Green Indonesia

This article deserves to be read by every politician, businessman, community worker and, indeed, every citizen of Indonesian who has a voice and a vote.

Nature Not Solely to Blame for Disasters in Indonesia
By Andre Vltchek

Another day, another unnecessary loss of lives: 24 people killed and 10 still missing in floods and landslides on the small island of Tahuna off Indonesia’s Sulawesi. The date is January 12, 2007.

At an alarming rate, Indonesia is replacing Bangladesh and India as the most disaster-prone nation on earth. Whenever the word Indonesia appears on the list of headlines on Yahoo News, chances are that another enormous - and often unnecessary - tragedy has occurred on one of the islands of this sprawling archipelago.

Airplanes are disappearing or sliding off the runways, ferries are sinking or simply decomposing on the high seas, trains crash or get derailed on the average of one per week Illegal garbage dumps bury desperate communities of scavengers under their stinking contents. Landslides are taking carton-like houses into ravines; earthquakes and tidal waves are swallowing up coastal cities and villages. Forest fires from Sumatra are choking huge areas of Southeast Asia.

The scope of disasters is on a scale so vast that they cannot be discounted simply as the nation’s bad luck or as the wrath of gods or nature. Corruption, incompetence and gross indifference on the part of ruling elites and government officials are to blame. Poverty, in combination with a dearth of sound public projects as well as kleptomania, is taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of desperate Indonesian men, women and children.

Since the 1965 U.S.-sponsored military coup that deposed Sukarno and installed the military regime of staunchly anti-communist and corrupt pro-market dictator Suharto, Indonesia has escaped serious scrutiny by the international media and governments. After Suharto was forced to step down in 1998, Indonesia has been hailed by the international media as an emerging and increasingly tolerant democracy: yet the only political parties allowed to compete in elections are those that are staunchly pro-business.

All continue to cover up the facts of Indonesia’s recent history, notably the 1965 massacre and the nation’s recent social collapse and the slide toward Muslim domination of Indonesian politics and society. In the wake of major earthquakes, tsunamis and landslides, citizens are encouraged to pray, instead of analyzing facts, particularly the facts of government failure and corruption.

Some of the disasters that have struck Indonesia are man-made; many are preventable; in all cases the possibility exists of reducing the human toll. On close scrutiny it becomes obvious that people die due to almost non-existent efforts to prevent the loss of life and the lack of basic education. Perhaps it is above all the product of a savage unrestricted market economic system, which allows enrichment of the very few at the expense of the majority who live on less than 2 dollars a day in this resource rich country.

Indonesia is profit-driven to the extreme. When combined with extreme corruption, the result is a formula for disaster. Particularly when there appears to be little profit to be made from implementing preventive measures. Dams and anti-tsunami walls are almost everywhere considered public works and it is precisely this word - public - that has almost disappeared from the lexicon of Indonesia’s decision makers. Short-term profits for special interests receive much higher priority than long-term gains for the entire nation. Moral collapse of the nation is reflected in these values, which slight the interests of the working poor.

Ferries are sinking not “because of high winds and waves”; they are sinking because they are overcrowded and badly maintained, or more precisely because they are allowed to be overcrowded and badly maintained. Everything is for sale, even the safety of passengers. Companies care only about their profits, while government inspectors are mainly interested in bribes.

In the recent well-publicized sinking of the Senopati Nusantara ferry on December 30, 2006 as many as four to five hundred are feared drowned. But this was just one of hundreds of maritime disasters that occur in Indonesia each year. While there are no comprehensive statistics available (the Indonesian government publishes none), some maritime routes lose three or more vessels a year.

The Indonesian airline industry has one of the worst safety records in the world. Since 1997, at least 666 people have died in eight major airplane crashes in Indonesia. Some of the pilots are so badly trained that planes regularly skip off runways, miss runways altogether or land in the middle of them. Maintenance is another issue: flaps often don’t function properly, wheels cannot be taken in after take-off, seldom changed tires frequently blow up on touch down. It is a mystery how some airplanes - particularly the old Boeings 737s flown by almost all Indonesian airlines - make it through inspections.

Local civil aviation officials told the author that the navigation systems at several major Indonesian airports are in a disastrous state, particularly those at Makassar in Sulawesi and Medan in Sumatra.

Adam Air which recently lost a plane off Sulawesi with 102 people on board during a short inter-island hop - without a mayday and with the flight recorder still unrecovered - is presently locked in a lawsuit with two former pilots who claim that the airline was violating every imaginable international regulation in order to maximize profits and cut costs. The two are among 20 pilots who have resigned, refusing to fly badly maintained aircraft, fearing for their lives and the lives of their passengers.

“The industry growth is so fast and it’s not matched by the growth of human resources,” said Dudi Sudibyo, an aviation expert called on to advise President Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono about Adam Air Flight KI-574. “There are not enough regulators, flight inspectors or planes,” he told the Associated Press. The fact that no Indonesia airline has ever been held legally responsible for a major accident is indicative of unbridled corruption in the Indonesian government, legal system and regulatory bodies.

On average, a deadly train accident occurs every six days in Indonesia, many caused by the lack of gates at its 8,000 level crossings. In comparison Malaysia had no fatal accident for 13 years up to 2005 (the last year for which statistics are available).

Despite the fact that Indonesia has relatively few cars per capita, its roads are the “most used” of any network in the world (second only to Hong Kong): 5.7 million vehicle-km per year of road network (2003 data, The Economist World in Figures, 2007 Edition). Despite epic congestion resulting in the generally slow pace of traffic, more than 80 people die per day on Indonesian roads, mostly due to the terrible state of the infrastructure and poor law-enforcement, according to The Financial Times.

Earthquakes alone do not kill people. Poor construction of houses and buildings are the culprits, together with the lack of preventive measures and preventive education. It is a well known fact that Indonesia, located on the so called ring of fire, is prone to natural disasters. But the poor can count on no large-scale public housing projects (like those in neighboring Malaysia), which could withstand earthquakes. Almost every family must build its own dwelling. Major earthquakes kill hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

At least 5,800 people died and 36,000 were injured on May 27, 2006 during the earthquake that struck central Java near the historic city of Yogyakarta, recording 6.3 on the Richter scale. Primitive infrastructure, inadequate medical facilities and corruption in the distribution of aid are responsible for the unacceptably large number of casualties after each major tremor.

Illegal logging and deforestation are the main reasons for numerous landslides, frequently the result of deforestation. There are numerous solutions to this problem, including law enforcement, inspections and attempts to provide alternative means of livelihood for those communities that are so desperate that they are literally forced to dig their own graves by destroying the environment, which in turn annihilates entire communities. But almost nothing is done, as illegal logging is a huge and lucrative business that greases hundreds of willing palms.

In December, 2006, dozens of people were killed in landslides and flash floods in northern Sumatra Island, forcing 400,000 people to flee their homes. In June 2006, floods and landslides triggered by heavy rains killed more than 200 people in south Sulawesi province.

Tidal waves, known as tsunamis, killed more than 126,000 people in Aceh province in December 2004. Not only was the response of the Indonesian government and military inexcusably slow and inadequate, but a large part of the massive foreign aid disappeared in corruption. Instead of helping victims, many members of the Indonesian military extorted bribes from relief agencies and destroyed precious supplies including drinking water and food when bribes were not paid.

Many victims were prevented from returning to their own land while children were forcefully separated from their parents (who lost birth certificates during the tragedy) and “adopted” by religious organizations; some became victims to human trafficking. More than two years after this devastating tragedy worsened by a scandalous land grab, hundreds of thousands are living in temporary housing.

Many victims of another tsunami, which struck the coast of southern Java on July 17, 2006, are still waiting for any substantial help. At official count, 600 people died, but the real number was almost certainly much higher. Indonesian officials received early warning from Japan but refused to act, later claiming that there was not much they could do, as the area was not equipped with sirens or loudspeakers.

Indonesia often suffers from man-made disasters that strain comprehension. Mud volcano - a torrent of hot mud from deep beneath the surface - began surging from a natural gas exploration site after a drilling accident. The mud inundated entire villages right outside the second largest city - Surabaya. This was the result of flawed safety procedures by a gas exploration company. The principal well owner is PT Lapindo Brantas, which is linked to the wealthy family of Indonesia’s Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie.

This “accident” displaced more than 10,000 people, covering more than 1,000 acres of land with hot mud, and destroying Surabaya’s only motorway as well as the major railway line. Garbage buried entire communities of poor scavengers at an illegal dumping site outside Bandung. There are many more cases similar in nature, but a complete list would require an entire book to begin to do justice to the subject.

The question is when will Indonesian people say that enough is enough and when will they demand accountability and justice, exact statistics and a concrete blueprint for solutions? In almost any other country, two recent disasters - the sinking of the Senopati Nusantara ferry and the “disappearance” of Adam Air’s Boeing 737 with 102 people on board - would be more than enough to force cabinet ministers to resign. In Indonesia, these tragedies are seen (or presented) as yet another misfortune with no one accepting responsibility and no one held accountable.

Indonesia’s press and mass media report every disaster in excruciating detail. But they fail to provide analysis to show that what is happening is extraordinary and intolerable, that probably no other major country is experiencing such devastating loss of human lives due to disasters that are either man-made, easily preventable, or subject to government action to minimize casualties. To link the enormous number of lost human lives in countless disasters with corruption and the system’s socio-economic priorities is unthinkable for the major media. The Jakarta Post, Indonesia’s leading daily newspaper, recently declined to publish this commentary.

Since December 2004, Indonesia has lost some 200,000 people in various disasters, excluding automobile accidents and military conflicts. That is more than Iraq lost in the same period of time in the course of a deadly war, and more than Sri Lanka or Peru lost during their long civil wars. Indeed, many Indonesians are experiencing lives as danger ous and hazardous as those in war-torn parts of the world. In the absence of comprehensive statistics and comparative analysis, however, few realize it.

Indonesia is poor, but it certainly has the capacity to protect some of its most vulnerable citizens. The main problem is a lack of political will and a
system whose priorities lie elsewhere. There is plenty of concrete and bricks to build dams and walls against tsunamis, to reinforce the hills around those towns, which are in danger of being buried by the landslides. One has simply to look around Jakarta where dozens of new shopping malls are springing up and at the palaces being built for corrupt officials.

Failure to deal with the problems of natural and man-made disaster is rooted in the combination of the dominance of the calculus of profit and the system’s corruption. Local companies and officials have developed an uncanny ability to profit from everything, even from disasters and the suffering of fellow citizens. When the toll has to be calculated in hundreds of thousands of lost human lives, corruption becomes mass murder.

Andre Vltchek - novelist, journalist and filmmaker - is a co-founder of Mainstay Press and senior Fellow at the Oakland Institute. Producer and director of “Terlena - Breaking of a Nation“, a feature documentary film about the impact of Suharto’s dictatorship on present-day Indonesia.

Andre Vltchek presently resides and works in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific and can be emailed here. He wrote this report for Japan Focus.  This article is reprinted with (his) permission.

Joint Press Release by Ecological Internet, Biofuelwatch, Watch Indonesia and Save the Rainforest (Germany)
For immediate release - November 10th, 2006

Southeast Asia’s Annual Rainforest Fire Emissions = Carbon Reductions from 5 Kyotos!

At Nairobi, governments are debating the future of the Kyoto Protocol and action to prevent the most serious impacts of climate change. So far, they appear to have ignored pleas to address one of the greatest single sources of carbon emissions: the destruction of South-east Asia’s peatlands and forests. The annual emissions from annual peat and forest fires are about five times as great as the total annual emission cuts which the Kyoto Protocol aims to make by 2012, from 1990 levels.

Indonesia alone holds 60% of all tropical peat, containing some 50 billion tonnes of carbon. This is equivalent to 7-8 years of global fossil fuel emissions. Timber and oil palm plantations are draining the peatlands and also pushing local communities and small-holders into peat areas and rainforests. Once this peat is drained, all this carbon will eventually be released into the atmosphere, unless the peat is subsequently re-flooded and restored. Annual fires, many of them set deliberately by plantation owners, speed up the process. This year’s fire season has been one of the worst on record. Wetlands International warned earlier this week that the boom in biofuels is speeding up the destruction, and further that one tonne of palm oil grown on peat is linked to the release of around 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide released from that peat. Due to its low cost, palm oil is set to become the prime feedstock for biodiesel.

Biofuelwatch member Andrew Boswell says from Nairobi: “Over 6600 people from 75 countries have emailed governments to call for real action to address the causes of the annual peat and forest fires. So far, there are no signs that delegates have listened. UNFCCC exists to prevent dangerous climate change and to stabilise levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This will be even harder to achieve unless tropical peatlands are protected and restored.

Ecological Internet, Biofuelwatch, Save the Rainforest (Germany) and Watch Indonesia are calling on the Conference to agree to international assistance with fighting the fires which are still burning on Borneo, and to set up a working group which will draw up proposals for the protection and restoration of the peatlands which must report back within a year. They stress that those proposals must be developed in close co-operation with local communities and the South-east Asian NGOs representing them and must take full account of the needs of local people, and also of the need to protect those forests which are not part of the peatlands.

Notes

1. Biofuelwatch is a UK campaign which seeks regulation to ensure that only sustainably-sourced biofuels can be sold in Britain in the European Union.

2. Ecological Internet (EI) provides the most successful Internet based environment portals, search engines and international Earth advocacy network ever, regularly achieving environmental conservation victories around the world. EI specializes in the use of the Internet to achieve environmental conservation outcomes. Ecological Internet’s mission is to empower the global movement for environmental sustainability by providing information retrieval tools, portal services and analysis that aid in the conservation of climate, forest, water and ocean ecosystems; and to commence the age of ecological sustainability and restoration. On average 30,000 visits a day are made to our environmental portals.

3. Save the Rainforest (Rettet den Regenwald e.V.) campaigns against the abuse of rainforest by industrialised countries and organises support for indigenous people in the forests.

4. Watch Indonesia is a German-based working group for democracy, human rights and environmental protection in Indonesia and East Timor.

4. For a fully referenced background paper about the peat and forest fires in south-east Asia, and their contribution to global warming, click here.

5. For the figures provided by Wetlands International, click here.

6. To subscribe to the Ecological Internet e-newsletter visit here.

Hello Jakartass

I read with interest your new blog site Green Indonesia. It seems like a great initiative, and I hope you continue with it. When did it start?

I wonder if you could put a link to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), and Telapak on your Rain Forest Action page. EIA and Telapak have been working together for over 10 years, primarily campaigning on illegal logging and the associated trade in illegal timber in Indonesia, and around the world. EIA is based in London, England, and specializes in using visual documentation techniques to expose environmental crime, while Telapak is based in Bogor and Jakarta, and works on sustainable community projects, and campaigns on illegal logging.

Our respective URLs are

• http://www.eia-international.org/
• http://www.telapak.org/

If you could put us on we would appreciate it.

More generally, I have been seeing there are more and more bloggers in Indonesia commenting on environmental issues, which is very promising. If you ever require specific information about forest issues in Indonesia, or illegal logging, please feel free to get in touch.

Keep up the good site.

Regards

Jago Wadley
Email
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Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA)
62/63 Upper Street
London
N1 0NY
UK
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EIA is an independent, international campaigning organisation committed to investigating and exposing environmental crime.
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Green Indonesia is intended as a ‘café blog’. Anybody is welcome to contribute news of events, actions, campaigns etc. which are felt to be sufficiently ‘green’. Please email me or Rambler.

It’s now thirty years since I went into the health food store in West Cumbria, some thirty miles from the Windscale nuclear reprocessing plant.

I wanted to buy some herbal teas. I’m not sure what flavour or, indeed, why as the mother of Son No.1 and I were avid wine makers, using the fruits and flowers of the local countryside.

Whatever, for some reason I wanted 5 teabags. Each of these was in a paper envelope with a pretty picture on. These five enveloped teabags were enclosed in a cellophane wrapper, probably with one of those pull tags which can be found on cigarette packets.

The sales assistant then proceed to put my purchase into a bag advertising the shop; I can’t remember if this was a plastic bag, biodegardable or not, or whether it was a paper bag, recyclable or not. It was immaterial, as I put my small shopping into a pocket and suggested that she should cut down on the packaging.

“Oh, yes,” she told me, “I’m into the environment.”

I stopped smoking on February 13th this year, and jobless and stressed that I currently am, apart from a few passive intakes I haven’t inhaled a cigarette or joint since. What I have inhaled, though, is the massive pollution that pervades Jakarta, particularly in the dry season.

To counteract the coughing and dry throat I’ve developed a mild addiction to Plonk sweets (US: candies) which “Get rid of smoker’s bad breath and itchy throat. Made from licorice extract, Plonk clears your throat and replaces cigarette breath with fresh, minty scent.”

But why is each sweet (US: candy) individually wrapped in plastic and then sold in another machined bag?

As a species, those of us not in the poverty trap but with disposable income are now disposing of the Earth’s resources.

The Ecological Footprint which measures the amount of biologically productive land and water to meet the demand for food, timber, shelter, and absorb the pollution from human activity.shows that we are now in debt.

Not only are we wiping out plant and animal species in our rapacious rush to fill our shopping malls with consumerables and fancy packages, but in contributing to global warming, we have set in train the extinction of life as we know it.

Sir Nicholas Stern, an internationally regarded economist, spent more than a year examining the complex problem. After a week of rumours and leaks, yesterday he formally launched his 579-page report. Though dry in its delivery, it had a simple and apocalyptic message: climate change is fundamentally altering the planet; the risks of inaction are high; and time is running out.

Sceptics may be right when they say that global warming and climate change is encyclical. I don’t necessarily agree with them because I tend to think that the Industrial Revolution, which kicked off in the UK some 250 years ago, is the root cause of the current catastrophe..

The invention of machinery which relied on fossil fuels for energy enabled massive productivity and the need to seek out global sources of raw materials and markets. Colonial empires have come and gone in this never-ending quest. Wars have been ‘won’ and ‘lost’ in the desire to dominate and monopolise.

Industrialised countries are belatedly trying to cut down the carbon emissions from factories, appliances and vehicles, as indeed are poorer countries such as Indonesia which, as reported today in the Jakarta Post (temporary blog), is in the process of cutting down on the import of chloroflurocarbons (CFC). Whoopee, considering that CFCs are banned elsewhere it’s good that the Department of the Environment here is actually doing something.

What is disturbing though, is that according to the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Living Planet Report 2006, Indonesia is a debtor nation, not just in terms of Chinese-Indonesian tycoons stashing their ill-gotten gains in Singapore but in terms of the depletion of natural resources.

Oil, copper, gold, coal, gas, wood. These are all non-renewable, yet conglomerates and cabals gladly dispose of them for short-term gains with little thought of this nation’s destiny. Is it because the Indonesian birthright has been sold for a mess of potage?

What a bunch of plonkers.

More Reading Links
BBC
Guardian

Contributors wanted.
If you have a keen interest in environmental issues, then this planet and Indonesia in particular needs your help.
If you can write about these issues, we are keen to hear from you. Please email us.

Press Release
By Ecological Internet and Biofuelwatch
October 18, 2006

(Madison, WI, USA) - Hundreds of peat and forest fires are once again burning across Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra, releasing vast quantities of greenhouse gases and destroying the livelihoods of local communities and rainforest habitats of countless species. Those annual fires release as much carbon as 15% of all emissions from burning fossil fuels worldwide.

Haze in KL

So far some 2,500 people from 75 countries have written to the UK, US and other governments from HERE to demand urgent international action at the forthcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Nairobi. The ongoing campaign is organized by Ecological Internet and supported by the British campaign group Biofuelwatch. It calls for urgent measures to stop the conversion of peat forests into timber and oil palm plantations, or agriculture, and to restore the peatlands which have already been drained and degraded.

Almuth Ernsting, a member of Biofuelwatch, states: “The destruction of south-east Asia’s peat forests is a major threat to the global climate, as well as to local people in Indonesia and Malaysia, and to global biodiversity. This is not simply somebody else’s problem to solve: Across south-east Asia, millions of hectares of land are being converted to timber and oil palm plantations, and the UK is a major importer of timber products and palm oil from this region. Ironically, Britain, as part of the EU, is trying to meet some of its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol through the use of biodiesel, and much of this is made from palm oil. Far from reducing climate change emissions, we are subsidizing the destruction of one of the Earth’s most important carbon sinks. We are therefore calling on UK citizens to support the Ecological Internet appeal.”

Scientists estimate that the 1997 peat and forest fires emitted up to 2.5 billion tonnes of carbon and that the average is around 1 billion tonnes a year. By comparison, the Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce emissions from all Annex 1 countries by only 188 million tonnes a year from 1990 levels. Once the peat has been drained, all the carbon will enter the atmosphere - fires just speed up the process. This fire season could be one of the worst ever, as El Nino climate conditions bring drought to Indonesia.

Indonesia alone is planning to convert another 6.5 million hectares of land to oil palms, causing yet more CO2 emissions. Much of the oil palms will be grown to make biodiesel which has been previously claimed to be carbon neutral: this is obviously not the case when it is associated with destruction of virgin rainforest. Plantation owners routinely set fires to burn land, and they also evict local communities and force them into sensitive ecological areas, such as peat swamps. The Kyoto Protocol allows the funding of monoculture plantations, which can be extremely destructive to the environment and to communities, but it does not allow carbon credits to be used to protect virgin forests. This means that some of the money which is supposed to be spent on ‘clean development’ is given to timber and palm oil companies, even though both sectors are linked to vast climate change emissions.

Full details of the action alert can be found HERE and HERE.

Notes:
1. Ecological Internet (EI) provides the most successful Internet based environment portals, search engines and international Earth advocacy network ever, regularly achieving environmental conservation victories around the world. EI specializes in the use of the Internet to achieve environmental conservation outcomes. Ecological Internet’s mission is to empower the global movement for environmental sustainability by providing information retrieval tools, portal services and analysis that aid in the conservation of climate, forest, water and ocean ecosystems; and to commence the age of ecological sustainability and restoration. On average over 30,000 people a day visit our environmental portals.

2. Biofuelwatch is a UK campaign which seeks regulation to ensure that only sustainably-sourced biofuels can be sold in Britain in in the European Union.

3. For a fully referenced background paper about the peat and forest fires in south-east Asia, and their contribution to global warming, see HERE.

The Faunacator has seen within the past few days at first hand the appalling forest fire-induced haze over Batam and Singapore. Whoever coined the phrase ‘Ignorance is Bliss’ cannot have had this in mind, believe me.

The haze appears at its most intense at a very bad time for the annual migration of raptors (birds of prey) through Southeast Asia. They come down from mainland Asia and head through the Malay Peninsula and Java and on out eastwards. They are best seen locally in the Puncak. If you want to witness magnificent birds of prey soaring on the thermals as they wend their way east Contact Birdlife International Indonesia or simply google in ‘Puncak Raptor Watch’ for more information. Another excellent website for birde watching in Indonesia is SurfBirds.com

We’ve lifted the following in toto from Friday’s New York Times  because you have to register to read it. With Green Indonesia, you get it as it comes.

We like this presentation of the Sidoarjo story for two reasons.

1. It sets everything out succinctly.
2. It nails Aburizal Bakrie who’s only kept his place in the government because he was one of SBY’s financial backers. No more, A.B., no more. It’s time to bugger off.

KEDUNGBENDO, Indonesia, Oct. 5 - It started as a natural gas well. It has become geysers of mud and water, and in a country plagued by earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis another calamity in the making, though this one is largely man-made.

The highway west of Kedungbendo has been cut by the mud flow. Eight villages are completely or partly submerged, with homes and more than 20 factories buried to the rooftops. Some 13,000 people have been evacuated. The four-lane highway west of here has been cut in two, as has the rail line, dealing a serious blow to the economy of this region in East Java, an area vital to the country’s economy. The muck has already inundated an area covering one and a half square miles.

And it shows no signs of stopping. The mud is rising by the hour, and now spewing forth at the rate of about 170,000 cubic yards a day, or about enough to cover Central Park.

Foreign companies, environmental groups and political observers are now watching closely to see whether the government will hold the company that drilled the well accountable for the costs of the cleanup, which could easily reach $1 billion.

The company is part of a conglomerate controlled by Aburizal Bakrie, a cabinet member and billionaire who was a major contributor to the campaign of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

The disaster occurred as the company, Lapindo Brantas, drilled thousands of feet to tap natural gas and used practices that geologists, mining engineers and Indonesian officials described as faulty.

But as the liabilities have escalated, Lapindo was sold - for $2 - last month to an offshore company, owned by the Bakrie Group, and many fear it will declare bankruptcy, allowing its owners to walk away.

Mr. Bakrie declined to be interviewed. A spokeswoman for Lapindo, Yunawati Teryana, said that it was too early to conclude that Lapindo had acted negligently. She noted that some geologists had said this was a natural disaster, a natural mud volcano, perhaps set off by seismic activity in the area.

Government officials and company engineers are not hopeful that they can contain the problem. In what Indonesian officials describe as the best of the worst options, the government plans to pump the mud into the Porong River, which flows into the sea 20 miles north of here.

“It will be the death of the ecosystem around that area,” said Amien Widodo, an environmental geologist who teaches at the November 10 Institute of Technology in Surabaya. There is debate whether the mud is toxic. But the sheer volume alone will smother just about everything in its path, he said.

The area’s commerce has already been devastated.

“We are angry because we were living comfortably in our own home and now we are forced to leave,” Reni Matakupan said as she stood here looking across 200 yards of mud at her family’s factory, DeBrima, which was filling with mud.

The problems began in late May when the company had reached about 9,000 feet, Mr. Widodo said. It continued to drill to this depth even though it had not installed what is known as a casing around the well to the levels required under Indonesian mining regulations, and good mining practices, he said.

The company experienced problems with the drilling that led to a loss of pressure in the well. That is when the mud started seeping in from the sides of the unprotected well bore, at a depth of about 6,000 feet.

The mud was stopped by cement plugs that the company had inserted into the well hole. The mud then sought other avenues of escape, eventually breaking through the earth, and creating mud volcanoes in several places that resemble the geysers of Yellowstone.

If the proper casing had been in place, the mud would not have entered the well, Mr. Widodo said, and would not have discovered these other avenues to the surface, a conclusion supported by mining engineers. Several Western and Indonesian mining engineers spoke about the matter, some offering graphs and mining details that have not been made public, but only on the condition that they not be identified, for fear of running afoul of Mr. Bakrie, the billionaire company owner.So far there does not appear to be any government investigation into what set off the mud eruptions.

After the first eruptions, in late May, the police in Sidoarjo, the district at the center of the disaster, began an investigation, but it appears to have languished. “I am not confident that anyone will ever be prosecuted,” said H. Win Hendrarso, the regent for Sidoarjo, choosing his words carefully. In an interview in his high-ceilinged office, Mr. Hendrarso, who was elected a year ago, said he had no authority to investigate. Any investigations would have to be by the central government in Jakarta, he said. He added that he was not aware of any.

“I just want Lapindo to take responsibility,” he said.

But Lapindo no longer exists, and the company to which it has been sold may not have any assets. Last month, Lapindo’s parent company announced that it was selling Lapindo for $2 to Lyte Ltd., a company that is registered in the offshore island of Jersey. The majority shareholder in the parent company is the Bakrie Group, and the Bakrie Group, owned by Aburizal Bakrie and his brothers, is also the sole owner of Lyte, according to public documents.

Lapindo’s parent company, Energi Mega Persada, had said in an official securities filing that it was selling Lapindo because of the huge costs it faced in cleaning up after the mud flow, and it was better to use its assets for its other oil and gas projects.

An Energi spokesman, Herwin Hidayat, said the Bakrie Group remained committed to cleaning up the mud, through Lyte. He declined to say what assets Lyte had, if any. He said it was a “functioning company.” He declined to give any examples of any business that it had done.

A concern now is whether Lyte, which has been renamed Bakrie Oil & Gas, will declare bankruptcy, which seems almost inevitable.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Mr. Hendrarso, the senior elected executive official in Sidoarjo, the district that is at the center of the mud disaster. If the Bakrie Group does not pay, the Indonesia government will be left with the bill, government officials said. 

….. or Limb From Limb

The Arasa-Maram, the banyan tree, (so sacred with the Hindus, since Vishnu, during one of his incarnations, reposed under its mighty shade and there taught humanity philosophy and sciences) is called the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Under the protective umbrage of this king of the forests, the Gurus teach their pupils their first lessons on immortality and initiate them in the mysteries of life and death.

In Java, the banyan tree is also sacred, not least because underlying Javanese mysticism is a complex and elaborate metaphysics: “... man actively and inevitably participates in the all-encompassing unity of material and spiritual existence. The spiritual aspect is superior, more true as it were. … Harmony and unity with ultimate essence is the purpose of all life. … Nature and supernature mutually influence each other, and causality is implied in their coordination.”

A tree under which teachers and pupils sit suggests a natural bonding, the all-encompassing unity of material and spiritual existence. If a tree could hear, how wise it might be.

So, who the hell are those dim-witted souls who have chopped up a 100-year-old banyan tree in Jakarta to halt a rumor about is special powers from spreading? Presumably they are not Javanese and they certainly do not follow the pluralistic Muslim faith practised by the vast majority of the population.

Earlier, rumors had spread that cutting down the tree would bring bad luck because it was spared during a tree-felling drive to make way for a new bus lane in central Jakarta, Sarwo Handayani, head of the city’s park agency said.
 
She said the rumors gained strength after unidentified people left offerings at the tree’s base. Handayani dismissed the rumors of supernatural involvement as nonsense, saying officials did not fell the tree because the bus lane could be routed around it.

The sprawling tree’s branches were hacked away Sunday, leaving just its trunk. Handayani said it was too early to say if the tree will survive.

The head of the Muslim group, Zainal Arifin, admitted to attacking the banyan, saying it did so to prove that there was nothing mystical about the tree.
 
“Surely, no one can believe that a tree is more powerful than a human,” he said. “We did this to propagate Islam.”

Actually, I do believe that a banyan tree is more powerful than a human. After all, it gives life and does not take it. It nurtures and, as Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, said, it provides “beneficent shade.” I also can’t believe that this action is going to gain any converts to Islam, unless there are other witless twits out there who are prepared to become pitiful laughing stocks.

If this group had more balls, I’d suggest that an appropriate punishment would be to tear them limb from limb, but that’s too flippant.

Nah, let them be laughed at whilst they’re planting replacement trees as part of their community service in Jakarta’s Parks Department, seeing as there really is one.

We’ve taken the liberty of lifting this post from Unspun, the blog of Ong Hock Chuan. The questions he asked are highly relevant in the ongoing saga of the Sidoarjo ooze.

As we wrote yesterday, once again, actions are being taken for short-term gain, mere Bandaid solutions for serious lesions.

I guess it is a case of if you live long enough you get to hear everything.

Greenpeace is not exactly known for favoring expediency over idealism. Yet in the papers it was reported to have said that it has no objection to the government’s plan to dump the muddy water from Lapindo’s botched well into the Porong river and the sea. It said this was a “very regrettable outcome arising from a very desperate situation.”

There are other strange mutterings bubbling up from this Lapindo mudflow issue. Greenpeace’s Executive Director for Southeast Asia, Emmy Hafild, at the same time told reporters that Greenpeace could not offer any solutions to the mudflow problem. “We can’t do anything about it. We’re not experts,” she was quoted as saying.

This mud slinging is a bit rich. Greenpeace, as an international activist group, does not have the resources and network to come up with a proposed solution? Where does all its money go to? Does it want to be perceived as only criticising without offering some constructive alternatives? If not, then maybe they should just shut up.

Their attitude notwithstanding, what they said about dumping the mud into the Porong and eventually into the sea may be a solution, if there is no substantial and lasting damage to humans and marine life.

The problem is that while everyone takes great delight in being shrill about Lapindo Brantas there are precious few facts for anyone to make a rational decision. There are some basic questions that need to be answered before there is any basis for further sound action. This is not an exhaustive list but if answered it would certainly clear up some misperceptions and misinformation about the Lapindo mudflow problem.

1. Is the mud really toxic? If so how toxic, what potential damage can it inflict on humans and marine life?

2. What are the usual methods of stopping or mitigating mudflows such as this? Why can’t they be used in this instance?

3. What are the ecological conditions in the Porong River and the sea nearby? Are they fragile and would they be damaged by a discharge of mud, or are they already so far gone with pollution, dynamite fishing and leaching that it doesn’t matter if a few tons of mud are dumped there?

4. Are there any underwater currents and thermoclines that can help contain or disperse the mud if it is discharged into the river and the sea?

Perhaps Greenpeace and the other activists might want to channel some of their energies into establishing such a body of facts and bring the discussion of what to do with Lapindo to a high level.

If they can do that then it would be great for all of us as we are getting tired of the communication of shrill and escalating blame and mudslinging.

As Ghandi once observed, “Those who take part in mudslinging often lose ground.”

Two weeks ago, we posted a bumper batch of green news from around the archipelaego. Sadly, there’s little new to report.

Sidoarjo Mudflow

This is now officially a disaster zone because the government has decreed it. Displaced residents must be resettled, retrained and compensated at the expense of Lapindo Brantas .

The mud continues to pour forth at a such a rate that it is beyond the resources of civil engineers and other responsible officials to contain it. It will, therefore, be piped untreated into the River Porong and thence into the sea. That this will destroy the livelihoods of shrimp farmers and others dependent on the sea is deemed of little consequence.

Greenpeace said it did not oppose the government’s plan to dump muddy water into the sea and the Porong river, despite fears that this would pollute the ocean. The environmental group said dumping untreated mud and water into the aquatic environment is “a regrettable outcome arising from a very desperate situation”.

They argued that the social problems arising from the tragedy were more urgent than the environmental damage.

Green Indonesia believes that this is short-term thinking at its worst. How can affecting communities further afield benefit those in the immediate vicinity? What happened to the original plan to pump treated, non-toxic, water?

Green Indonesia does, however, offer its congratulations to Greenpeace for pouring some 700 kilograms of toxic mud outside the office of welfare minister Aburizal Bakrie on Wednesday.

“It is utterly shameless for the minister to distance himself from the disaster when his corporate group owns the controlling shares in this operation,” Greenpeace Southeast Asia executive director Emmy Hafild said at the rally.

The activists staged a silent protest, holding posters that read “Stop your mud Mr. Bakrie or your mud will stop you!“

That Mr. Bakrie is threatening to sue the group, whether for making slanderous statements,  for being rude to him or for being young is unclear, is par for the course.

Aburizal, who is one of the country’s wealthiest businessmen, has been quoted as saying the mudflow was not his responsibility.

Neither, it would appear, is fulfiling his role as Minister for People’s Welfare.

Jakarta

It has been suggested that the City Government will prioritise environmental issues in its next spatial plan. There is also talk of a green belt around the city. Given that talk such as this has been common for nigh on thirty years, Green Indonesia will adopt a wait and see policy.

Java Rhinos

A report in the UK Observer today applauds the birth of four Java Rhinos.

This is the rarest of the rhino species  with fewer than 60 animals surviving in only two known locations: one in Indonesia and the other in Vietnam. Rhinos have been poached from these small populations in recent years and much more intensive protection is needed if this species is to survive. The Javan and the Sumatran compete for the dubious distinction of being the most endangered species of rhino.

Unfortunately, this news is five years old. 

Ho hum.