Word: indonesia
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...some degree of cutting, for instance, but once forest fragments shrink beyond some unknown threshold, the entire system loses its ability to recover. page refers to a recent study led by the University of Michigan's Lisa Curran, who contends that human activities such as logging may have doomed Indonesia's great dipterocarp trees, the anchor of its rain forests...
...consume all the dipterocarp fruit, with the result that no new dipterocarp trees are taking root in the areas studied by Curran and her colleagues. Since a host of creatures ranging from the orangutan to the boar are dependent on the dipterocarps, the trees' disappearance may ultimately doom Indonesia's rain-forest ecosystem. PAGE scientist Nigel Sizer of the World Resources Institute notes that similar problems associated with fragmentation loom over all but the largest remaining forests on Earth...
...report specifies some common-sense steps in the right direction. For instance, governments can eliminate the estimated $700 billion in annual subsidies that spur the destruction of ecosystems. In Tunisia, water is priced at one-seventh of what it costs to pump, encouraging waste. In the mid-1980s, Indonesia spent $150 million annually to subsidize pesticide use. With access to cheap chemicals, Indonesian farmers poured pesticides onto their rice fields, killing pests, to be sure, but also causing human illness and wiping out birds and other creatures that ate the pests. When Indonesia ended the subsidies in 1986, pesticide...
...from East Timor. But peace was short lived; the following year Indonesian President Suharto ordered his troops to invade. Gusmao joined the resistance, fleeing into the mists of the heavily forested mountains that run the length of the island. By 1981 he was leader of the resistance--and for Indonesia's special forces, the most wanted man in the country. Gusmao eluded capture until 1992. But on a secret trip to Dili, a contact betrayed him, and the rebel leader was arrested...
...letters to keep the dream of independence alive. In 1997 Mandela visited and called for his release. A year later, Suharto's successor, B.J. Habibie, surprised everyone--particularly his own military--by taking up Gusmao's challenge of a referendum on full independence for East Timor. And when Indonesia lost the vote, the generals unleashed their armed militias on the Timorese people for two weeks of blind terror...