We are privileged to be joined by Alasdair Clayre, of Christ's College, Cambridge, who will be giving us a talk on rainforests and deforestation.

"Born in Borneo, I grew up, when small, in an isolated tribal community, in the rainforest. I am still a member of the tribe, with a tribal name and tribal family.

In Britain I went to Winchester College and Christ’s College Cambridge, where I boxed for the university, debated, acted and campaigned on green issues, leading two expeditions back to Malaysia and Borneo. I took my BA in Theology and Religious Studies and my MPhil in Social Anthropology, focusing on development, education and environmental issues in Borneo.

After Cambridge I went to Columbia University Film School in New York, but spent most of the next few years campaigning on deforestation, running tours of France in the summer to subsidise my trips to Borneo.

Logging was a very sensitive issue in Sarawak then, receiving world-wide media attention, even reaching the cover of The Sunday Times. With the local authorities deeply suspicious of my activities, I soon found myself under virtual house-arrest. So I moved sideways into ecotourism and before long was sitting down for lunch with government ministers instead; but our goals were the same: to work with tribal communities to safeguard their culture and environment.

My talk will be in part biographical, outlining the changes to the forest and its peoples, over 50 years, with photographs.

Students and teachers alike will doubtless be familiar with arguments over deforestation and the value of tropical rainforests, but I would like to take a different slant, to explore the political, social and economic pressures involved, focusing on Sarawak, which has led the world in logging.

Timber and land are valuable resources, and rainforests are sparsely populated, so there is a strong utilitarian incentive to exploit those resources in developing countries. And why not?

Is biodiversity worth more than development? To whom? And who will pay for it?

What are the human rights implications? Whose land is it anyway? What are we losing as cultures and languages become extinct too?

In particular I would like to focus on another aspect of deforestation often overlooked in rainforest discussions: the impact of roads.

In 1988 I took a boat upriver, then a light aircraft into the mountains and finally trekked five days through partly uncharted forest to reach my village, Long Banga. In 2015 I could jump on the back of a 4-wheel drive from the coast and arrive after an arduous (and dangerous)10 hours on logging roads.

Many species will return to logged areas, to secondary forest, but the logging roads provide access to hunters and markets, arguably a much greater threat to biodiversity than deforestation itself.

The roads also open up new land for plantations of monoculture crops like palm-oil, probably an even greater threat to biodiversity.

And what changes have these roads, the hunting and plantations, brought to previously isolated communities?

Should we care? And if so, what can we do?"

Accessibility

Other Courses Available :

News

Social Media

Further Information