Exposition+Lesson+1+Text+8

__**// Abstracted from National Geographic Magazine November 2008 //**__ This is the mythic Borneo, the island of the world's imagination, and it's all as wondrous as it sounds. But if you want to see the real Borneo, the Borneo of the first decade of the 21st century, it would be good to be the crested serpent-eagle perched in a tree across the river. Then you could soar high above the Kinaba­ tangan and see how quickly the unruly forest gives way to neatly planted rows of oil palm trees, stretching for mile after mile in all direc­tions. The palm plantation is lush and green, and the arching fronds of the trees give it an exotic beauty, and for the incomparable biodiversity of Borneo it is inexorable death. Set between the South China and Java Seas, bisected by the equator, the island of Borneo has served throughout human history mostly to have its natural resources exploited—many would say plundered—by a succession of peo­ ples from around the world. Chinese traders came for rhinoceros horn, the aromatic wood called //gaharu,// and birds' nests for soup. Later, Muslim and Portuguese traders joined them to export pepper and gold. Britain and the Netherlands controlled the island dur­ ing the colonial period of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when loggers began cutting the tropical hardwood forest covering the island. 'The current political division of Borneo—the southern three-quarters belongs to Indonesia, most of the rest to Malaysia, with slivers that make up Brunei—reflects alliances of the Brit­ ish and Dutch colonial era, which ended with independence after World War II. In recent decades, companies from Europe, the United States, and Australia have drilled for abundant oil and natural gas and strip-mined coal. There are mansions from Amsterdam to Melbourne, from Singapore to Houston, that were built with wealth from Borneo. Man­ sions built with Borneo wealth stand in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, too, because Indonesia and Malaysia, or at least the political and economic elite, have been the biggest plunderers of all. A different kind of richness has attracted oth­ers, including the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who spent time here in the mid-1850s while he developed theories important to mod­ ern understanding of evolution and biogeogra­ phy. Wallace collected more than a thousand species new to science, including Rajah Brooke's birdwing. Scientists have continued making dis­coveries ever since, demonstrating that the rain forest of Borneo ranks with the most biologi­ cally diverse places on Earth. Borneo has more than 15,000 known species of plants, including more than 2,500 species of orchids. Southeast Asia's lowland forests, including Borneo's, are the tallest tropical rain forests in the world, and may have as many as 240 species of trees on a single four-acre site. Borneo is home to the world's largest flower, the world's largest orchid, the world's largest carnivorous plants, and the world's largest moth. In the multilevel structure of Borneo's rain for­ est lives the world's largest collection of gliding animals: Apart from several species of flying squirrels there are flying lizards, flying colugos, flying frogs, and—the stuff of nightmares for some—flying snakes. Sun bears and clouded leopards roam Borneo's forests, while two species of gibbons and eight species of monkeys climb in the trees. Around a thousand elephants have survived in one corner of the island—mostly in the Malaysian state of Sabah, where the Kinabatangan River runs to the Sulu Sea. Rhinoceroses barely hang on to exis­ tence, with fewer than four dozen remaining. But it's an even more charismatic animal—the orangutan—that has become the symbol of Borneo. Its expressive eyes stare out from the newsletters and funding appeals of conserva­ tion groups around the world. Considering the island's unsurpassed biodiversity—from orangutans and rhinoceroses to tiny mosses and beetles not yet discovered—and the rate at which its forests are being lost, Borneo's future may well be the most critical conservation issue on our planet. From a satellite perspective imminent deforestation is stated. The island, half covered with trees, highlands stand hundreds Virgin forests where almost indigenous hunters, wild gaharu gatherers. Needing a boat trip of several days through pathless wilderness. But it's an entirely different increasingly desperate one, the prime habitat for most o biodiversity, including prang During the past two decade million acres were clearer more than half the size of G in //Science// magazine in 2001 Here is another dream. Along a dirt road in southern Borneo stands a one-room wooden house, with a few banana trees in the yard and a small vegetable garden in back. Beside the house a man kneels, washing a Yamaha Jupiter Z motorbike. It's red, and it shines in the hot sun as the man rinses off the soap. The man's name is, let's say, Pak Wang. With his new motorbike he can go to the closest village in a few minutes, instead of walking nearly an hour along the road. In the village he can meet his friends, buy things, go to the little karaoke bar, and watch television in his uncle's restau­ rant. He can feel part of the world. Pak Wang wants a mobile phone. Most of his friends have one, and if he had one it would be easier for him to make plans with them, to know where they will be on Sunday night, to meet the pretty woman named Unita who sells fruit at a street stand in town. So. Here is the message to the world. If we want to protect the forests of Borneo, to pre­ serve a substantial part of its stupendous bio­ diversity, to make sure that orangutans have places to make their nightly nests and hornbills have fruit to eat and flying frogs have trees to live in, there's only one way to do it. We need to find a way for Pak Wang to buy his mobile phone. And, after he marries the pretty fruit-seller, a way for them to keep their children healthy and send them to school. A way that offers them a better future without having to turn their forests into plantations of oil palm or the sterile pits of strip mines. And we need to do it while there's still some­thing left to protect.