Word: ngau
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pace of change is startling. According to Harrison Ngau, a member of the Malaysian Parliament concerned with the rights of tribes on the island of Borneo, as many as 10,000 members of the Penan tribe still led the seminomadic life of hunting and gathering at the beginning of the 1980s. But the logging industry has been destroying their woodlands, and the Malaysian government has encouraged them to move to villages. Now fewer than 500 Penans live in the forest. When they settle into towns, their expertise in the ways of the forest slips away. Villagers know that their elders...
...Foundation in San Francisco last year created a kind of Nobel Prize for the green movement. The $60,000 awards are given annually to representatives from six continents for "their grass-roots efforts to preserve and enhance the environment." The awards have already been put to good use. Harrison Ngau used his 1990 prize money to campaign for and win a more exalted platform for his efforts to save Malaysia's forests: a seat in that nation's Parliament...
When timber interests first came to Ngau's area in the state of Sarawak in 1977, several thousand natives lived entirely off the forests. But logging and settlement plans have reduced that number to fewer than 500 Penan tribesmen, who still cling to nomadic ways. Even these remaining nomadic clans are threatened by a powerful alliance of Japanese trading companies, merchants and local politicians, who continue to push logging operations ever deeper into the interior...
...Ngau, now 30, became concerned about logging in the late 1970s when its devastating effects began to become apparent. In 1982 he set up a branch of Friends of the Earth in Sarawak to help preserve the forests the Penans call "our bank and our shops." Ngau and his colleagues became investigators, exposing links between logging companies and politicians. Later, when the Penans found the courts stacked in favor of timber interests, they took the desperate step of blockading logging roads. Ngau and Friends of the Earth provided legal help and made the Penans' plight the focus of international protests...
...face of indomitable natives and pressure from foreign environmentalists, the Sarawak government has begun a dialogue with the Penans, and Malaysians have begun to respect those natives who choose to live in the forests. Thanks to Ngau and his colleagues, there is a sliver of hope that the grim sacking of Sarawak may be halted...