Asia's majestic forests — issue #22

Two years ago, I managed to catch The Great Animal Orchestra, an exhibition of animal recordings captured in the wild by bioacoustician Bernie Krause. In a pitch black room, the bright bars of a spectrogram flashed on the walls, freezing each species' cries in the forest.

It was a cacophony. A portrait of the wild, teeming with glorious biodiversity.

Decades passed, the chirps, howls, and barks slowly faded, even as the sound of machinery droned. The spectrogram pulsed feebly. The black spaces between each cry grew longer...until there was silence, broken only by the occasional green blip. 

An unnerving, dark silence—the sound of our forests today. It was among the most powerful data visualisations I've ever experienced. 

Asia contains just under a fifth of the world's forests—but what forests we have. From mangroves to tropical dry forests, our woodlands still hum with life and beauty. Forests here have nourished people fror generations, from forestry resources and tourism to the centuries-old practice of forest bathing. 

Yet our forests are fast vanishing, with all the life they support. Commodity-driven deforestation, agriculture, forestry production, wildfires, and urbanisation have erased millions of hectares of forest habitat and threatened wildlife. Palm oil, in particular, is a major culprit in Southeast Asia. 

Governments around the region have made efforts to stop deforestation, and many communities are rallying around conservation organisations, sustainable agriculture, and policy changes. But what can we, as individuals in our larger societies, do to save our forests from being silenced further?

We've been writing about conservation here for some time—with more understanding and appreciation of our forests, we hope, more people will want to save them. From choosing sustainable palm oil to adopting wildlife, there's much that we can do. A week after Earth Day, we bring you some places to start. As always, we're happy to hear from you—let us know your thoughts at hello@kontinentalist.com, or simply reply to this newsletter.