Project Details
This project was done in conjunction with international company, XL, making their entrepreneurs Business School event carbon free. The trees went into the Matthew Faid Memorial Forest which was the initial Sideman planting with PATT. Sideman is in the foothills of Mount Agung in South-East Bali. The landscape is green, characterized by clean flowing rivers and many low hills with very steep slopes. Most of the slopes have been cleared of native vegetation, which was then replaced with crop plants and trees. Some slopes were never revegetated and retain only a cover of long grass, which is cut and sold for roofing. Although the hills still look green there is very little wildlife, few birds and the monkeys have disappeared.
In Sideman, the Village Head, Cok Mayun, remembers when monkeys and birds still inhabited the hills. He tells a story... ‘When I was a young man, I frequently went up into the hills. There were many birds and monkeys. One day I came across a family of monkeys with a very large leader. He was about to climb a banana tree and so I said to him, please help yourself to half of the bananas, but please leave the other half for me and my family. He took exactly half the fruit and left the rest, even when they were ripe and yellow.’
It is widely agreed that one of the main problems for native wildlife is a lack of food. The native fruiting trees, which used to be common even after the forests were cleared, have slowly been cut down one by one, as locals had need of cash or timber. In the old days, these trees were valued and kept for their abundant wild fruit. Children especially loved them, but unfortunately they also provided high quality timber so as the resource became scarce and demand continued to grow, prices climbed higher and their fruit became far less important than the money they could fetch as wood.
Typically, these long-living trees produce enormous amounts of flowers, providing critical sources for bees to forage and subsequently, many small, tasty fruits perfect for birds, bats and monkeys. In November 2008, one thousand five hundred trees have been planted on the very steep slopes above the village. Cok Mayun is enthusiastic about bringing back the birds and monkeys and he looks forward to the day when children, on their way to ceremonies at the hillside temples, will once again be able to pick wild fruits. There's a long way to go to bring nature back to the degraded forests, hillsides and riverbanks of Bali, but PATT hopes Sideman will provide a model for many such projects as businesses decide to 'give something back' and local people once again, realise the value of their natural environment.
