Disasters have plagued the country for the past six months. The memories of the devastating flashfloods in Jember, East Java and the landslide in Sijeruk village in Central Java earlier this year remain fresh in our minds, not to mention the horrific earthquake that rattled Yogyakarta and Central Java over a month ago.
Within the past week, floods and landslides struck again, this time in Sulawesi and Kalimantan. Hundreds of people were killed in Sinjai, Bulukumba and three other South Sulawesi regencies, in Gorontalo and in Banjarmasin in South Kalimantan. Thousands of other people were displaced, their belongings and houses swept away and the supporting infrastructure in the areas severely damaged.
These latest disasters may be too much for the country to bear, with the government admitting a shortage of emergency funds to provide survivors with decent humanitarian relief. It was perhaps a coincidence that the office of the State Minister for the Environment released Tuesday its latest report on the widespread environmental degradation the country is suffering.
The report highlights the increase in forest conversion, in which forests are razed to make way for mining or other business purposes, and illegal logging. Such practices have led to the country's deforestation rate shooting from 2 million hectares per year to 3.5 million hectares last year.
Although not going so far as to link environmental degradation to the natural disasters common here, the State of the Environment Report 2005 does provide several clues as to why such calamities happen.
(Emphasis added)
EDIT
http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid=20060629.E01&irec=0No, no, we wouldn't want to do anything as
alarmist as that, now would we?
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