Happiness is finding something you really love doing and making sure you actually make time to do it!
It’s an obvious thing to say and it’s unbelievably cliché, but I happen to think it’s true. It’s really easy to get bogged down worrying about the small things in life and start pushing the things you actually want to do to the back of your priority list. Really it should be the other way round. Start with what you enjoy, what you want to achieve, and when you want to achieve it by, and then organise your time around that.
I’m writing this from a hostel in Kota Kinabalu on Borneo. I arrived earlier today (it’s gone midnight here), and I’ve been awake for about 36 hours now… so I’m feeling a bit delirious, and will almost certainly wonder why I published such a corny blog post tomorrow. But for now, I’m very happy that I got my Master’s finished early, so that I could come and do one of things I love most of all, which is spending time in the rainforest.
Over the next 3 months, and alongside a team of other students and scientists, I’ll be conducting research in an area of jungle nearly the size of Central Park. This forest has been been logged very intensively, at some of the highest rates found anywhere in the tropics. All of its large timber trees have been chainsawed down, leaving a forest that is visibly disturbed. In fact, a lot of forests remaining in Southeast Asia are now like this: heavily logged and degraded.
But previous research has shown something very important. Although heavily logged forests–like the one we’ll be working in–host less wildlife than pristine unlogged forests, they remain vital strongholds for animals and plants. And crucially, even though they are degraded, logged forests are home to many many more species than are found within monoculture plantations, like oil palm plantations.
The problem is that many logged forests on Borneo are being deforested to make room for these oil palm plantations. So the urgent task at hand is to find ways of ensuring we protect logged forests. We need to find ways of contending with the fact that converting forest to oil palm plantations–which produce palm oil, the most widely consumed vegetable oil on the planet–is a very lucrative activity.
This is where our research will fit in. When a forest is logged, the disturbance makes woody vines and other understorey plants explode in number. Like brambles, these choke or out-compete remaining trees and seedlings, slowing the regeneration of the forest.
But by cutting these vines, it might be possible to speed up the the recovery of the logged forest, accelerating the recovery of timber and carbon stocks. In turn, this could help increase the value of the logged forest, and also provide employment opportunities for forest workers involved in macheting the vines. And in turn again, this could help avert deforestation to lucrative oil palm plantations.
I’ll do a proper blog post and an accompanying Conservation Uncut podcast soon on exactly what we’ll be doing in the jungle over the next three months. But as a taster, I can tell you this: It’s going to be hard, it’s going to be fun, and it’s going to involve A LOT of macheting, at lots of different intensities. It’s very exciting, this is the very first (and therefore the most daunting) year of what will be a 30 year (at least!) research project!
Early estimate: we’re probably going to have to cut somewhere in the region of 30-35 km of trails through the logged forest!!
I don’t know when I’ll next have internet to post. I’ve no idea what the internet situation is where we’re staying, but I’m not hopeful (although it is nice to detach from social media and all that malarkey too!). But I’m really excited for when I can share more about this research, and I’ll try making a few videos while I’m here!
Stay tuned! 🙂
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