UK it’s been fun but I’m leaving ya!!! 🙌🏽 Back on the road to Papua, Sulawesi and Borneo tomorrow! 🎥I’ll be shooting some films addressing the proliferation of roads into wildernesses such as the trans Papuan highway. Almost always, roads such as these result in massive legal and illegal logging and mining that can decimate some of the last true wildernesses on earth. Here’s an example, with one tiny, almost harmless looking track in the bottom left of the photo ↙️, snaking it’s way into a limestone karst hill in Myanmar. This now gives access to people who may wish to turn this monolith into a cement mining site. Got to build those shopping malls some how I guess... 🤷🏽♂️
The rarest great ape on earth - the recently discovered Tapanuli Orangutan, is currently being threatened by deplorable tactics used by the corporation - North Sumatra Hydro Energy #nshe. They are attempting to buy influence, pressuring scientists, making false statements and most recently have hired a PR firm, all in order to secure a hydro-electric dam project that would decimate the apes last refuge in Sumatra. The project is being funded by the #bankofchina as part of the #beltandroadinitiative which is rapidly funding infrastructure projects with massive environmental implications. With only 800 of these apes left (the one pictured is not one of them but it’s cousin, the Sumatran orangutan, that I encountered in North Sumatra last year), this project is an environmental disaster in the making and should never have been approved. If on balance you’re for protecting forests and endangered species over idiotic corporations bank statements, be sure to make your voice heard on the petition #avaaz has set up calling for an end to this disaster of a project.
