To paint the consequences as they exist today,
here is a verbatim quote from an email sent to me from Kuala Lumpur on 21
March 2002:
“As you look out over your garden to enjoy the view, kindly transport
yourself to Malaysia to imagine what it would be like here. First, it is hot,
as in real hot (even by local reckoning), so you turn on the showers to cool
yourself only to find the water coming out in trickles because there is water
shortage (officially we are still under a dry spell as the downpours we have
had of late have poured over the downstream areas instead of the catchment
areas where the dams are). Then as you turn your gaze outside to comfort
yourself with the lush scenery, you find the haze is everywhere, making you
feel gloomy and morose. Still, I should not complain. Other places are worse
off.”
It is hard to imagine what “worse” might be, save perhaps for the Aral Sea.
The “haze” that forms a dome over the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and Java is
smoke from burning forests. Some is set alight by slash-and-burn farmers so
poor they must survive on half an acre or so of millet for at most three
years before the soil depletes and they must find another half acre and burn
that. Most, though, comes from timber companies burning slashings from their
clear-cuts so politically connected companies can lay claim to and plant
another palm-oil plantation. The foliage of the oil palm is so dense very
little can grow beneath it, and its productive life is 95 years. Voila, a
green desert that yields a cooking oil with one of the highest LDL
cholesterol contents.
Hints of ecological disaster have been looming above Asia for years. The land
around Nong Khai in Thailand is barren, mostly untilled, unbearably hot. Just
across the Mekong in Laos the land is covered with fertile jungle. About ten
years ago politically blessed timber companies arrived and felled the Thai
forests. That done, they moved on, and are now felling what little forest
Cambodia still has, leaving the farmers behind, like those of Nong Khai, to
poke sticks into the dead earth and wonder what they can do with the rest of
their lives. To make ends meet they sell their spare daughters into the
brothel trade, which is run, invisibly, by military officers.
Seven years ago I was in Cameron Highlands in Malaysia, one of the old
British hill stations, to which they repaired during the hot season. Night
after night at around 3 in the morning there would rise a great roar, and
down from the forests of the Losing (pron. “Loh-sing”) Highlands in nearby
Kelantan province came truck after truck hauling giant logs, so large only
two or three could be chained to the stakebeds. Not a few trucks, not a few
dozen, but several hours of them—I would stop counting at a hundred and still
they came. Why at that hour? Because they left the Losing Highlands around
ten at night in order to arrive and vanish behind the corrugated sheetmetal
fences of coastal plywood makers and pulp chipping mills before the morning
motorists could see them. Some years later there was a brief flurry of
articles in the Malaysian press that the Losing Highlands was now a wasteland
and no one seemed to know where the timber went or who took it away.
To be sure, the press skirted around the subject of who made the real pile
off this. The Sultan of Kelantan, like many of Malaysia’s sultans, lives off
selling land-use rights to Chinese timber companies. He wanted a Boeing 737
and a new palace. For that a wasteland was made. To be sure the characters
involved were not so colorful as those in Paul Sochaczewski’s novel, but the
ruin his novel predicts has come true all across the broad quarter-moon from
Western Sumatra through Java and up to Borneo and Sulawesi.
It is interesting to compare what the Malays and Chinese are doing to these
forests with what British and Dutch did with the forests of India, Sri Lanka,
and part of Malaya. They cut down vast stretches of silkwood, satinwood,
ironwood, mahogany, ebony, teak—a litany of the world’s most gorgeous
woods—but they planted tea and rubber plantations in their stead. Today these
are major segments of their national export economies.
The Malay sultans, by compare, have done absolutely nothing to turn their
lands to productive use. The Chinese towkays (very wealthy men) have planted
palm-oil plantations on the less hilly bits near roads. But for the most part
they choose to cut and move on, in the most short-sighted and destructive
business model the world has ever known.
And for what?
It would be convenient at this point to wring one’s hands and write another
check to an ad-splashing environmentalist group or go paint signs for the
anti-globalization cause. Not so fast. It is rapidly becoming evident that
bitching about symptoms is fixing no causes. Lamenting Borneo’s lost forests
does not address the fact that sixty percent of Indonesia’s labor force is
unemployed. Dithering over the influx of pre-teens into brothels does not
address the fact that local moneylenders charge upward of 40 percent per
month, and how else can an impoverished paddy owner scrape together enough
money to buy seed grain for the next rice planting or a fisher to repair the
broken outrigger on his catamaran? The tourist postcards don’t show these
things.
Time-honed social mechanisms are breaking down not because of land grabbing
or the market mechanism or globalization, but because a mix of population and
prosperity has given exploiters a powerful tool with which to divide and
conquer to their advantage. There are glimpses of hope at the local level
with ideas like the mini-loans of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, a group in
India teaching mothers how to buy their daughters out of debt bondage, and a
trend in India of rural Indian women having fewer babies. But these are
glimmers in a glooming sky of intellectual property rights falling
increasingly to the advantage of remote corporate entities responsible only
to even more remote moneyed interests. Non-governmental organizations
preoccupied with grabbing and holding turf end up focusing on the means to
the neglect of the ends. Most of all, those who complain loudest also tend to
innovate the least.
For some time the 800-lb gorilla in the global closet has been that the
Western Intellectual Tradition has slipped over the line dividing purpose and
narcissism. Howsoever the American politicians phrase their ideals, their
realities are grabbing, carving, weaponry, coercion, and hypocrisy. Once a
wellspring of original thinking, the Western academic community increasingly
flounders in incestuousness—a recent book by a famous university press whose
subtitle was grandly stated as “Global Ethics in a New Century” contained
fourteen essays by professors from obscure campuses in England, Wales, the
USA, and Canada, but not a single contribution from the Confucian, Hindu,
Buddhist, Muslim, business, investment, environmental, or scientific
communities. Americans are unaware that the most significant threat to their
hegemony over the next twenty-five years is not brewing in the Middle East or
the Southern Tier countries, but in the heads of young Asians.
Except for the last sentence above, we all know all this. Why paste it on the
end of a review of a book whose purpose was not intended to address these
things?
Because writers like Paul Sochaczewski are who we need most right now. Not
academics. Not literary-circle darlings. Not trendgrabbing scribblers. Not
opportunists who will write anything so long as a film option is likely to
come out of it. Mr. Sochaczewski has the talent to create a plausible story
based on realities only locals know, characters who move the plot along, and
a point of view forged from the pain of innocents. One prays that publishers
like Sid Harta in Australia continue to support him and writers like him,
because the bar-code blinkers of the American publishing and bookselling
establishments will not.
Can we ask them, though, to raise the bar higher than storytelling? For two
centuries novels about ideas set the standards for fiction we all hearken to
today. Authors were promulgated because publishers felt they and writers had
a duty to society. Now most publishers feel their duty is to shareholders,
and a good deal of the fiction they support is TV printed on paper. It so
happens that most of today’s truly original thinking is outside the media
mainstream. If ever there existed a time to think in 50- to 100-year spans
instead of till the next quarterly financial report, this is the time; and if
ever there was an occasion to address the future we face using fiction to
shape it, September 11 was the day it started.
Fiction has so many fruits yet unplucked. From New Age thinking come the
ideas of the unity of history and that oversouls inhabit ideas. The former
holds that history is neither linear nor cyclic but a group of behaviors that
flux in and out of social need irrespective of time. Oversouls are behavior
forms that envelope idea forms; for example, they are why fundamentalism and
saintliness behave the same way in no matter in which ethos they occur. The
message of these is to not look backward as we move forward. What does that
mean for the most backward-looking institution of humankind, namely religion?
From Islam comes ideas such as: the state’s primary duty is to raise the poor
from their poverty while encouraging the wealthy to create more of it;
economics and ethics are optimal when at one with each other; the
best-yielding business contract links self-interest with social advance; a
market economy is a lowest-common-denominator economy but a market society is
a courtyard which embraces the four main constituencies of culture: the
social, the civil, the devotional, and the economic.
These are but two things I know well. There are myriads I know not, though
others do. Mr. Sochaczewski is an entertaining and incisive writer with a
point to make. Redheads make it well. I hope he goes on to explore the byways
of mind thus far untrod, and of those inform us as well as this.
A Word About the Publisher
Sid Harta Publishers is an Australian house that specializes in books by
Australian authors, or books set in or near Australia. Their representative
Andrew Karam describes their interest in Redheads thus:
“Sid Harta became interested in Paul’s book because it tells a story that
needs to be told—some of the realities behind the international environmental
movement as understood by a member of this group. Paul does an excellent job
of pointing out the necessity of this movement, the importance of the
research performed, while also tipping from the pedestal the many
environmental activists who tend to place themselves there. By describing how
scientists, activists, natives, governments, and funding organizations
interact with one another, Redheads helps the reader to understand that
everyone engaged in environmental activism, whether "pro" or "anti", is a
person with some sort of expectations and agenda.
“On the one hand, this does show that all sides abuse the system to some
extent. On the other, showing the participants to be human makes it a lot
easier for the reader to empathize with them and to see the environmental
movement as a human endeavor that we can all aspire to join and make a
contribution. It is much more refreshing to read about real people than
idealized people, they are much more interesting and immediate.”