Word: manser
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...Fourteen months ago, Manser returned to Batu Lawi at the end of a 12-year personal crusade to help his adopted tribe, the Penan, preserve their landscape and their way of life from the cancer of all things modern: cash, Coca-Cola, television, but above all the mowing down of their native forest. If he had reached the summit he would have been confronted with glaring evidence of his failure: the verdant forest slashed by logging roads, a net of wounds bleeding orange mud, the animals largely gone. Manser had lived with the Penan in their jungle for six years...
...Manser separated from two Penan acquaintances near the base of the mountain, saying he would climb it alone. With just a few days of walking, he would have been reunited with his closest Penan friends. But Manser never made that hike. After he was left near Batu Lawi, he was never seen again...
...What happened to Bruno Manser? The body of the Swiss adventurer-turned-activist, who would now be 46, has never been found, despite numerous searches by his Penan and European friends. Nor has any trace been found of his 30-kg rucksack. When he vanished, some suspected foul play: Manser had fallen on the wrong side of the logging interests in Borneo?who can be ruthless. There was talk of a bounty on his head and suspiciously heavy movements of police and loggers in the area at the time of his disappearance. Malaysia's politicians were fed up with...
...More optimistic friends hoped that Manser was performing one more stunt?that somewhere, somehow, the short, wiry activist, hardened by years of living in extreme conditions, was alive and reveling in the swirl of mystery surrounding his disappearance. Manser was, after all, a man who would do almost anything to get publicity for his cause. In 1996, he slid almost 3 km down a half-frozen funicular railway cable in Switzerland; three years later, he buzzed the capital of Malaysia's Sarawak province in a motorized hang glider. According to Roger Graf, who joined Manser in the mid-1980s...
...know what was in his mind," says Graf. "He knew some of the Penan were selling their land to the loggers. He had seen some of his best friends abandon their traditional clothes and, for the first time, don T shirts and shoes. Everywhere, he saw logging." Manser was an idealist, the kind of earnest campaigner who makes people uncomfortable, who goes too far, a man described by one Swiss friend as half child, half hero, a man who would never abandon the fight for his friends. But even heroes give up sometimes. "I had wondered for a long time...