By Erica Pohnan | ASRI Conservation Program Manager
I always say that ASRI’s two reforestation sites are like two children: Laman Satong, our older reforestation site that had the fire last year, is like the difficult child that needs constant love and attention in order to thrive. In contrast, Sedahan, our younger reforestation site, is the precocious child that constantly delivers amazing surprises, unasked.
Every time I go there, I am amazed at how tall the trees have grown in less than two years. The site’s peatland soil is far more fertile than the degraded, dry soil at Laman Satong. Many of the planted trees are already over two meters tall. One species in particular, petai (stink bean) has been consistently shooting up like a rocket wherever we plant it.
“We need to plant more of this!” I keep telling the team. They laugh back at me, “But it’s hard to find seeds! The community loves to eat the beans and collects them all before we can plant them!”
Luckily, we happen to have a health clinic that can solve these types of problems. We raised the price of petai seedlings in our list of non-cash payment options. A patient can now cover their entire medical bill with just a few stink bean tree seedlings. (I hope we get a flood of them.)
Also, not only is the site growing well, but it is legitimately changing the worldviews of the community members who work there. Many are former illegal loggers that have been tasked with returning this small piece of the world back into forest. Our site coordinator Yayat says that the workers have told him they can’t bear to think of cutting down a tree ever again after their work on the reforestation site. And believe me, they are extremely proud of what they have accomplished. They really want Sedahan to become an environmental education site so that others can see what the site has become.
Last year, we asked them to replace the old bridge into the site with one safe for school-children to cross. They responded by building an elaborate bamboo bridge with two sets of benches. Benches! The old bridge was so precarious that I used to leave all of my electronic devices at the clinic assuming that I would fall off the bridge into the river. The gorgeous new bridge is stable enough to host 8-person photo ops.
“I had almost nothing to do with it!” Yayat told me at the time. “It was all their idea!” And by the way it took them only 2 days to build.
The workers were also instrumental in stopping further land clearing. In previous years, one community member cleared the 2 ha area next to the site for farming. With the constant coming and going of the reforestation workers, he became afraid of getting reported to the police. So he stopped clearing land. He didn’t plant any rice. Instead, he planted durian and rubber tree seedlings. That piece of land will also become a forest again.
Lastly and most incredibly, the site is already fulfilling its initial purpose — providing a corridor for orangutans to cross between forest fragments and the main body of the park. A few days ago, our newest conservation volunteer Adam came back from a day of cleaning out weeds at the site with news: the workers found orangutan nests. Three of them. He went back the next day to take some pictures. Sorry, he said. There are actually four nests. FOUR!
The Sedahan site continues to remind us that sometimes all the love, sweat and bug bites that go into reforestation work can yield the elusive results we hope for – even a few years earlier than expected. In fact, I just heard today that one of the Forest Guardians visited the last active logger in the community where the Sedahan site is located. The logger is ready to stop. But he wants a job.
He wants to become a reforestation worker.
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