Boven Digoel lies in the very eastern corner of Indonesia, in Papua province, on the island of New Guinea. “When you fly over the island, still even today, mostly what you see is unbroken expanses of rainforest,” said Dr. Bruce Beehler, a biologist at the Smithsonian Institution, who has spent the last four decades studying the trees and birds of New Guinea.
Some of the species that evolved here are iconic, like the brightly coloured birds-of-paradise. The island has high levels of endemism, with species found nowhere else on Earth.
Many more species remain unknown to science, yet to be discovered by outsiders, Beehler said. “I can assure you that the forests of the Digul [River basin] are super-rich, and have probably millions of species of invertebrates, micro-organisms, and plants,” he told us.
“They may hold in their chemistry all sorts of odds and ends that could be very useful to humankind in the future if we were to get a grip of them.”
Today, the forests of Boven Digoel lie under the shadow of the Tanah Merah project, a plan to log billions of dollars-worth of timber from an area almost twice the size of Greater London, raze what remains and replace it with a monoculture palm oil plantation.
Those involved in the project have employed all the tools of corporate secrecy to disguise their identities and cover their tracks.
We delved into the politics of Papua and followed the money across borders, from Indonesia to Malaysia to the Middle East, to unearth the hidden story behind the project. – Via Garamut News.
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