Human–Environment Relations and Politics in Indonesia

Conflicting Ecologies

Kristina Großmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000435740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses how people in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo, relate to their environment in different political and historical contexts.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic studies of Dayak people, the indigenous inhabitants of Borneo, the book examines how human-environment relationships differ and collide. These "conflicting ecologies" are based on people's relation to the "environment", which encompasses the non-human realm in the widest sense, including forests, rivers, land, natural resources, animals and spirits. The author argues that relationality and power are decisive factors for the understanding and analysis of peoples' ecologies. The book integrates different theoretical approaches, sheds light upon the environmental transformation taking place in Indonesia, as well as the social exclusion it entails, and highlights the conceptual shortcomings of universalistic concepts of human-environment relations.

An exploration of evolving human-nature relations, this book will be of interest to academics studying political ecology, environmental anthropology, sustainability sciences, political sciences, development studies, human geography, human ecology, Southeast Asian studies, and Asian studies.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003176466-1

Borneo is the world’s third largest island. Its territories are divided between the three countries of Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam and Indonesia. Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of the island, comprises five provinces, of which Central Kalimantan is the largest in terms of area, but the second smallest in terms of the number of inhabitants. In former times, Borneo was covered with vast rainforests and peat swamp forests. However, the forests are shrinking rapidly as, each year, millions of hectares are logged and converted into oil palm plantations and open-cast mining. Despite the tremendous loss of forested areas, Borneo is still extremely rich in biodiversity and contains many endemic species of plants and animals, such as the endangered orangutan and the Borneo elephant.

On a recent visit to Palangkaraya, the capital of Central Kalimantan, my plane flew low over the Sabangau National Park as we approached the airport. The National Park is located to the south of the district capital and was declared in 2004 to protect remaining parts of the vast peat swamp forest which once covered the south of Kalimantan. Today it is home to the world’s largest orangutan population. Looking out of the window of the plane, I was reassured to see the vast green carpet of trees, stretching to the horizon and interrupted only by orange-brown colored rivers meandering through the dense forest. The airport of Palangkaraya is named after the first governor of the province, Tjilik Riwut, to honor his efforts to secure the rights of the ethnic Dayak inhabitants of Kalimantan. Following Indonesia’s independence from the Dutch colonial power in 1945, what today is Central Kalimantan was originally part of the province South Kalimantan. Dayak people living in the area launched a series of increasingly militant protests against the political and economic dominance of the majority Muslim population in South Kalimantan. Protesters campaigned for secession from South Kalimantan and for the establishment of a “Dayak province” in the interior of the island. In response to these protests, the province Central Kalimantan was founded in 1957 and President Sukarno appointed the Dayak military commander Tjilik Riwut as first governor. When I entered the airport, I was reminded that Kalimantan is rich not only in biodiversity but also in natural resources. In a glass cabinet, positioned in the middle of the entrance area of the airport, the diverse natural resources of the province were displayed: a piece of coal, a whitish rectangular plate which was supposed to depict rubber, some oil palm fruits made of plastic and a small rock painted a golden color. The content of the showcase underlined that, in Central Kalimantan, priority is given not to the protection of the remaining forest and biodiversity but to the extraction of resources for development, to increase the wealth of the province and the nation.

Figure 1.1 Map of Indonesia

Source: Kristina Großmann and Elena Rudakova

During my journeys to Central Kalimantan it became clear that the environment is an important part of people’s lives. Both environmental protection and resource extraction are omnipresent in the province and my visits often brought me into contact with one or other of them. Not infrequently, when I was sitting in a small coffee shop (warung) or strolling around the bazar in Palangkaraya, people asked me what I was doing in Kalimantan, suspecting that I worked either for a mining or palm oil company or for an environmental organization. Indeed, many mining and agribusiness companies maintain branch offices in the provincial capital and the city is also a hub for international, national and local environmental organizations. Later, in the minibus heading to the north of the province, half my fellow passengers were convinced that I was involved in environmental and animal protection, and offered to join me on my expeditions to rehabilitate orangutans in the forested mountain ranges in the far north – while the other half tried to persuade me to invest in their rubber or gold mining business or buy their haul of gemstones. In particular, the most northern district Murung Raya, where I stayed most of the time when visiting Kalimantan, is seen as an Indonesian El Dorado: where men can make their fortunes and there is wealth for the taking. Murung Raya is also the new frontier for coal exploitation, as the principal location of the mega-mining project Adaro Met Coal, which covers 350,000 hectares and is expected to deliver 20 million tons of coal over the coming years. For decades, the Indonesian government has enforced an authoritarian developmentalist regime based on the extraction of natural resources on the “outer islands,” including Kalimantan. Today, natural resource extraction, particularly coal mining, remains one of Indonesia’s principal sources of foreign revenue. The district of Murung Raya was created in 2002 as part of the decentralization process following the fall of the President Suharto. Since then, Purukcahu, the capital of Murung Raya, has experienced a boom in population, infrastructure and economic development. Covering an area of 23,700 km² and subdivided into ten sub-districts and 115 villages, Murung Raya is Central Kalimantan’s largest district and also the one with the lowest population density. The district occupies the upper reaches of the Barito River, Borneo’s third longest river, which originates in forested mountains in the far north and flows from north to south through the district and thence through the neighboring province of South Kalimantan towards the Java Sea. Murung Raya is located on the Equator and vegetation consists of tropical lowland forest and tropical subalpine forest. The district is generally hilly and, in the north, encompasses part of the Muller-Schwaner Mountain Range, an area still covered with vast tracts of pristine forest that forms the backbone of the southern portion of transnational Heart of Borneo (HoB) conservation initiative. Covering an area of 220,000 km², the HoB was set up in 2007 when a conservation agreement initiated by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) was signed by the governments of Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia and Malaysia, with the aim of ensuring the protection and sustainable use of what is considered to be Asia’s last great rainforest. My fieldwork was carried out between 2014 and 2020 during regular visits to two sub-districts of Murang Raya: Uut Murung, the northernmost sub-district, and Laung Tuhup in the south of the district. Between 2014 and 2020, I visited the three villages Kalasin, Tumbang Tujang and Tumbang Topus, situated along the upper part of the Murung River, a tributary of the Barito River, in the densely forested north-east of the sub-district Uut Murung.¹ Between 2016 and 2020, I visited the village Tumbang Batubara in Laung Tuhup, an area where massive deforestation has taken place as a result of extensive open-pit coal mining.

Figure 1.2 Map of Murung Raya

Source: Kristina Großmann and Elena Rudakova

People living in the three settlements in Uut Murung practice a semi-nomadic lifestyle and self-identify with different ethnic groups, including the Punan Murung and Bakumpai. I argue that they practice a relational and attached mode of engagement with components of the surrounding natural environment, particularly forested areas, rivers, animals and natural resources, which they consider “gifts” of nature, such as gaharu (in English, agarwood, aloewood, eaglewood or lignaloes). Forests and land are the home of spirits and ancestors and thus possess a spiritual and symbolic dimension. Their mode of engagement with the environment is not only constituted relationality and sharing but also shaped by the political context of their marginalization in the course of ongoing state-led territorialization processes. Under the authoritarian regime under the former president Suharto, which lasted from 1966 until 1998, national and international development discourses constructed remote rural areas as marginal territories and their marginalized inhabitants as in need of “modernization,” to be achieved through the implementation of development projects. The attached and relational mode of engagement with the environment of these semi-nomadic groups contrasts with the detached and extractivist mode of engagement of mining families living in Tumbang Batubara. Lives of people who settle in this village are shaped by decades of large-scale coal mining, which is currently being expanded even further through the implementation of the mega-mining project Adaro Met Coal. Some villagers still practice shifting cultivation to sustain their livelihood; however the majority are now employed by one of the mining companies. Villagers generally support large-scale mining, because coal is associated with development and the possibility of a better future.

During my visits to these settlements I came to appreciate that forests, land and resources not only provide food, trade products and monetary incomes but are also important in the formation of masculine identities linked to the extraction of resources, specifically those of semi-nomadic gaharu collectors in Uut Murung and the technically adept miners in Tumbang Batubara. Moreover, ethnicity plays a major role in people’s relation to their environment. As mentioned above, Tjilik Riwut airport of Palangkaraya honors a hero who fought for the rights of Dayak people, reflecting the importance of ethnicity in struggle for the self-determination of people in Central Kalimantan. Under President Suharto, discourse on ethnicity was suppressed and considered “unpatriotic.” After his fall in 1998 and in the reformasi (reformation) period that followed, ethnicity has once again become a political issue. The assertion of indigeneity, a concept that connects ethnicity to power relations, has become a means to claim rights in struggles over land and resources. A key demand of these struggles is the recognition of adat, a traditional institution that encompasses local practices, rules and codes of conduct. In Central Kalimantan, the construction of a specific Dayak indigenous identity is increasingly utilized for political mobilization, as for example by leaders of the adat forest management scheme called “Dayak, Wake Up” (Dayak Misik). Thus, acceptance or rejection of Dayak indigenous identity plays an increasingly important role in determining how people relate to their environment: in whether or not resources are extracted, forests are protected or land is ascribed symbolic value. “Dayakness” has become a rallying cry in resistance to the increasing commodification of nature, encroaching territorialization, and exclusion from access to land and resources.

The book in a nutshell

In a nutshell, the book is about how people in Central Kalimantan relate to their environment in different political and historical contexts. I draw on multi-sited ethnographic studies of Dayak people, including semi-nomadic forest dwellers, shifting cultivators, and miners living in Murung Raya, as well as urban-based activists in the provincial capital. I understand the “environment” as encompassing the non-human realm in the widest sense, which includes forests, rivers, land, natural resources such as gaharu and coal, as well as animals and spirits. Similarly, “ecologies” encompass the totality of context-specific relations between humans and non-humans. I describe how ecologies of people in Murung Raya are shaped by specific historical trajectories and evolving political, cultural and economic conditions. I explore what happened when different human–environment relationships collide, a phenomenon that I call conflicting ecologies.

In this book I explore how these political struggles are manifested in the enactment of different ecologies. I contrast the sharing, attached ecology of Dayak communities in Uut Murung with the resource-based, detached ecology of mining communities in Laung Tuhup. In elaborating on the multifocal power relations and different modes of relations to the environment that underpin these different ecologies, I aim to transgress the dichotomous view of humans versus nature. I describe how, in the constitution of ecologies, forests, rivers, gaharu, coal and land are not only passive objects and resources to be exploited but also possess an agentive force, that I call Wirkmacht. This comprises not only the material characteristics and functionalities of non-human entities but likewise processes of identity formation connected to them. Thus, for example the Wirkmacht of gaharu comprises both its monetary value (as wild, high-grade gaharu is more worth than gold) and its agentive role in the formation of a specific masculine indigenous identity: that of an autonomous semi-nomadic gaharu collector, living “upstream” and close to nature, who defines his identity in contradistinction to men belonging to the hegemonic urban elite living downstream. Likewise, the Wirkmacht of coal comprises its contribution not only to the family economy but also to the identity of a strong, technically adept miner, who is proud of his power to dominate nature. I am specifically interested in what happens when different ecologies come into conflict with one another, which I explore in case studies of two forest management programs: a gaharu tree nursery scheme and the Dayak, Wake Up adat forest management program. In the course of the gaharu nursery, the ecology enacted by the environmental activist Agus conflicted with the relational ecology of sharing practiced by semi-nomadic groups living in the densely forested Heart of Borneo. Agus aimed at preventing gaharu collectors to cut down trees on their expeditions. In the frame of the ecology of sustainable forest conservation, for him, the trees should sustain biodiversity, prevent erosion, protect the water reservoir and prevent emissions. For semi-nomadic gaharu collectors however, the “gift” gaharu in a sharing environment is not only a source of money but likewise a marker in the formation of a masculine indigenous identity. Thus, they were not interested in cultivating gaharu trees and the seedlings which Agus brought to the village rotted in the pots. In order to break up essentializations, I argue that ecologies are not constituted by a pre-given bounded coherent relation to the environment but dynamically enacted in a specific time and place. Using the example of Agus, I show that he as a city-trained young graduate originating from one of Kalimantan’s indigenous communities enacts and practices different human–environmental relationships according to the specific context. Another example of conflicting ecologies focuses on the Dayak, Wake Up scheme. It could ...