Word: indonesianness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There are two important things to know about tracking wild elephants, and it's better to learn both of them before you're actually in the jungle, tracking wild elephants. First, elephants are fast. In thick forest - in this case, the vast Ulu Masen ecosystem in the Indonesian province of Aceh, where leeches writhe beneath your feet and white-handed gibbons hoot from the treetops - they can outpace even deer. Second, elephants can't climb trees. This is good, because that's precisely what you're meant to do if one of them charges...
...human activity, far outranking the total from vehicles and aircraft combined. Forests are disappearing so fast in Indonesia that, incredibly, this developing country ranks third in emissions behind industrial giants China and the U.S. Since 1950, estimates Greenpeace, more than 182 million acres (740,000 sq km) of Indonesian forests, the equivalent of more than 95 Ulu Masens, have been destroyed or degraded...
...signed a historic peace deal with the Indonesian government in 2005, in the wake of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, which claimed about 160,000 lives in Aceh alone. Today, Aceh's governor is a tsunami survivor and former GAM rebel called Irwandi Yusuf, whose background seems tailor-made for REDD: he was trained as a veterinarian and once worked for FFI. "He's one of the few Indonesian politicians who gets it," says Linkie. "He's thinking way beyond his five-year electoral term." In June 2007 Irwandi banned commercial logging in his province, "an unprecedented environmental...
...valley of rice fields at the heart of Ulu Masen. It is famous for its fertile soil and the gold sometimes found in its rivers. Raked by clouds, it is also famously wet: some people joke that the name Geumpang is a contraction of gerimis panjang, the Indonesian for "constant drizzle." A no-go area during the conflict - GAM rebels passed through there on their way between Aceh's east and west coasts - it is now a peaceful place. Children walk to school past paddy fields of ripening rice, while glistening water buffalo wallow in pools...
Participants at U.S. labor rallies tend not to draw inspiration from Indonesian divas - but Kartika Jahja was asked if her jazzy scorcher of a protest song, Mayday (sung in English), could be used by a coalition of writers and journalists at a protest in Detroit. "And we are the ones who work their fields/ And we are the ones who fight their wars," the track goes. "And we are the ones to cut this crap." The passionate defiance is signature Tika (as she's more commonly known), and something that sets the 28-year-old singer-songwriter apart from Indonesia...