Years of Poems and Spirits

Read this article on the WP website.

Keywords: Indonesia, New Guinea, Land Rights, Poverty, Deforestization, Corruption.

Malaysian timber merchants came to town and paid Tiri and other native Papuans for rights to log in jungle that their clans have long considered their own here on the island of New Guinea

… environmentalists say that the best way to defend what remains is to give the impoverished local peoples who live in their shadow limited rights to cut trees for their own profit… an incentive to preserve most of the wood for future generations.

“I bought a jeep and a truck,” said Tiri, who has two wives, eight children, and never finished grade school. “All the goods I got, I got from Mr. Wong.”

tribal council of seven indigenous tribes … tried but failed to win the clans’ confidence when Wong was courting them. [Its coordinator] said that the communities were blinded by Wong’s easy cash and failed to grasp the need to log in a sustainable fashion.
–Why a proto-state without absolute power is not a state.