Some scientists claim that what is happening in Borneo is the largest and fastest man-made ecological catastrophe in human history.
Greenland, with its 2,175,600 km2, is the largest island in the world; New Guinea, with 792,500 km2, is the second and Borneo, with its 743,330 km2, occupies the third position among the largest islands on Earth and is larger than France.
Borneo (Kalimantan in Indonesian) has a curious political subdivision into three parts: of which Malaysia owns 26.7%, Indonesia 72.6% and Brunei less than 1%. As for the forests, these covered almost the entire island, which has a population close to 18 million inhabitants and a fauna among the most biodiverse in the world.
Last week, when we talked about Cubagua, a small islet located in the northeast of Venezuela, of just 24 km2, we narrated the ecological disaster that it suffered in early times, since its millennial oysters, the only species in the place, were depleted in a period of 30 years, between 1515 and 1545.
This example of predation is so simple to understand and clear to visualize, due to its smallness, speed and unique species, that we said that Cubagua could serve as a Unit of Understanding and Measurement to understand and quantify the intensive extraction of natural resources by humans, anywhere on the planet.
We bring this up with reference to Borneo, where predation by humans of the 20th and 21st centuries, similar to that of Cubagua, is taking place, saving the difference for its complex ecological systems and size, since it could accommodate more than 32,000 islets like the Venezuelan one. For this reason, the Borneo Case is not as simple as the Cubagua Case, however, with the data that is available, the opinions that are handled and the scarce updated information do not leave much room to intuit that the fate of the jungle and fauna Borneo will not be very different from Cubagua's mother-of-pearls, unless effective measures are taken to stop the ecological catastrophe, something that for a few years has been trying, under the name of Heart of Borneo,a protected area promoted by several organizations, among which the WWF stands out.
Before all this, Borneo's once exuberant rain forest was almost impenetrable due to the great variety and quantity of trees that formed it prior to the 1980s and 1990s, when the jungle was the subject of hostile deforestation, with the loss of two thirds of its extension, which made it the largest exporter of wood in the world, even above the Amazon and Africa together. In this way, the beautiful and varied trunks of Borneo ended, in a period similar to the predation in Cubagua, such as wooden houses, parquet floors, furniture, paper, clothes hooks and other artifacts.
Thus, the trees removed in record time left huge empty spaces on the great island, which were soon occupied with the planting of the oil palm, known for its negative environmental impact, such as loss of habitats and extinction of species, second trigger for the destruction of the flora and fauna of Borneo, which has not stopped until today. In a short time, Malaysia became the largest exporter of palm oil and its derivatives on a global scale, due to the growing demand for this commodity by large food, cosmetic and biofuel corporations, although some of them, in recent years, They have canceled their relations with large suppliers of such a questioned raw material.
As if that were not enough, in order to remove remains of plant material and clean extensive territories for palm oil planting, frequent intentional burning took place, which sometimes turned into huge uncontrollable fires, further damaging the wildlife of Borneo, from which it lacks data, in addition to sending millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Borneo's forests are some of the most biodiverse in the world. According to WWF, it is estimated that the island has at least 222 mammal species, 420 resident birds, 100 amphibians, 394 fish and 15,000 plants.
Finding reliable and current figures on species reduction in Borneo is hard work, but you don't have to be very creative to imagine that animal deaths must have gone in a straight line with the destruction of forests. An emblematic case is the Borneo orangutan, whose population has fallen by 60% in the last 60 years and is estimated to decrease by another 22% by 2025. There are three causes of this rapid decline: habitat destruction, hunting poaching and the killing of orangutans to protect the fruit of oil palms, which became the food substitute for the species.
To erase from the map such an ecological system, full of vitalities, humidities and biological diversity, formed over millions of years, where thousands of species lived, is unmatched in the recent history of Earth. If we add to this the destruction to which the Amazon is being subjected, there is no science or computerized models that can predict the consequences that will have in the near future having removed the two largest lungs in the world, nor a voice that can affirm that such a catastrophe it was not the work of homo sapiens sapiens.
Sources:
- Morison, Samuel Eliot and Commager, Henry Steele History of the United States of America. 1st. English edition, 1930.1ra. Spanish edition, 1951. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mexico - Buenos Aires.Mongabay. Borneo. Recovered from
