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Monday, Oct 13, 2008
Why is the CNN News I watch overseas so much better than the watery slobber they show in America?
Sep 5, 2003 | My thanks to those of you who endured my philosophizing from Borneo without thinking even once about Ted Kaczynski.
Without meaning to launch into another eco-rant, I'd like to respond to those who've remarked, as people always do, that my rain forest excursion must have been remarkably sticky, bug-ridden and uncomfortable. Mention of the tropical jungle (or, to use the more p.c. term, rain forest) inevitably brings to mind two things: heat and bugs -- the proverbial "steamy jungle" and all its frightening discomforts. A Vietnam vet who hauled 60 pounds of gear through the bush might recall differently, but in fact rain forest weather is quite pleasant. Heat and humidity are high, but never extreme, flora and fauna existing in a kind of self-regulating equilibrium. Such is the beauty -- everything in balance, with no overabundance of a particular species. That includes insects. Large (or malarial) they can be in certain exotic exceptions, but their volumes are kept in check. Five treks now on four continents, and I can count the number of mosquito bites I've suffered on one hand. Ten minutes in the Maine woods and I'd be stung to oblivion.
Borneo, along with the Amazon basin and parts of the Congo in central Africa, contains the last surviving stronghold of tropical forest in the world. Yet even here it exists only in diminishing stands, steadily bought up by Chinese timber companies or converted into cheap farmland. (Rain forest soil is actually very poor, and many of the farms yield a limited harvest before they're abandoned.) From the plane you can see expansive logged-out tracts, the land reduced to stretches of what looks like desert; rivers and coastlines, sometimes far from the forests themselves, mustard-colored with silt and runoff. You don't get a sense of the damage until you view it from the air, though what I saw over Borneo didn't look as awful as what I saw over central Panama from an Aeroperlas commuter plane in 2000 -- vistas of devastation that literally reached the horizon.
On Borneo, Malaysia has cordoned off some protected parks and introduced selective, sustainable logging. In the Indonesian portion of the island the situation is less hopeful. Millions of hectares are annually clear-cut for timber and burned. In 1999 Indonesian forest fires burned out of control and created what some have called the 20th century's biggest environmental catastrophe. Southeast Asia became covered by a thick pall of smoke that caused airport closures as far away as Singapore. I remember reading stories about birds, bats and insects that became disoriented in the smoke and drifted hundreds of miles out to sea. Sailors were startled to see huge flocks, desperate for food and water, landing randomly on ships in the open ocean.
Anti-environmentalists love to accuse the other side of harboring a "plants before people" bias that, in their minds, undermines our dominion over nature. This is the main reason so many Christian fundamentalists despise eco-activists. In truth, and as any savvy conservationist will remind you, humanity and the rest of the natural world are codependent. If you're not sure why you should give a damn about the decimation of tropical foliage, it affects the planet in several ways, none of them particularly helpful to people or animals. It destroys habitats, kills off and isolates countless species, and is slowly but surely eliminating the richest and most varied concentration of life to be found. Moreover, the burning of forests results in a kind of candle-at-both-ends nightmare of carbon dioxide. Fewer trees remain to absorb the climate-altering gas, while the burning of the trees itself releases thousands of tons more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
So see it while you can.
In the end I survived five days in the equatorial woods and more than two weeks in three different Islamic countries, touching down in Newark, N.J., without a single shrapnel wound, tropical disease or leech bite. Many readers were surprised that I'd chosen to visit Bali, but on the island's tranquil and exotic north coast worries of terrorism were about as nonexistent as snowstorms.
Meanwhile I have nothing but nice things to say about the service and punctuality of Malaysia Airlines. My jaunt through Dubai, Borneo, Bali and back involved 10 separate Malaysia Airlines flights, from 13-hour transoceanics to 50-minute domestic hops. All 10 of those flights arrived and departed precisely on time, or, in several cases, early.
On the three-hour leg between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Denpasar, Bali, I was astounded to count five cabin attendants aboard the 737-400, a jet with seating for fewer than 150. But even more striking: What's that strange silver glint coming from my tray, flashing in my eyes as I enjoy a view of Singapore? Why, it's an actual stainless-steel butter knife! Cheers to the clear-thinking Malaysians, who must defer to TSA ridiculousness on routes to and from Newark and Los Angeles, hiding the metal cutlery when the Americans come to dinner. "Please note that due to safety and security regulations," states the inside cover of the economy class menu, "plastic cutleries [sic] may be on occasions be [sic] provided instead of our normal silver/stainless steel ones."
Give them credit, they're trying.
Alas, I was just about to type that Malaysia appears both an airline and a country that really has its act together, when I came across some comments from the nation's prime minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. In a fresh copy of the New Straits Times, Mohamad, speaking from a conference in Damascus, unloads a litany of bizarre Jewish conspiracy rhetoric. "Today, [in] the US government, many of the members of Congress are Jews," explains Mohamed. "If they are not Jews, their staff members are Jews. So by controlling the Press and media, controlling the money through banking, and controlling now the Congress, they have become the power in the United States."
Oh. Just what a nation of impressionable young Muslims needs from its head of state. Perhaps I missed more of this mongering when I was back in Dubai.
I greatly enjoyed Dubai, incidentally, and found the Arabs extremely gracious and polite, though I don't know if I can describe how it felt to swim in the Persian Gulf, where according to the hotel bulletin board the seawater temp had hit 35 degrees C. That's just about 95 for Fahrenheiters. I have been to some hot countries, but I have never, ever, felt anything like the midday scorch of Dubai in August. The splash from a 95-degree Persian Gulf wave was akin to having warm syrup poured over your shoulders.
Overheated, I retired to my room and tried to decipher the headlines on Al Jazeera. The most I could make out was the occasional, vaguely derisive "Bush," until I switched to CNN. And that's when the frustration really set in.
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