In the mountains, about one hundred kilometres to the north of Martarpura, they set up camp. Their objective was to collect data, soil and botanical samples to determine the suitability of the region for reforestation. The failure of the first attempt at setting up tree nurseries for reforestation, which had been launched almost two years previously, had been put down to the embezzlement of funds by Rami Latif.
Marcillac was to examine the technical reasons for the failure so as to avoid the same mistakes in the future. Ohlsson was present to record the disaster and to alert the world authorities and institutions for need of urgent action through treaties and legislation.
It had not been so simple, the plantations had started out successfully enough, but apart from the lack of funds, the result was the almost total failure of the trees that had been planted.
The barelands as the name suggests, was uninhabited, no cultivation, no trees, and consequently nobody to protest about its use.
The ground had been prepared by previous generations of loggers and shifting cultivators who had left the soil naked and exhausted.
The natural forest that surrounded the barelands fell away in a matter of fifty metres, giving way to a vast undulating landscape covered with thick alang-alang grass. The only relief was an empty road that wound its way into the distance.
They sat on the remains of a long dead tree listening to the buzz of the insects. A slight breeze set the tall grass moving in ripples.
‘That soil is practically sterile,’ said Marcillac pointing to the red earth.
The laterite soil was a mixture of alumina and iron oxides with very little else. The red colour was typical of tropical soils that had been formed under conditions of unimpeded drainage and due to an abundance of iron oxides.
The soil had been once covered with a peaty mat of organic matter, and a downward removal of iron compounds and clays. The quantity of humus had been small, which was normal in tropical forests, under rainforest cover the laterisation had been prevented from proceeding to its furthest extent.
The humus had also maintained the fertility of the soil. It contained large amounts of plant nutrients, which as they became mineralised were added to the upper layers of the soil. These were then washed down into the deeper layers of the soil, where they were absorbed by the roots, carried up to the leaves and the stems and back down to the humus when the leaves and the plants died.
‘Look!’ he said as he let the dry red earth run through his fingers.
‘Its just dust and gravel, there’s practically no organic matter in this soil.’
A continuous cycle of life and death perpetuated the forest, but there in the barelands the cycle had almost come to a stop, practically the only plant that grew on that denuded leached soil was the hardy grass. Thirty years before, the earth would have been covered with a dark brown humus, a black mass of partially decomposed organic matter mixed into the soil; it maintained the fertility and the water retention in the soil. In that way, the vegetation counteracted the downward leaching of soluble substances and brings them back to the upper layers.
The team from the Martarpura Forestry Department, with the hired help, carried the baggage to a campsite one kilometre from the lake and set up the tents under the eyes of Soetrisno. It would take them a couple of hours to straighten things out and set up the field kitchen.
In the meantime, Marcillac and his men after examining their equipment and baggage, set out to survey the surroundings under the hot sun. They transpired profusely, the humidity was in the nineties; the weather conditions were exactly what should have favoured a luxuriant mass of vegetation.
In the rainforest climate, where surface water is low, water tends to flow down into the soil, carrying with it the soluble nutrients, which are continually washed down into deeper layers of the soil and removed by the water as it flows to natural collection areas in rivers and streams.
One of the most important features of rainforest soils is their low level of plant nutrients. In fact, it is a contradiction, that rainforest vegetation should be so luxuriant and that leached and impoverished soils of the wet tropics bear such extraordinarily prolific forests, compared to the richer soils in savannahs or much less luxuriant forests.
‘You know John it’s the rainforest itself that sets up the processes that counteracts the impoverishment of the soil, there is a closed cycle of plant nutrients,’ Ohlsson explained.
The soil under its natural cover reaches a state of equilibrium in which its impoverishment progressed extremely slowly. On the other hand, plant nutrients are continuously released by decomposition of the bedrock, the trees roots reach down to these and suck up the nutrients.
Some of those substances are fixed in the hard material of the plants, others remain dissolved in the sap but in the end, they are all recycled to the soil by the death and decomposition of the plants.
‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, its here that you understand the meaning of that, death and resurrection, it would have gone on for almost ever if man hadn’t broken the cycle,’ Marcillac told Ennis solemnly.
They walked back down to the lake, leaving the help to organise the camp. From time to time, a bird lifted out of the grass, there were few insects. The warm wind blew softly as they looked towards the distant deep greens hills that rose on the other side of the lake. An island emerged out of the water here and there, surprisingly covered with dense vegetation in contrast to the grass-covered hills; even a few dominant trees towered up like lonely sentinels. On the lakeside the two men stood silently looking out over the water, the wind whistled softly over the surface lifting light ripples. There was eeriness, a sense of abandonment.
In the past, the soil had been continuously enriched in nutrients sucked up by the roots. It was strange though; the majority of the roots, including the feeder roots had been in the upper layers of the soil.
In mature soils the wealth of the nutrients was mostly stored in the living vegetation and the humus, which were linked together in an almost closed cycle. The decay of the bedrock deep beneath the soil made up the small losses.
Such a closed cycle made it is easy to understand why the soil, which had once supported a dense rainforest, had become barren, very soon after the land had been cleared and planted by the shifting cultivators.
It was the explanation for the barelands; nature’s delicate balance had been upset. The Forestry Department had made a futile and incompetent attempt to recreate a forest-a man made forest-one that would have needed an artificial life support system.
When the original forest had fallen under the axe, the reserve of nutrients had disappeared with the wood or released into the soil. Burning and exposure to the sun had destroyed the fragile layer of humus.
‘As I once read, the capital of the forest was sold off, at give away prices, a heritage lost forever in a spree that lasted two or three years,’ said Marcillac. ‘Before it was like those hills over there,’ he pointed to the dark green undulating cloud-covered skyline, draped by a dense forest.
‘Let me explain to you, climatic climax is generally regarded as the unchanging equilibrium of the forest, that’s relative to the human time scale of course, on a geological time scale all forests will gradually change.’
‘That’s a little difficult to grasp in one go,’ Ennis said visibly absorbed in thought.
‘That’s understandable in a layman,” Ohlsson said with a wry laugh, ‘but when politicians, financiers and industrialists start to squander our common heritage, then I’m sorry to say it becomes very sad and concerns us all.’
TELEVISION AND OUTBOARDS
Borneo Pulp Page 33
