into the air.

Other experts warn that geo-engineer-ing risks diverting attention from the need to create a carbon-neutral economy.

“Wind and solar energy are at least in the pipeline, whereas geo-engineering is much more speculative,” Pope said.

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Ten ways to save the World

The Independent 15 Mar 09;

We get the message. The planet's doomed unless we get our act together PDQ. We even know some of the measures needed to give ourselves a chance. But which less orthodox proposals could stave off disastrous climate change? Environment editor Geoffrey Lean has a cunning plan

It has been a really bad week for the climate. Each day brought depressing news as scientists meeting in Copenhagen told us global warming is taking place more rapidly than expected. The seas are rising faster than predicted; the polar ice caps are melting more quickly; and the Amazon rainforest is doomed unless urgent action is taken.

The main solutions are widely agreed. The world needs to forge a much tougher treaty this year to replace the failed Kyoto Protocol. Global emissions of carbon dioxide must be cut by at least half by the middle of the century, much more in industrialised countries. Using energy more efficiently is essential, as is rapidly increasing it from renewable sources. Nuclear power and biofuels are much more controversial, but are likely to be used to some extent. But new, much less familiar solutions are also emerging.

Here are 10 of them.

Sweep away soot

Cutting soot emissions from car exhausts, factories and open fires is probably the fastest way to tackle global warming, and there are calls for a treaty to achieve this. Scientists say the pollutant is the second biggest culprit in climate change after carbon dioxide. Black carbon, which gives soot its colour, has two main effects. It heats the atmosphere by absorbing radiation from the sun and releasing it into the air. And it darkens snow and ice when it falls on them, causing them to reflect less sunlight, heat up and melt – in turn exposing land or water, which also warms rapidly. Reducing emissions is fairly easy, using tried and tested technology. And it has a rapid effect as soot stays only days or weeks in the atmosphere, compared with centuries for carbon dioxide.

Save the ozone

Measures to save the ozone layer have so far been the most effective steps to combat climate change, as many of the chemicals that attack the protective layer in the atmosphere are also global warming gases. A 20-year-old treaty, the Montreal Protocol, has almost phased out their production, coincidentally eliminating the equivalent of 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. This puts to shame the Kyoto Protocol, which aimed to cut emissions by 2 billion tons. Experts want measures to remove the chemicals from equipment such as old fridges, where they acted as coolants, when these are scrapped, saving the equivalent of 20 billion tons of carbon dioxide.

Make connections

Renewable energy is often unreliable: the sun does not always shine, the wind does not blow for ever. But the European Commission and other bodies are drawing up plans to get round this by tapping clean sources and linking them up, so that there will always be enough to meet all Europe's electricity needs. Solar power stations, for example, would be placed in the Sahara, where just a fraction of the desert could provide for the whole continent. Tides would be tapped along Britain's coasts, the world's best place for exploiting this resource. Huge wind farms would be erected in the North Sea, and these would be balanced by hydropower in mountainous areas such as Norway, storing water behind dams and releasing it on calm days. It would all be linked by a continent-wide electricity grid.

Wise up the grid

Barack Obama, David Cameron and Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, are all sold on creating a "smart grid", which the Tory leader describes as like moving from "the plain old telephone system to the internet". The present "dumb grid" just delivers electricity from generators to consumers; the smart one would enable them to communicate with each other. So, it can make fridges and washing machines and other appliances use power when it is abundant and cheap, and avoid peak times when it would be much more expensive. Smoothing out demand in this way means that the grid needs fewer power stations, and can accommodate renewable energy more easily. It would also provide a huge boost to a "rooftop revolution", where households generate their own electricity from the sun or the wind and sell what they do not need to the grid.

Rethink cars

Motoring could be revolutionised if cars were marketed like mobile phones – in a manner that would cut carbon dioxide and reduce the cost of driving. Motorists would get subsidised – or possibly even free – electric cars in the same way that customers currently get mobile phone handsets. In return, they would take out a contract for miles, rather than minutes, entitling them to get power either by plugging in to recharging points (at home, in car parks or on the street) or exchanging batteries at filling stations. The idea is the brainchild of a thirty-something former dot-com entrepreneur, Shia Agassi, who believes it would halve motoring costs. It sounds too good to be true, but Israel, Denmark, Hawaii and San Francisco are already starting to put the system in place – and even Gordon Brown has toyed with the idea. But to tackle climate change properly, the electricity has to be provided by renewable sources or nuclear power rather than fossil fuels.

Embrace scum

Slimy scum could prove our saviour, as algae are emerging as one of the most promising and environmentally friendly sources of biofuel. Algae can grow extraordinarily fast, doubling in weight several times a day. They produce at least 15 times as much fuel per hectare as conventional crops like corn or oilseed rape, and do not take up farmland needed to grow food; they can be grown in lakes, the sea or even in the process of cleaning polluted water. Algae take three times their own weight of carbon dioxide from the air while growing, and the fuel they produce packs much more power for its weight than other biofuels. It is therefore being developed as a potential carbon-neutral way of fuelling aircraft: Air New Zealand has already mixed it with ordinary jet fuel for test flights. Cars have run on pure algae biofuel, and big oil companies are investing in it.

Grow houses

Hemp is the world's second fastest growing plant after bamboo, shooting up four metres in just 14 weeks, rapidly taking carbon from the air. One hectare provides enough hemp to construct a house, if mixed with lime to revive an ancient building material. Limetechnology, the Abingdon-based firm pioneering the practice, calculates that growing it will capture 50 times as much carbon dioxide as would be saved by upgrading a traditional home to modern standards of energy efficiency. Biochar, an ancient technique used by Amazonian Indians to fertilise their land by burying charcoal, has even wider applications. Opponents worry that growing trees for it will take land out of food production, but Craig Sams – the co-founder of Green and Black's chocolate, who is now developing it – believes that just 21/2 per cent of the world's productive land would suffice to get carbon dioxide levels down to those of the pre-industrial age by 2050.

Pay for trees

Felling forests, especially in the tropics, is the second biggest cause of carbon dioxide emissions after burning fossil fuels, accounting for a fifth of the world's total. But people and governments have no incentive to leave them standing when they can make money by selling the timber, or farming the cleared land. Now international negotiators are beginning to work out how the world as a whole could compensate them for setting aside the chainsaw. In practice, of course, the money would end up coming from rich countries. Halving emissions from deforestation is estimated to cost about $20bn (£14.3bn) a year, but would avoid pollution costing at least five times as much. Similarly, Ecuador is seeking international compensation for refraining from developing a huge oil field lying under a particularly important area of Amazonian rainforest in the north-west of the country.

Reform taxation

Green taxes are beginning to come back into fashion after being eclipsed for years by sophisticated schemes for trading carbon emissions. They would work best as part of an "ecological tax reform", which would reduce taxes on employment – such as income tax and national insurance – at the same time. By shifting the burden from "goods", such as work, to "bads", such as pollution, it becomes cheaper to lay off barrels of oil than to fire people, reducing pollution and increasing employment. The European Union has estimated that this could create at least 2.7 million jobs across the continent, while combating global warming. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have both taken up the idea and promised to introduce it if they get into power. But so did Gordon Brown in opposition, and, despite introducing some modest measures in his 1999 Budget, he backed off after the fuel price protests the next year.

Follow a busker

A former busker, Aubrey Meyer, thought up what is increasingly regarded as the long-term solution to global warming – and, through relentless campaigning, he has managed to get his idea adopted as policy by many governments, especially in developing countries. Dubbed "contraction and convergence", it starts from the principle that everyone on Earth is entitled to emit the same amount of carbon dioxide. It then determines the level of emissions low enough to avoid dangerous climate change. The total amount put into the atmosphere worldwide each year must then be made to "contract" until it reaches this point. Simultaneously, the totals of individual countries have to "converge", so that each emits the same amount for every one of its citizens; rich countries would have to reduce their totals very heavily, while some poor countries could actually be able to increase theirs. Most experts agree that it is the fairest framework. Persuading Americans to agree to emit the same amount as Ethiopians is another matter.

The top six world savers: Key figures

Barack Obama

US President

Transformed prospects for a new, tough international treaty by giving it high priority

Hu Jintao

President of China

If the US and China can agree on what to do, the chances of international action are good

Anders Fogh Rasmussen

Prime Minister of Denmark

Will chair December's crucial treaty negotiating meeting in Copenhagen

R K Pachauri

Chairman, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The body that provides scientific evidence on global warming

Yvo de Boer

Treaty executive secretary

Tough Dutch UN official responsible for keeping negotiations on track

Gordon Brown

Prime Minister UK

Finally becoming really interested in climate change. But is he up to the job?

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‘Green’ dams hasten rape of Borneo forests

Tribal peoples are fighting huge hydro-electric projects that are carving up the island's rainforest

Michael Sheridan, Times Online 15 Mar 09;

THE island of Borneo, a fragile treasure house of rainforests, rare animals and plants, is under threat from plans for Chinese engineers to build 12 dams that will cut through virgin land and displace thousands of native Dayak people.

The government of the Malaysian state of Sarawak says the dams are the first stage of a “corridor of renewable energy” that will create 1.5m jobs through industries powered by safe, clean hydro-electricity.

Campaigners are furious but appear powerless in the face of a project they fear will compound the devastation wreaked on Borneo’s peoples and land by previous dam projects and the felling of its forests.

They point to the ruin caused by the levelling of millions of acres of trees for oil palm plantations to meet the world’s demand for biofuels.

The dams would slice across a vast sweep of Sarawak, a place where wisps of cloud cling to remote, tree-clad peaks, huge butterflies flit through the foliage and orang-utans, sun bears and leopards roam.

There is more than an ecological argument over the scheme. The initial contract has gone to the Chinese state-owned company that built the controversial Three Gorges dam – a project described by Dai Qing, the campaigning Chinese journalist, as “a black hole of corruption”.

Teams from the China Three Gorges Project Corporation are at work on the first of the 12 new dams at Murum, deep in the interior, from where Sarawak’s great rivers uncoil towards the South China Sea.

Tribal peoples are dazed and frightened, telling a visiting researcher last week that they had been ordered off their ancestral lands. Signs in Chinese were posted all over the project site.

No financial details or contracts have been publicly disclosed. Analysts in China say the work is likely to have been financed in part by a loan from a state institution.

Critics argue that Sarawak does not need more electricity. It produces a 20% surplus and there is as yet no cable to deliver power to peninsular Malaysia – which itself generates more energy than it needs.

Company records filed with the Malaysia stock exchange show that a big beneficiary of the policy is a firm whose shareholders and directors include the wife and family of Abdul Taib Mahmud, Sarawak’s chief minister.

Taib, 72, who drives around in a vanilla Rolls-Royce, is one of the richest and most powerful men in Malaysian politics. He also serves as Sarawak’s finance minister and planning minister.

The family-owned firm, Cahya Mata Sarawak (CMS), has interests in cement, construction, quarrying and road building. It has signed a memorandum of understanding with Rio Tinto, the London-listed mining group, to build a “world class” aluminium smelter that will get its electricity from a dam at Bakun.

The Bakun dam, a separate project due to be completed by 2011, has already displaced an estimated 10,000 indigenous people, leading to bitter legal battles and a chorus of dismay from economists about cost overruns.

Malaysia’s reinvigorated opposition is now campaigning against what it calls “crony capitalism”, helping hitherto powerless tribal peoples to challenge in the courts land grabs and cheating.

For all that, it may be too late to save the natural bounty of Borneo itself. Orphaned orang-utans, piteously holding the outstretched hands of their human saviours, are the most conspicuous symbols of its fragility.

Divided between Malaysia and Indonesia, with Brunei occupying a tiny enclave in the north, Borneo’s riches have ensured its plunder.

One reason is the voracious world demand for timber. The other is the fashion for biofuels made from palm oil. Almost half of Borneo’s rainforests have been cut down. Two million acres have vanished every year as trees are felled, the wood sold and the land turned over to oil palms.

The greatest plunderer of all was Indonesia’s late dictator, Suharto, who doled out timber concessions to generals and cronies during his 32 years in power.

Now the central government in Jakarta is winning praise for a determined crackdown that has slowed the rate of illegal logging.

However, much of Indonesian Borneo is already laid waste. Enormous fires cast a perpetual pall of toxic haze, making Indonesia the world’s third largest greenhouse gas polluter after China and the United States.

“Green gold”, or palm oil, poses an even more insidious threat because it promises prosperity and development to the numerous poor of Borneo – along with immense rewards for the elites.

The vegetable oil comes from crushed palm husks. Long used for cooking, cosmetics and soap, it has now become a principal source of biodiesel fuel.

Malaysia and Indonesia produce about 85% of the world’s supply of palm oil – most of it on Borneo.

The price of this apparently environment-friendly fuel is high. Its damage far outweighs its benefits, according to a recent international study published in the journal Conservation Biology.

One of the research team, Emily Fitzherbert of the Zoological Society of London, concluded that oil palm as a biofuel was “not a green option”.

John Anthony Paul, a Dayak notable in Sarawak, explained it another way: “There’s a stench from the palm oil mill close to my longhouse. There’s a huge quantity of slurry and sludge. Our water is deteriorating. Many fish disappear and there are more floods. Pesticides leach into our soil. The insects start to change, so the pollination changes and so does the quality of our fruits and crops. It’s unsustainable.”

Resistance is growing. Last week two Dayaks walked for four hours, carrying their sharp-edged parangs, or blades, to meet me near a cluster of huts housing Chinese dam workers.

The scene was Bengoh, a place so wild, flower-strewn and lovely that it would have made a tourist poster were it not for the grumble of construction noise and the gouged earth.

The Dayaks are being forced out of their villages because engineers from SinoHydro, a second Chinese contractor, are building yet another dam to improve the water supply to Kuching, capital of Sarawak.

“We are 28 families, in our village since our ancestors,” said Simo Anakbekam, 48. “The government says we must leave. We want them to recognise our rights to our land.”

The state government says it has offered adequate compensation plus resettlement to new homes with better jobs, health and education.

However, most people in Simo’s village just want to move higher up their familiar mountainside and cannot understand why they must depart for the hot, marshy lowlands.

It turned out to be an example of legal coercion with the familiar echo of “crony capitalism”. Armed with eviction orders, the dam builders told the Dayaks their presence might contaminate the new water supply.

However, lawyers for the villagers found draft plans for the Bengoh dam – drawn up, the documents state, with input from Halcrow, the British consultancy firm – which reveal that unnamed investors plan to build two resorts on the site.

The Dayaks are now fighting for better compensation and the right to stay in the area.

All over Sarawak, tribal people have lost their ancestral lands to similar gambits. “They don’t know that this thing is coming until they hear the sound of the bulldozers,” said See Chee How, a lawyer and civil rights activist.

It is worse deep in the northeast interior, where logging, palm oil and dams threaten the existence of the Penan, a nomadic tribe. Last week a British researcher for Survival International, the campaign group, found people running short of food.

“They hunt but go for weeks at a time without finding a single animal. Fish are also scarce, because the logging silts up the rivers. Sago is becoming more and more difficult to find,” said the researcher, who asked not to be named.

“One old man told me that the changes could be seen in the bodies of the young people, who were thinner and weaker than the people of his generation. The Penan asked me again and again to get news of their plight to the outside world.”

The ravishing of Borneo – its peoples, animals and the land itself – has roots in the past. But there may be a remedy, too.

Sarawak led a romantic, isolated existence under the “white rajahs” of the Brooke dynasty, whose adventurous founder, James Brooke, established himself in 1848 as an absolute ruler. His heirs held power until 1946.

The Brookes disdained the British empire’s commerce and industry, seeking to preserve a noble Dayak culture in all its splendour.

They established native customary rights by which district officers recorded land tenure as a way to stop headhunting wars among the Dayaks. The rajahs also granted leases and published an official gazette.

Malaysian courts have upheld cases based on such documents and now a hunt is on for letters folded away in longhouses and yellowing copies in archives in Britain. For many in faraway Sarawak, it may be their only hope of justice.

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