No neat boxes.

(For anyone who even thought to start reading - this is a bit of a confused mumble to help my head out.)

This is all a bit more complicated than I had naively thought initially. Umm. A few days ago, I had lunch with my lovely translator and her husband, who was putting up a somewhat aggressive, or just very passionate argument for oil palm plantations, for forest clearance, basically for development. (It was a good exercise for my assertiveness training.) Why shouldn't Sarawak/Malaysia/Southeast Asia develop? We did years ago, logging and clearing our forests, building roads and houses and laying down cables for our televisions. Sarawak apparently still has atleast 70% forest cover left (whatever 'forest' means). And people want development. They want to send their kids to good schools, and have a big car and a big television, and be able to travel to see their families (which are often quite spread out here, and quite large/ginormous). The State is really pushing development too. By 2020, it is both planning to have 1 million hectares gazetted under some form of State protection and have 1 million hectares of oil palm plantations. I wonder which it will achieve first. And people seem to love oil palm. I've been surprised by how much knowledge people have about it's growth requirements and behaviour as a crop and commodity. One guy yesterday was telling me about how beautiful oil palm was to look at from the air (most airports in Malaysia are visible as a grey strip within a neatly-patterned green palmed sea). He said it was nicer to look at than paddy, which you see when you fly into Thailand apparently (these Sarawakians aren't afraid of getting on a plane - something they share with the island-bound Brits).

So, it looks nice and the people like it and the State completely adores it, giving out young palms to farmers to 'help' them establish their plantation (whilst carefully managing their income so that the State big potatoes get a cut)....and apparently it's a beauty on peat.

I also had breakfast with a Chinese entrepreneur, who was one of the first developers to establish an oil palm plantation on peat. He's a cowboy in Sabah, the other Malaysian state on this here island. And he's a hard worker. He said, which is going in by thesis at all costs: "everything is bad about growing on peat". It's really expensive to sort out the drainage and build roads and buildings. He can't get insurance for the big diggers that he uses because they disappear into the peat too easily; the insurers won't insure something they can't see. Yet, oil palms are productive enough that they even pay for themselves and much more when they're grown in an acidic, mosquito-ridden, sinky swamp.

A partially-inebriated gentleman I talked to last night, when I was partially inebriated, said that the only peat swamp forests left in 10 years will be those gazetted as National Parks by the State. There are 22 National Parks in Sarawak, 2 cover peat swamp forests, and for sure in one of those two, there is still logging happening. The other has crocodiles.

People here probably know more about crocodiles than they do about peat. All credit to the crocodiles, but they aren't so good at storing carbon, and would probably eat an orangutan rather than provide a suitable habitat. But there is still a lot of forest left in this clammy place. Do Sarawakians need these peat swamps? They do for water supply in some places, and that seems to be an acknowledged argument for their conservation....but not everywhere. In other places they need more shops. There are so many shopping malls here in Kuching (selling different forms of unneccessary plastic poo). But people are allowed to buy plastic poo if they want, right.

I think I need to rethink my arguments....and possibly my life. I'll start with my arguments. I did see a beautiful bird at the edge of a plantation a few days ago. Sometimes I wish I was a birder.