Demarcation Diaries
31 August 2001
The beauty of the river and forest could never be captured by
words, nor by pictures, because the subtle differences of colors,
the mixture of sounds from known and unknown sources, are only
possible to be grasped when you are here. This is my second day
on board, and I am beginning to wonder: could someone ever get
bored of the river and the forest here, if they really opened
their eyes and ears?
We have been sailing on the Rio Jurua since early this morning.
The river is getting narrower as the sound of the forest gets
louder and the dolphins appear more frequently. I saw the legendary
pink dolphin and the deadly crocodile today. We are moving in
the heart of the Amazon, but still, I cannot imagine how we are
going to walk and work in the forest!
The forest is so thick that it seems impossible to penetrate
for outsiders. In fact, since the colonisers 'discovered' the
Amazon, there have been incessant attempts to penetrate the forest,
and they either ended in tragic failure, or disaster for nature.
With bulldozers, the modern day loggers find it much easier to
penetrate the forest in search of commercially valuable timber.
And this is what demarcation is really about: closing off destructive
attempts to penetrate areas of the forest that are home to people
who live with nature. If all Indian lands in the Amazon are demarcated,
20 percent of the Amazon rainforest would be off limits for loggers.
Sze Pang
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