Online reports – Ecology – From tree to tree using adrenaline strategy

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“Ready to take high risks”: Book title of the Manser biography

“Bruno Manser – The Voice of the Forest”: Ruedi Suter’s book about the missing human rights activist and rainforest activist

From Peter Knechtli

DThis book is breathtakingly written – anyone who has read the first three words (“Dark, dripping forest”) will be able to play through to the 344th page and gain some fundamental insights. It is the material for a film. In a gripping reportage style, Basel journalist and OnlineReports employee Ruedi Suter traces the extraordinary journey of the Swiss rainforest protector and human rights activist Bruno Manser, who saw his life's work in his total devotion to the Penan people living on the island of Borneo in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. Manser has already become something of a myth: he went missing in May 2000 and was declared missing by the courts five years later.

“B“Runo Manser – The Voice of the Forest” is the title of the biography published by “Zytglogge” of a young Swiss man who actually wanted to be a “naturalist” – and in his own way became one – but who, as a young high school student, climbed up into the treetops, preferred to sleep on the balcony rather than in bed, and devoted himself with increasing passion to a life of freedom and in harmony with the natural resources. To this end, Manser developed the ability to make the basic items of daily use himself, largely without outside help. “If only I could go to Sumatra, Borneo and Africa once and live like a cave dweller in the deep, impenetrable jungle among gorillas, orangutans and other animals,” he once wrote in a school essay, revealing his longing to escape what we call civilization.

“Settling in with the Penan,
until bulldozers and chainsaws come.”

Dut it took him a long time to realize his heart's desire for a life in the jungle – but his need to get out did. After graduating from high school, he spent eleven years working as a cheesemaker and shepherd on a Graubünden alp. It was not until he was barely three years old, in the spring of 1984, that he traveled to Bangkok in a jet plane and later to Borneo. With astonished eyes and thirsty for adventure, he explored caves and admired the “diversity of nature's creations”, chewed unknown plants until he felt sick, and made his first acquaintance with leeches and snake bites when he joined the nomadic Penan people, lived with them for six years, partly illegally, and soon spoke their language. The countless natural history drawings of animals, plants and scenes from the everyday life of nomads, which Manser carefully made as if no one had discovered them before him, are less scientifically valuable than evidence of how uncompromisingly he voluntarily exposed himself to the paradise and the dangers of the rainforest. He witnesses how bulldozers cut paths through the homeland of the peaceful indigenous people and workers with chainsaws cut down the most productive tree trunks on behalf of international timber trading companies.

MIt contains numerous quotes from Manser's writings and testimonies from people who accompanied the individualist from the Alpine republic, and Ruedi Suter describes how the adventurer became a charismatic activist who was prepared to take a “high risk”. He takes an intensive look at Manser's network of relationships – including female and complicated ones. In doing so, he brings to light so many, even surprising, names of contemporaries who sympathized with Manser that an index of names further increased the documentary value of the book. A book, moreover, whose first edition was not only printed quickly, but also noticeably edited under time pressure.

“Manser becomes a symbol of resistance.”
of a jungle people.”

GStrengthened by the trust of the indigenous people, Manser becomes an ambassador for the Penan and an international symbol of the resistance of a jungle people against the destruction of their livelihood. What the timber combines leave behind when their work is done are “extermination zones” (Suter) and “battlefields” (Manser). The “white Penan”, as the knowledge-hungry and well-integrated immigrant from Central Europe is called by his hosts in the rainforest, now approaches influential figures in international politics such as US Vice President Al Gore, the German Minister for the Environment Klaus Töpfer, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and Danielle Mitterrand for direct talks. He also works with international organizations, climbs church towers, gives well-attended educational lectures throughout Switzerland and endures hunger strikes until shortly before he collapses in order to draw the world's attention to the existential fate of the Sarawak nomads.

Die Penan revered Bruno Manser – and still revere him today. Even five years after his disappearance, the hero of the rainforest remains the undisputed identification figure in the fight for the existential rights of the small Sarawak people. The fact that the threat to the Penan people became a global issue is Manser's immense achievement, as is his ability to network the desperate groups of residents. In 1989, he brought together no fewer than 40 chiefs, and he was also involved in organizing blockades that seriously hindered logging. That was the forest Manser.

SIn his atmospherically dense reports, often written in the present tense, uter uses his special relationship with the subject being portrayed: he was friends with Manser, he even served as his advisor on certain issues – and he had access to sources and records like no other media professional. But the author must have suspected that Manser's life would become more dramatic: he gradually began to type the conversations with the “voice of the forest” directly into his laptop.

“The media mechanics are like addiction.
They always asked for more.

TDespite his closeness to the now internationally famous symbolic figure Manser and despite his total identification with his goals (“Bruno Manser exudes a feeling of honest selflessness”), Suter does not lose his critical distance from the protagonist of his book, even as a kind of executor. He mercilessly shows how the white bushman, with his stubbornness, uncompromisingness and determination to the limit, not only finds a growing following, but occasionally also shatters the friendship of personal comrades in arms.

BFor all the sympathy that the author shows for the political demands for the protection of the indigenous people, their natural environment and the biodiversity that surrounds them, he clearly reflects the questionable nature of the adrenaline strategy that Manser increasingly used: he cleverly used the growing media interest in spectacular actions to spread his political messages. He just underestimated the cruel mechanics of the media: it has the characteristics of addiction and always demands more. Media sympathy is unfaithful and merciless, it can unexpectedly turn into disinterest in the person who was just being idolized if the drama is not increased: déjà vu! Media Manser also had to learn this the hard way.

Sa parachute jump with the lamb Gumperli – rehearsed in civilian mode with the help of grenadiers from the Swiss army – already sparked controversy, even though it was still being broadcast on television. But when Manser threw himself into the abyss using a specially made pulley construction on the auxiliary cable of the Klein Matterhorn cable car above Zermatt, and a well-known German private TV station only showed the spectacle and did not mention the political background at all, the method of artificial excitement proved to have failed. Not only that: the question gradually arises as to the extent to which the staged media events also served the ego of the main actor. At the height of his event campaign in Switzerland, he had to admit that the success in the fight against deforestation in faraway Sarawak was “below zero”.

AEven the politicians who were well disposed towards Manser and who called for a sustainable timber industry, a ban on the use of tropical wood from overexploitation and a declaration of imported wood in the Swiss parliament were largely unsuccessful. Manser and his fellow campaigners probably had the most significant impact in this country by convincing numerous communities to stop using tropical wood. And that is how it stayed. Rosche Graf, then managing director of the “Bruno Manser Fund” (BMF) and Manser's long-time comrade in arms, began to criticize “activism without strategy” and Bruno Manser seemed to recognize the dead end. The euphoria of the action was followed by signs of resignation and despair. Manser reached a point where he could give nothing more than his life. Consequently, the media response reached its peak when Manser was reported missing.

“The timber companies and governments
remain anonymous juggernauts.”

DThe chronicle of Manser's struggle, which has now been published following the publication of his impressive diaries last year, also documents a somewhat naive understanding of politics and an idealistic idea of ​​change processes where massive economic interests are affected. “Today's politics is not honest,” complained the Malaysian “public enemy number one” in a diary entry, as if politics has ever been and can be “honest”. As it turns out today, another strategy, initiated primarily by the later BMF managing director John Künzli, could be more promising: supporting the Penan with money and technical equipment in mapping their habitat and, based on this, filing land rights lawsuits based on the model of Canadian indigenous peoples.

ISuter is surprisingly reserved in his assessment of the strategic successes, which are central to the survival of the nomadic people. Through the “Voice of the Forest”, Bruno Manser and his radically alternative lifestyle have been given a more differentiated face. The timber companies and their leaders, on the other hand, remain largely anonymous juggernauts, as do the administration and its acolytes from Sarawak and Kuala Lumpur, who are linked by the awarding of concessions. We learn little about them from the “Voice of the Forest”.

“The indigenous peoples are struggling
against ethnocide, ecocide and genocide.

DThis work would have gone far beyond the scope of the lone fighter Bruno Manser's research into the nature of the people. Achieving this would also be a Herculean task: the Penan are only a tiny example of the fate of the indigenous people in general. Ruedi Suter, the son of a veterinarian and a doctor, grew up in the Belgian Congo and is familiar with the glaring injustice of colonialism, comes to a minimal but probably not unrealistic assessment: “War is being waged against the most undemanding peoples of our earth… Well.” The indigenous peoples are fighting for their very survival. Against impoverishment, despair and uprooting.

DThe clearing of the rainforest continues. Every second, an area the size of a football field is cleared. In the space of a generation, we are witnessing the demise of a people who are thousands of years old. The Prime Minister of Sarawak, Taib Mahmud, was not deterred and stuck to his idea of ​​progress. There is no sign of the promised biosphere reserve. Around a hundred companies with more than a thousand bulldozers are driving the devastation in Sarawak. Nobody is stopping them. Not even Bruno Manser. But he has given the forest and its people a voice. The achievements of the man revered by the Penan will only be written by history. Because “Penanland”, according to Suter's sobering conclusion, “is everywhere.”

Ruedi Suter: “Bruno Manser – The Voice of the Forest”, Zytglogge Verlag, 344 pages, 39 francs.

6 December 2005