Espejos de Aztlán; Lindsay Holt

Hello and welcome to Super programa Espejos de Islam. I am Cecilio García Camarillo. Good night. We are going to be talking in English with the friend Lindsay Holt. It's not that he doesn't speak Lindsay Holt in Spanish. Lindsay Holt is an artist, very committed by Santa Fe. He has worked in the course of the years with many projects related to the environment. Lindsay, I want to thank you for driving in from Santa Fe for tonight's program. That's really appreciated. Thank you, Cecilio. I'm very happy to be here. Locally, Lindsay, you were telling me that back in 1989, you worked on a tree planting project near Avicue, you know, Mexico. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Yes, Cecilio. In the summer of 1989, the highway department of the state of New Mexico brought the project to widen highway 84 through the valley in Avicue. It was such a devastating presence that we experienced there.

Those of us who were living there, I felt I had to organize some type of more effective action to heal the scars that were looking like they were going to remain. And organized a lot of artists to come together. We had a large exhibition at the Avicue Inn and raised several thousand dollars. And we were able to purchase many seedlings and trees, which we then replanted into the environment, the following spring on Earth Day, which was the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. Great. Lindsay, I've been to your studio, and I've seen a lot of your artwork you'd like to do large pieces. Very powerful art that you do. A lot of it relates to the environment. But there's a difference between doing art that reflects nature and to be an activist, environmentalist. How does that fit you? Do you feel comfortable with my calling you an environmentalist?

Well, I feel very comfortable with that classification. I think what you're referring to is the fact that from time to time, I seem to set aside the paintbrushes and focus on other ways to manipulate and have other tools. And I feel comfortable with those as being more progressive avenues of creation, if you will. In January of 92, the New Mexican published, the New Mexican of Santa Fe published an article. And the headline reads, Painter often distracted by other compelling issues. Do you feel like your environmental activities or distractions from your artwork? No, I really do not, because in the long run,

you have to be able to be flexible and to maintain a very open creative mind and the flexibilities that you apply. You should be able to switch your domain, go from one medium to the next. It's very good to be accomplished and focused in one area, but to be able to switch almost on an immediate basis and go into something different and be able to understand the issues and the parameters, and then try to work effectively within those context is very challenging for a creative person also. So I don't feel it's distracting to switch over to environmental issues at all. We have a main issue that we want to discuss tonight, and that is where your interest in the environment has taken you. You were mentioning to me a while ago that there is a gentleman that visited with you in Santa Fe, Bruno Mansour, and he is a gentleman, one of the central figures in a movie

that was shown recently in Santa Fe, a very powerful movie called Tong Tana, and along with his presence, Bruno brings in a very heavy environmental issue, and that brings us to what we want to be talking about tonight, Lindsay, and that is the island of Borneo, and maybe we can start by explaining where Borneo is geographically so that people can know what part of the world we're going to be talking about. Well, we're talking about the third largest island on Earth, and it's situated in the South China Sea about 1,000 miles east of the Malaysian Peninsula, which comes out of the area where South Vietnam and Thailand and Cambodia are, and the area that we're exclusively dealing with in this particular issue is known as the State of Sarawak, S-A-R-A-W-A-K,

which joined the Federation of Malaysia when it became a new country in 1963. So that's pretty much the area. It sits in around Indonesia. It's close to Indonesia, and also above Borneo are the Philippines. Correct. So that's more or less the part of the world that we're talking about. Exactly. K-Stapasando, and K-Stapasando, and when Borneo is divided, it's two countries actually, no? That part that Sarawak is part of the... It's basically the northwestern third of the island. The other two-thirds are devoted to the country of Indonesia. What is happening in Sarawak? Well, it's a very, very crucial and important timely issue of our times. In fact, I just finished writing a very lengthy article for Crosswinds magazine, which will be on the streets tomorrow over Santa Fe and Abu Kerkay. And the theme of the article was that this particular issue is nothing less than a metaphor

for all of humanity here at the end of this 20th century. We are dealing with the very oldest rainforest on the face of the planet Earth, one of the most biodiverse forests on Earth, and one of the very last native indigenous nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes of humanity, the nomadic pinan, that's P-E-N-A-N, they have been living in this forest peacefully for thousands and thousands of years. They have such an incredible knowledge base of their rainforest home that it would far surpass many of the capabilities of modern science, I assure you. Their pharmacology alone is absolutely mind-boggling. The plants that they have knowledge of and the things that they're able to derive from the various plants is amazing. For example, they have 10 different biodegradable fish poisons, which they derive from about 12 different plants,

which they shoot into fish with arrows through the water, which will not harm the person who eventually eats the fish, or the aquatic ecosystem is completely biodegradable. Of course, you and I wouldn't last for more than a few days over there, and they've been there for many, many years. And unfortunately, their home is also the site of the highest rate of commercial deforestation on the face of the earth right now. And we do not hear a lot about this issue over here in the United States because we are so accustomed to hearing about the Amazon and Central America, and those areas which are much closer to us. However, suffice it to say that this particular forest, the oldest on earth, is going at a rate twice that of the Amazon. 850 hectares per day. The logging is going on 24 hours per day. Even at night time, they have huge floodlights mounted on the front of the bulldozers. It is actually an incredible tragedy in the making, and it's happening even as we speak.

The deforestation or the cutting down of the trees begin when Sarawak became part of Malaysia. More or less, this is the historical pattern after colonial times, and this was a British colonial area. There seems to have been a pattern of local government that was set into motion by colonial presence, which had an elite appointed system where certain people who were more or less paid off were able to run the area on behalf of the colonialists. It's very typical of what may have happened here in the Americas over many centuries also. You see that the forest became the only thing eventually that were left to the eventual state of Sarawak when it joined the country of Malaysia that the new state politicians had left to exploit, because the capital over in Kuala Lumpur took control over all other resources, such as oil and tin and rubber, and this is an area which produces a great amount of those.

The forest were the only thing left for them to exploit. Over several generations, four or five generations in this century, there's been a tremendous amount of inside government corruption with those who are politically connected, family and friends, to receive the most lucrative concessions for logging. In fact, the one fellow who seems to be the central satanic character in the whole novel, if you will, unfortunately, is a man who's appointed himself the Minister of Environment and Tourism and owns 45% of the lumber industry. Who was that individual? I hate to name poor James. His name is Datuk James Wong. There was a huge scandal in Japan in 1987, in fact, and it was revealed that the Japanese government, and this is just one instance, gave Wong's company, which is called the Lim-Bang Trading Company,

over 200 million yen in foreign aid to build, I guess, what, forest logging roads. Uh-huh. And how is the cutting down of the trees affecting the native population in this case? Yeah. In this case, very severely. I should tell you, Cecilio, that I'm very familiar with the different various forms that these types of destruction can take, particularly here in the United States and the Americas, and also in the Southern Americas and Central America. And the information that I've read about this particular brand of deforestation is really scary because we have a government that we're dealing with here, which is not only lying about that, to jump the track for just a minute. They're now lying about the people, and there's tremendous human rights abuses going on that they're covering up.

But getting back to the land, they say that they're doing selective cutting, which, of course, is obviously ridiculous. It's very hard to do selective cutting in a dense, dense rainforest, and so they're really wiping out everything. And what happens afterwards is you have a completely denuded area, and it is a rainforest. So as soon as it rains, and the soil begins slipping and falling, and then all the rivers become polluted, the fish die, the animals flee, all the basic things that we're taking place in the rainforest all come to a stop. And it's an amazing process. I had an opportunity to see some photographs, although the trees they are incredibly large trees, and what is interesting is that most of the root of the tree is visible above ground. Do we know anything about this tree's Lindsay, how big they are, what kind of trees they are? Well, we know, generally, that as with most rainforests on the earth,

these are the most biodiverse areas on our planet, and one thing we know is almost how much we do not know, because there seems to be a great deal of knowledge and information about the rainforest, which our modern societies have not yet gained. For example, some of the things that come out of these very trees that we're talking about, and this is one of the very real tragedies involved in this displacement of these native pinan people from their environment, because they alone have the keys to these stories, and this is not mythological that I'm not making this up. This is factual. This is extremely factual. This is not like the movie Medicine Man that just came out with Sean Connery, whether you like that or not. This is the real thing here. These people know all about these plants, and they are not coming from specialized, literate type educations like we have. If we had a botanist or herbologist who was an expert in frogs, I'm told to go over there, they would only be able to identify flowers or frogs,

whereas a native pinan would come along, he could identify everything, and tell you 15 different ways to use it, you see. So what we know is nothing compared to what the pinan know, and if we let them go and let their environment go, we may never know what's really there. So the survival of those people is in jeopardy right now? Absolutely. Are they being moved around as the logging companies keep moving in and expanding? Yes, they are. What is happening is the pinan, once nomadic pinan, are being forced into resettlement camps, and there are estimates of anywhere between 7 to 10,000 of the pinan total population with perhaps 500 to 1000 who may be left as nomadic hunter gather in the forest, and they're literally running for their lives. And what happens when they get into the resettlement camps is they're basically out of their cognitive universe, their whole universe, psychospirically and environmentally, that they were once in harmony with, is now not present,

and they are forced into these government constructed long houses, where they're expected to be good little Indians, and create tourist artifacts and what have you, and they have no relationship anymore to their surroundings, they have no proximity to the medicinal plants, which they once had harvested over 50 different species of medicinal plants that they used for everything from antidotes to stimulants, even as contraceptives. They can't get that anymore, they can't hunt. Their whole lifestyle is completely taken from them. So they really have nothing better to do than to sit there on the side of these clogged rivers, watching all these logs that was once their forest, come down the river on the way to being processed to go to Japan, which is the other thing I want to bring into. Yes, you've mentioned... Oh, we're out of time. No, we want to ask you, we're going to take a short musical break,

and then I want to ask you if we have been able to identify some of the companies that are coming in and buying all those wood, but I believe you selected... I don't know, you just went to the collection. I'm not sure what it is either, we don't know what Lindsay selected, but it's what is it called, trees or... Something about the forest, this is only when we could find in the vast library of trees, so we're going to play that and see if it relates to what we're talking about tonight. Music Music Music Music

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