Like a slithering red snake, the dirt road cuts through the jungles shrouding an endless row of hills.
At the first sign of humanity, the logging road stops abruptly: a crude barrier of branches tied together by dry palm fronds and a handwritten warning: "When We Say No, We Mean No."
In the middle of the ancient rainforest in Borneo, this simple blockade erected by a jungle tribe has become the symbolic frontline in the battle to protect forests from a logging industry eager to harvest the bounty that feeds much of the world's thirst for timber.
"Logging has been the biggest disaster for the forests, and its indigenous people," said Raymond Abin of the Borneo Resources Institute in Sarawak, Malaysia's biggest state that occupies a part of Borneo island.
The blockade "is the last resort of the natives after all processes of negotiations and consultations failed," he said.
Protection of forests is not just a Sarawak issue.
It is part of UN negotiations for a replacement to the Kyoto Protocol, amid new evidence that deforestation contributes to about 20 percent of global warming.
Leading the campaign in Sarawak are former headhunting tribes, who say logging is destroying their ancestral lands and snatching their customary rights over the forests.
There are other concerns that logging has damaged Borneo's ancient ecosystem and is pushing rare plant and animal species such as wild orchids and the clouded leopard toward extinction.
The forests are "what you inherited from your ancestors. During the headhunting days they sacrificed their lives to defend it," said Harrison Ngau Laing, a lands rights lawyers who represents some of the tribes.
Laing, himself a tribesman, said some 100 legal cases have been filed by the tribes against logging companies and the government. None has been resolved.
But opinion is divided among the impoverished tribes, some of whom live in settlements so remote they can be reached only on foot after days of walking through jungle trails.
To them, the logging roads are a lifeline to civilization. In the absence of development, they see the logging companies as the bearer of basic needs such as clean water, electricity, toilets, schools and transportation.
"I want children to go to high school. I don't want them to stay here in the village where there is no school. Maybe when they come back they become doctor or teacher," said Seluma Jalong, a tribeswoman who taught herself to speak passable English.
Jalong, 36, lives in Long Main village, which is reached from the logging road after a five-hour walk and boat ride.
About 70 percent of Sarawak is covered by forests, which are home to 24 minority indigenous tribes including the Penan who number between 10,000 and 15,000.
Long Benalih, where some 28 Penan families live, is one community. The leaders of Long Benalih set up the blockade on Nov. 8 on the road being built by Samling, Malaysia's second biggest logging company, which earned 9.1 billion ringgit (US$2.6 billion) from wood exports last year.
Ajaing Kiew, a Penan leader who lives in Apoh, a few hundred kilometers from the blockade site, said his area has already been flattened by logging.
"It is sad to look. There is nothing of the forest. That side is already red earth. At least there is forest left here," he said, accompanying two reporters to the blockade site.
Timber is Sarawak's second biggest export after oil and gas. The state government began giving concessions to logging companies in the 1960s, and widespread cutting of trees began in the 1970s and 1980s.
The move was too late, said Abin who described bulldozers clear-cutting swaths of forests with trees as old as 500 years.
According to the Bruno Manser Fund (BMF), a Swiss-based activist group, more than 90 percent of Sarawak's primeval rainforests have been logged in the last 30 years. Re-growth has restored the greenery but the new trees are not of the same quality.
Samling, however, insists it practices sustainable logging. It has also voluntarily agreed to oversight by the private Malaysian Timber Certification Council (MTCC).
The council provides an internationally accepted certification of good logging practices, which includes dividing a logging area into 25 blocks and harvesting them once in 25 years. This is supposed to give the forest time to regenerate.
Experts say the gap should be at least 45 years.
"By and large, it is fair to say that logging in this region is not sustainable," said Junaidi Payne of conservation group WWF's Borneo program.
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