The point is made that these rainforests are essentially finished as an intact forest ecosystem. Industrial forestry equipment is now being loaded to go to Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere, where the few remaining virgin forests exist. The challenge for the forest movement is to not let this social and environmental tragedy be repeated. This is a daunting task as Malaysian style industrial forestry has established significant toeholds in Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific, Africa and South America. Millions of species and their combined evolutionary history are being sacrificed to feed the developed world's throw away societies.
Time is short to save remaining rainforests.
I just want to cry when I hear the bulldozers and saws. Starting in the 1970s, and accelerating during the last decade, logging has swept like a wave across Malaysia's part of Borneo island, from coastal mangroves eastward to the highlands bordering the Indonesian state of Kalimantan. In the rush to extract hardwoods to be turned into scaffolding, chopsticks and paper, the loggers have degraded an irreplaceable forest gene pool that had stood largely undisturbed for millennia. The lives of the Penans and other forest people have been forever fractured. But native people and environmentalists are conceding defeat.