Flying to Kalimantan
Have you ever wished you could fly? Google Earth is a wonderful computer program that allows you to explore remote areas that you’d never visit in person. You can fly (virtually) across the world and zoom it to see things in fantastic detail. Visit http://www.google.com/earth/index.html to download the free desktop software. Perhaps the best place to start is to type in your own home address into the “fly to” box. You’ll be amazed at how much detail you can see.
Google provides a sightseeing tour when you first open the program to show you some examples of the power of their system. Not everyplace in the world has equally high resolution satellite images. Not surprisingly, Google provides exquisite detail of their own headquarters in California. You can almost read the license plates on the cars in the parking lot. You might also enjoy exploring the Grand Canyon in Arizona and the Forbidden City in Beijing, as well as some of the other places they’ve identified.
Google Earth is a good way to explore Indonesia and to learn about environmental issues there. For example, the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations can be vividly seen in G.E. images.
As we discussed in this space last month, Indonesia has the third largest area of tropical rainforest in the world. And, until recently, Indonesia also had the highest rate of forest destruction of any country. Between 1900 and 2005, Indonesia lost nearly one quarter of its primary forest. The two main drivers of this terrible loss are logging of valuable tropical hardwoods, and land clearing for palm oil production. Generally, the two are linked: first the hardwoods are mined from the forest (generally illegally), and then the slash and remaining trees are burned to make way for a palm oil plantation. 
Although Indonesia has little heavy industry, the country ranks third in the world in carbon emissions, primarily due to forest clearing and burning. In recent years, palm oil has been in great demand—particularly in Europe—for biodiesel fuel. This has driven up prices and created a land rush for plantation space. Together, Indonesia and Malaysia produce about 80 percent of all palm oil in the world. Indonesia alone currently has at least 17 million hectares of oil palms, and corporations would like to double that area.
Some plantations are truly enormous. Google Earth has identified one in central Kalimantan (you can recognize areas with interesting features even from way out in space because they’re high resolution. Anything Google considers worthy of expensive high resolution images is likely to be worth looking at).
For example, copy and paste the following coordinates into the “fly to” box in the top left column in GE: 2 31’ 07.19” S 111 58’ 59.43” E. This ought to take you to a huge oil plantation with a geometrical array of harvest roads and hundreds of millions of oil palms. The area is irregularly shaped, and not every place is filled with trees, but I’d estimate that it’s roughly 115 x 70 km (or about 1 million acres). It isn’t clear if it’s a single operation or several, but it’s an enormous area of monoculture forest. Zoom in (controls in the upper right corner of the frame) and you can see individual trees and even recognize the palm fronds that identify them.
There’s some good news about forest protection in Indonesia. As part of a $1 billion deal with Norway that we discussed last month, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has declared a two-year moratorium on new permits to clear primary forest. This should protect 64 million hectares of forest mainly in Kalimantan, Irian Jaya, and Sumatra. Perhaps even more encouraging, the Indonesian palm oil giant Golden Agri-Resources (GAR), a subsidiary of the global conglomerate Sinar Mas (palm oil, logging, coal mining, paper and pulp manufacturing, finance, real estate, and food production in Indonesia, China, Canada, UK, Australia, and Singapore) owned by the Widjaja family, has agreed to stop destroying primary forest for oil plantations. This decision was a result of public protests that led the world’s largest food company (Nestle), the world’s largest bank (HSBC), and a global restaurant chain (Burger King), among others, to declare they’d stop doing business with Sinar Mas as long as they continue to destroy forests for palm oil. Orangutans, tigers, countless species of birds, insects, and tropical plants as well as our global climate are the beneficiaries of this new policy, if Sinar Mas truly adheres to its promises.
However, new plantations continue to be created. Here’s a plantation under construction in a hilly area in eastern Kalimantan: 1 2' 16.03" S 116 41' 10.44"E.
