Across the “Conservation District” of Tambrauw

Landscape of Tambrauw. On Februari 2020 small team from Samdhana with John Reid across to Aypokiar, Tambrauw, West Papua. (SAMDHANA/Sandika)

Story by John Reid | Senior Economist and Partnership Lead NIA TERO

Februari 29, 2020

I had the good fortune to spend the last week in the company of a team from Samdhana Institute traveling across the “Conservation District” of Tambrauw, in West Papua. Yunus Yumte, Sandika Ariansyah and Betwel Yekwam were my companions as we traversed both coastline and mountains of Tambrauw. They accompanied me to the region to gather material for a book I’m writing with the biologist Thomas Lovejoy. The subject is the importance for large intact forests in solving three great challenges our planet faces: climate change, mass extinction of non-human species and the loss of human cultures. We are writing about the great boreal forests of Russia, Canada and the United States and the three biggest tropical forests, the Amazon, the Congo and the forest that convers New Guinea, from the Bird’s Head in the West to PNG’s Milne Bay in the East. These five regions hold the great majority of our planet’s unfragmented forest and disproportionately large concentrations of stored carbon, species and cultural diversity.

We started our journey in Manokwari, West Papua’s capital, known as Gospel City because that’s where Christianity first landed on the Island, in 1855, in the form of two German priests. The city was also a base for the naturalist Alfred Wallace, who co-discovered (with Charles Darwin) evolution by natural selection based on his exploration of New Guinea and other islands in the region. We made our way through old oil palm plantations and transmigration areas, crossed a river called Love, and over a ridge into the Kebar Valley, one of the few areas in Tambrauw with flat topography. It’s zoned for industrial agriculture and cattle[1]s. While the investment in infrastructure for this “Agropolis,” as planners call it, was evident, the customary landowners have so far resisted certain elements of the government’s plan; they have dismissed the idea of oil palm. So far there is just a limited area of corn growing.

From Kebar we climbed into the Tambrauw mountains on the Trans-Papua highway. This zone is completely zoned for conservation by the based on provincial and regency Spatial Planning[2] . The “highway” is passable only with a sturdy four-wheel drive pickup and has some of the steepest pitches I’ve ever seen, including in my travel in the mighty Himalayas and Andes. We arrived in the afternoon in Ayapokiar, a village of 19 houses high in the mountains. Samdhana is helping a group here to develop community-based eco-tourism. On arrival we were greeted by several women and the unwelcome news that the leader of the tourism initiative, Agustinus Momo, had fallen ill and traveled in the early morning to seek medical attention in the Sorong city.

I could see that Sandika and Yunus were disappointed by this turn of events, after weeks of careful planning and the six-hour odyssey through on rough roads. But Mr. Momo left a backup plan in place. We would go to the forest with his sister and two other women. In my experience it has been exceedingly rare to be guided in the forest by women. But looking around the village, we didn’t see any men. Not until the village secretary appeared and informed us there were only four others of his gender currently in Ayapokiar. The rest were in Sorong, West Papua’s biggest city, nearly a full-day’s drive to the West. I asked what kind of jobs they get there and was told they don’t generally work. They do something called jalan jalan. My Indonesian language skills border on non-existent so my companions had to explain that this expression means something like “randomly moving about.” It’s a flexible expression that can embrace a variety of purposeful errands as well as just hanging around.

This urban jalan jalan is possible in part because, since 2016, villages in West Papua (and all over Indonesia) receive a lot of money from Jakarta. Ayapokiar got around US$90,000 last year. So, people keep one foot in the village and one in the city, where they can get better health care, accompany children attending high school, visit their families and just hang around. The next morning we set out with Fince Momo, Agustinus’ wife Sopiana Yesnath, and a third guide, Mariana Hae, all carrying bulging net bags and all-purpose mats made from the long tough leaves of a forest plant. At the last moment we were joined by a fourth guide, two-year old Anastasia Momo, and a limping dog named Hunter.

At the entrance to the forest Fince left her sandals and went on barefoot. She and the other two pointed out the plants they use for their mats, to treat coughs, malaria, headaches and stomach trouble, to produce red dye, to make dogs better hunters, for food, to collect resin, to season pork and many other uses. Mariana scaled a narrow trunk and threw down bunches of the delicious langsat fruit. We made camp several hours later in a place called Srokha where the Momo’s had a garden twenty years ago. A Papuan forest may look like an endless expanse of similar trees, shrubs, ferns and rocks to a newcomer, but every place has a name. Srokha means crossroads because that’s what this place was in the time before 2007 when Ayapokiar was connected to the outside world by road.

The highlight of the forest visit was a trip with Mariana down a very steep hill to Iri River. So steep was the incline that if it were any steeper we would be falling. Mariana moved almost as fast as a person falling and had to wait for her stumbling visitors from time to time. The reward at the bottom was worth it. The Iri was running a crystal-clear emerald green, and Yunus, Betwel and I wasted no time stripping down and hurling ourselves into the current. With Samdhana’s orientation, the Ayapokiar tourism group has built a second camp on the riverbank, from which excursions to see birds of paradise can be launched.

This is not tourism for the faint of heart. The terrain is child’s play for our guides and even for little Anastasia. But was a physical challenge for us. The reward is being in an intact forest with the people who know it best, cooking and eating with them, hearing their family stories and learning about sacred places, for instance the mountaintops across the river where traditional Wuon education is conducted. In the evening we relaxed to the sound of Sopiana singing lullabies to her daughter and in the early morning stalked the Magnificent Bird of Paradise in its fastidiously tidied territory.

Tourism is also not for locals whose sole interest is making money from it. Very few groups have so far made the long journey to Ayapokiar, and some of the initially interested villagers have lost their enthusiasm. But Fince told us she wouldn’t trade tourism with its modest rewards for any amount of money from gold mining, for which certain areas in the Tambrauw mountains have been proposed. Her desire is to show people this forest. She wants them to know that the trees and birds exist and to support their conservation.

“Conservation” is a word you hear a lot in the office of Gabriel Asem, the District Head, or Bupati, of Tambrauw. We sat with him in the brand-new building in Fef, a swampy mountain valley three hours from Ayapokiar where the district’s new capital is being installed. There are bulldozers and excavators everywhere. Streets, buildings, a new church and a big hospital are all being completed in anticipation of 1,000 civil servants in what was, until recently, a village.

Mr. Asem explains two guiding pieces of public policy that distinguish Tambrauw: The Conservation District and the Customary Community regulations. The first is an expression of the principle that Tambrau values nature and people’s traditional ways of living enmeshed in it, and that the district does not want large-scale development that disrupts those age-old relationships for ephemeral economic gain. Mr. Asem has rejected mining as a pillar of the economy. The Conservation District has a way to go in translation into specific projects and restrictions and in its integration with national, provincial and village policies and practices.

The government has also opened the discussions to define the Customary Village policy to recognized customary governance (masyarakat adat/indigenous peoples) for handling certain village affairs – conflicts between clans for example – which currently have been lumped in the modern administrative structure in villages, which handles more mundane matters, such as budgets and infrastructure. Tambrauw is trying to align policy with culture in an ambitious way, and Mr. Asem made it clear he needs help from Samdhana and others to make this vision a reality on the ground.

Our last destination was the Kwoor River, the largest on the north coast of West Papua and Betwel’s home territory. He took us to his village where we met with his lifelong friend Derek Mambrasar. After a delay for torrential downpour that turned the streets of the Kwoor village into streams, the two guided us up the Kwoor to a camp on a creek called Sumi. He and Derek took us on an eight-kilometer tour walk to see the difference between forests whose ironwood trees had been logged and others where the stout merbau was still standing thanks to a landowner who chose to not to do business with the concession holder. As night fell, we walked along an old logging road where deer keep the grass cropped like a lawn. A deer grunted in the bush. After a while we left the road and reentered the forest, following Derek down a long slope toward the Sumi. An hour later, Derek suddenly ordered us switch off our headlamps. His beam played on a large kangaroo: dinner. Or potential dinner. The hunter advanced with a quickly fashioned spear, moving his light up in the trees to distract animal from man.

The marsupial escaped and we moved on. Just as we neared camp, Derek spotted a King Bird of Paradise snoozing in tree. He moved swiftly to the tree and, with a leap, snatched the sleeping bird. Before Derek release the terrified animal, we had a close look at the extraordinary red plumage, bright blue legs and the spectacular twin tail feathers that end in coils, green on top and gold underneath. Back on the beach at camp Betwel looked up the bird in the fat guide of New Guinea birds authored by Bruce Beehler and colleagues. We sipped palm wine from a length of bamboo to the sound of a million insects, frogs that bark like German Shepherds and the gurgle of the Sumi.

Tambrauw is a huge opportunity to keep and restore people’s connection with 1.2 million hectares of healthy intact forests. It’s one of the places keeping our plant whole, keeping local people fed and housed, keeping spirits of ancestors close at hand, providing a classroom for traditional education and reminding a visitor what’s possible if people show a bit of restraint and hold onto old knowledge. Samdhana supports customary mapping of clans’ territories in a time of increased development pressure while also looking for the livelihoods that can satisfy needs for income in an ever-more cash-oriented world. Yunus, Sandika and Betwel recognize that these technical fixes need to be accompanied by social and spiritual approaches such as reviving traditional education and fostering traditional governance of tribes, one level above the land-owning clans. I’m grateful to them, the communities that hosted us and to Samdhana for providing a glimpse of this astonishing place.

[1] Tambrauw Regency Spasial Plan, 2013 – 2032.

[2] Based on the Tambrauw Regency Spatial Plan 2013 – 2032: Forests function maps of Tambrauw Regency shows the total forests cover are 1,15 million ha. About 80% are under protection and conservation functions.