Indonesian Ecological Restoration & Education

The Jepara Forest Conservancy’s founding work – its original inspiration and efforts at organizing participants and forming goals – was provided by a handful of community members in Jepara who identified a strong need to improve environmental conditions on the Mount Muria peninsula. None of them had previous experience engaging communities to create forest conservation and restoration plans. They applied the initiative to learn from trial and error and to engage organizations and people who might offer appropriate expertise in a collaborative way toward realizing JFC’s vision.

Agus Rofiqkoh is both a principal member of Jepara Forest Conservancy’s founding team and a current member of its Board of Directors. At nearly every turn during JFC’s history and growth, Agus has been a critically important contributor, both initiating some ideas and facilitating implementation of nearly all of them. Agus Rofiqkoh is an example of what can happen when people grow and envision beyond models of “business as usual” that too often fail to protect natural environments and social contracts. Agus understands that success in implementing environmental restoration strategies and raising social empowerment is integrally dependent on creating strong sustainable businesses. Agus has become an environmental and social activist and spokesperson in Central Java Province. The core theme of his vision to improve social and environmental integrity is: market-oriented solutions.

Agus was born in Semarang, Central Java in 1968. He is the second eldest in a family of eight children. At age thirteen he was forced to drop out of school, both because his family could not afford tuition and because he had to find work to contribute to his family’s aggregate income. At age fourteen, Agus began to work on a passenger bus that traveled between Semarang, Java and Medan, Sumatra. During the eight years he worked for the bus company, he observed Sumatra’s vast primary forests become exploited by international lumber and mining concerns who regard Indonesia’s natural capital as a narrow set of commodity streams rather than a tapestry of intricately interconnected ecosystems and cultures. The business models brought little benefit to local populations: they displaced many people to urban slums and marginalized their native cultures. Ecosystems that had existed since time immemorial, providing bounty for many communities and for countless generations, were destroyed over a few decades. From the early years of Agus’ experience working on busses, he recalls encountering quite a lot of wild life along forest-lined Sumatran roads. He remembers meeting wild boars, elephants, various apes and monkeys and, once, a leopard. Toward the end of his time working with the bus company, some of the forested stretches had been transformed to wastelands dotted with stumps, as far as his eyes could see.

                  Beginning in 1992, Agus determined to learn wood furniture production. In 1998 he partnered with a Singaporean concern that operated furniture showrooms in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. Agus believes the significant wealth that was available to many in the teak furniture industry between 1997 and 2002 was precisely related to the devaluation of the resource that occurred when Suharto lost power in 1997. Indonesia grew chaotic during the years immediately following Suharto’s rule. The nation-wide theft of Indonesia’s state-owned teak plantations was one expression of the chaos. Wood deriving from one-hundred and fifty year old teak trees – a historically high-value material – was commonly sold for a fraction of its value. Teak furniture from Indonesia, priced ridiculously cheap, flooded the developed world’s markets.

                  Agus grew wealthy during the boom, paying college tuition for two of his younger siblings, and lost nearly everything during the bust, when theft and gross mismanagement finally exhausted Indonesia’s mature teak stocks. Agus learned from the experience that, in the future, he would only do business that fairly served its employees and circumspectly respected natural environments. Today, Agus is the Director of Indonesian Operations for Tropical Salvage. Tropical Salvage’s mission is to work in Indonesia’s rural communities to create good, steady, eco-positive jobs building well-crafted, aesthetically distinctive, value-competitive, salvage-wood products; to assist in implementing conservation, forest restoration and environmental education projects to protect the world's remaining primary tropical forests; and to advocate for best responsible social and environmental practices throughout the business world. Agus’ work with the Jepara Forest Conservancy is not compensated with money but it is rewarded enormously with inspiration and satisfaction.

                  Today, Agus lives in Jepara with his wife, Heni, and his two daughters Meri, aged ten, and Feni, aged one. Agus’ son, Luki, aged twenty, attends law school at the University of Semarang.