The little village of Pa Lungan sits in a grassy clearing, high in the hills of Malaysian Borneo, in a region called the Kelabit Highlands. The people here—a few dozen—belong to the Kelabit tribe, one of more than 50 Indigenous groups living on Asia’s largest island. They have sturdy wooden homes with slat glass windows, metal roofs, kitchen sinks, and TVs. Generators and solar panels power a few lightbulbs, laptops, and mobile phones (typically used to play music and games). Most households have a kitchen garden, an outdoor toilet, a cold-water shower, and a laundry line. A patchwork of coops and fences keeps chickens and buffalo in check. Just beyond these homes and yards lie rice fields fed by mountain waters and hemmed in by trees. It’s a tidy, orderly life in Pa Lungan—and it’s an easy walk to some of the most biologically diverse rainforests on Earth.
The Kelabit, like their ancestors, move fluidly between the village and the forest in a culture where notions of domestic and wild intrinsically overlap. Villagers plant fruit trees in the forest; they move wild herbs from the jungle to their kitchen gardens. “Daily living” and “the bounty of the forest” are deeply intertwined, as the Kelabit anthropologist Poline Bala, based at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, explained to me. In the past few years, new research has begun to shift scientific perspectives—and my own—of the Borneo landscape. It is not the wild, untamed place many people have long assumed it is. Rather, the rainforest we see today bears the marks of long-term human intervention.
A Sense of Place
In 2006 and again in 2013, I visited Pa Lungan as a journalist. During my initial visit, I became acquainted with a villager named Walter Paran. He is a thoughtful middle-aged man with slow and deliberate speech, a calm composure, and muscles shaped by a life lived off the land. In 2014 I wrote about Paran in a travel story that documented my search to find him after the intervening seven years to see how he and his neighbors were surviving in the face of widespread logging.
When I asked Paran questions about his life on both of my trips to the highlands, he took me on walks to convey his sense of place. Everything he knows and needs to know about who he is and who his ancestors were can be found in the physical world around him. Right from Paran’s door, narrow footpaths lead through the village and into the woods where his forefathers lived. Beyond that is a damp, dark forest of ancient old-growth trees that grow straight and tall, their trunks as wide as pickup trucks. A dense canopy of branches forms a shield against the equatorial sun. Below these trees is a complex undergrowth of thorny plants and winding vines, ferns with coiled fronds, and pitcher plants that swallow flies. The ground is slick with mud, and the air smells musky. Giant rats and wily snakes hide from sight. Leeches stand upright, twisting and reaching for anything that moves. In that ancient forest, wild boars root about the forest floor, and deeper inside the jungle, rarely glimpsed honey bears leave their tracks.
