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Johannesburg, SOUTH AFRICA - An international conference of the United World Colleges saw me coming to Singapore, my first time in Southeast Asia and my first visit to a truly equatorial city. Singapore is a fantastic city -- a highly ordered place with pinpoint efficiency, spotlessly clean streets and religious and cultural harmony. It was a truly pleasurable stay in the city. After the conference, I got to see a bit of Singapore and its sights, including a visit to the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, the last remaining virgin tropical rainforest in Singapore.
Nikesh Parbhoo Upon my return home to Johannesburg, I read an email forward which highlighted the potential destruction of the Amazon rainforest as a result of decisions being taken by the Brazilian government. The petition was addressed to the Brazilians and was against their intention to clear a portion of the Amazon. The email catapulted me back to Bukit Timah whilst still sitting at my desk.
I have done many a hike on the highveld of Johannesburg and its surrounds, but Bukit Timar was my first foray into a true rainforest. I didn't know what lay in store for me.
Singapore is a city that has very high humidity levels and I duly purchased three 2 litre bottles of drinking water before I set off on my adventure. It was a great relief to enter the forest since the searing intensity of the sun was diluted by, what for me was, the tallest canopy of trees I've ever seen in my life. What greeted me underneath this massive canopy can only be described as a cavernous world that represented the 'melting-pot' of nature -- a plethora of species of flora and fauna densely packed together in a symbiosis only nature can create.
Bukit Timah is 163- hectares in size, yet it contains more plant species than the whole of North America! Rainforests, the oldest known living ecosystems, cover only 2% of the land on Earth, yet they house approximately 50% of all species on the planet.
As I proceeded further and deeper into the forest, the humidity rose exponentially. I was soaked with sweat in my own clothes and my frequency of taking breaks increased dramatically. These breaks gave me an opportunity to immerse myself into the wonderful spectacle of sound, light and movement.
The spectacle was a patient one and one in which you become part of the act. The animals, birds and insects reacted to my every movement in the forest. To them, you're not seen as human -- rather you're like just any another creature. Most of the creatures in the forest are shy but for the very few that aren't, if you're seen as a source of food, you will be preyed upon. This is nature, and as a modern human, one feels a sense of insecurity, because all the safeties and comforts of an urban setting that we take for granted do not feature in this natural setting. The dead and decaying trunks of trees, and newly born skunks and rodents are indicative of the circle of life as nature intended it to be.
I've never seen so many shades of green interspersed with such variations of sunlight being bounced off thick and thin, dark and light leaves, reflecting off the thick shiny wax of other leaves. The sun peeking through the over-arching canopy provides a thousand opportunities from different angles for beautiful colours to be viewed through a droplet of water just about to drop off a leaf.
But then I walked to the edge of the forest and through the trees, where one could see the high rise apartment blocks of modern Singapore, and only then did I realise how selfish mankind really is. The best part of my trip to Singapore was these 2.5 hours spent in the company of the inhabitants of the rain forest and not the flashy electronics and shopping malls on Orchard Road (Singapore's shopping belt).
If a rainforest was a cosmopolitan city, then the Amazon would be Toronto, New York, Sao Paulo, London, Cairo, Lagos, Johannesburg, Paris, Mumbai, Tokyo, Sydney, Rio, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Dhaka, Moscow, Bangkok, Rome and every other major city rolled into one and then multiplied by 100 !!!
Can we blame Brazil for destroying its rain forest? How does Brazil compete on the international trade scene against the likes of the bullies of world trade? How does one expect Brazil to improve the lives of its inhabitants when there are unfair trade restrictions on its products in a capitalist world that professes "Free Trade"?
The only thing that Brazil probably has to further its advancement IS its rain forest. Furthermore, who is benefiting from the destruction of the rain forest? Will it be the Brazilian people at the grass-roots or the share price on the NYSE [New York Stock Exchange]? The destruction of the rainforest actually reflects as an increase in Brazil's accounts records (ie: an increase in GDP [Gross Domestic Product]). Do we even have a unit of measurement for the destruction of a certain portion of a rainforest that can be incorporated in GDP figures -- no! Even if there was such a measurement, it wouldn't be used, since profits would be hindered and financial statements would not look good.
We cannot blame only Brazilians for what is happening. The true culprit is capitalism in its entirety -- and more specifically the individuals, organisations and nations that perpetuate it in its most cruel form. Capitalism doesn't put a price on nature. Accountants don't have a course on environmental journal entries in their books. When it comes to dealing with nature, the accounting principle of contra entry, debit and credit is suddenly thrown out the window.
Rainforests should be treated like any other natural resource and utilised in a sustainable fashion. However, the current generation is consuming rainforests at such an alarming rate that the productive capacity of the forests in the future will be very little or even zero. The status quo is also robbing future generations of this valuable, income generating resource.
People far removed from the forest floors are orchestrating this terror on the environment. They sit in lofty air-conditioned boardrooms in capitalist bastions of the western world like New York and London. If there is any war on terror, then it must be directed at these environmental terrorists of the West that are raping, maiming, blowing up, digging up, polluting and scarring every corner of the earth.
These very nations implement so-called 'green laws', only to see that the very companies that these laws are meant to keep in check move their operations to the developing world to continue their terror on the environment in these countries (countries like Brazil) and then take the loot back to their now 'environmentally clean' western countries, and so countries in the developing world are now tainted as the polluters of the world!!
Do these corporations really care about the environment in countries like Brazil, Angola and Nigeria? That's what they want you to believe with their flashy advertising about a local environmentalist working for their corporation. Does an environmentalist sit on their board of executives at their global head-quarters? Enough said.
The world will soon reach a point at which the environment has been degraded to such a large extent that it will not be able to sustain the homo sapien species. Are world leaders listening? Quite frankly, I don't think so. They're too busy making money.
NIKESH PARBHOO is a twenty-seven (27) year old IT Business Consultant at a multi-national consulting house, Pretoria, South Africa and Secretary of the United World Colleges Scholarship Trust of South Africa. His hobbies include photography, travel, nature and the outdoors, from this this article was drawn. He received his BSc Honours (Information Systems and Computer Science) from Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. He lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. The photos accompanying this article were all shot by Mr. Parbhoo. This is his first article for The World's Magazine.
