Plastic scare

At the backyard of my house is a wiremesh basket in which my family has been tossing in discarded plastic containers, mostly mineral water bottles.
After a while we send them to the recycling centre. Mundane stuff. But looking at the filled wiremesh basket recently, i realised that there was an awful lot of plastic containers just one family has been throwing out.
Now multiply that thousands no, million times more. And how many are simply discarded and end up in garbage dumps? And that's just the plastic bottles. What about plastic bags?
A scary thought.

Nature's water park

A stream flowing down the Crocker Range in the outskirts of Kota Kinabalu serves as a wet playground for these children as their parents harvest their orchard nearby of durians, mangosteens, rambutans among others.
The cool, clear water of the stream flows for about 10kms before pouring out into the South China Sea.
Along the way, it becomes a convenient open sewer as it flows past pig and chicken farms, industrial and commercial areas and riverside squatter colonies and has been described as one of the most polluted waterways in Sabah.
And it continues unabated. This will be one of the legacies these children will inherit.

Domesticated cats

I shook my head in disbelief when I read this. The Malayan tigers at the Sabah zoo (technically it's called the Lok Kawi wildlife park) chewing on plastic bags?
Those treating the tiger enclosures like a big refuse bin are obviously witless.
And I I guess those cats must be bored out of their wits to resort to chewing on stuff like that. Then again what else can they do as they fed at regular intervals and need not worry about hunting for their food unlike their endangered cousins in the wild.

Highland veggies

Curious hands unfurl leaves of a cabbage plant at a patch in Kundasang, about 60kms from Kota Kinabalu. For decades, Kundasang has been the centre of temperate vegetable and fruit cultivation in Sabah.
The cultivation of cabbages, carrots, capsicums and asparagus were introduced in Kundasang by Christian missionaries to the indigenous Kadazandusuns of the area in the 1950s.
Sadly though, fuelled by demand for local temperate vegetables, 'outsiders' have been making a beeline for Kundasang and acquired land there. They have resorted to employing cheap but poorly educated Indonesian migrant labour to grow these vegetables. And for years there have been persistent worries that these vegetables contain excessive amounts of pesticide and fertiliser.

Pygmys of Borneo

Photographing these Borneo pygmy elephants were a cinch. Afterall they were confined in their enclusures at the Lok Kawi wildlife park near Kota Kinabalu.
The situation is hardly different for their cousins in the wild, particularly in the Lower Kinabatangan region where tracts of jungles where these pachyderms used to forage have been cleared to make way for oil palm plantations.
As a result, the 150 or so elephants in the Lower Kinabatangan are confined to the remaining fragmanted strips of forests along Kinabatangan river. It makes me wonder what are the chances of these elephants surviving in the whatever remaining "wild" areas of Sabah.

A picture with a few stories

Riding on a boat heading up a tributary of the Kinabatangan River with some friends some time ago, I saw this pile of logs stacked along the river bank and whipped out my camera and began snapping away. Reviewing the picture later, I realised it it said a lot about the environment of the area.
a) small trees some barely 1metre in circumference are being felled for lumber because there are no more bigger trees there;
b) these small trees were likely to have been felled in a secondary jungle that has been cleared to make way for yet another part of an oil palm plantation and;
c) plantation owners are ignoring requirements for them to leave strips of forests along the rivers (or riparian reserves) and instead are planting the crops right until the water's edge though oil palm trees could be wiped out in the event of a flood.
Because of (c) wildlife such as the Borneo pygmy elephants are being squeezed in their remaining habitat (more of that in an upcoming posting).

Defying logic

I really wish I can claim that I took the picture of this orang utan while it was swinging around in the wild.
But I did not. This was a captive primate at the Lok Kawi Wildlife Park near Kota Kinabalu so taking a picture of it was a cinch.
The orang utan remaining in the wild have to contend with a shrinking habitat no thanks to the opening of hundreds of thousands of hectares of land for oil palm and logging.
Speaking of which, I cannot fanthom the Sabah government's logic of logging out a forest that is home to about 3,000 orang utan and then turning around rehabilitating what will obviously be a considerably damaged eco system. At a cost of RM200 million to boot.
Somehow I can't help but feel that some lucky few are making killing from the the logging and then "rehabilitating" what is left over.