Kuda laut yang menakjubkan boleh menjadi ikon pemuliharaan laut dan perubahan iklim. Bagi menarik minat rakyat Malaysia, seorang penyelidik mengkaji kepelbagaian budaya yang diamalkan. Diterjemahkan oleh Hanna binti Norhisam.
SETIAP KALI ahli pemuliharaan Reana Ng masuk ke kedai perubatan tradisional Cina (PTC), beliau akan dipandang aneh, katanya dengan ironi. “Mereka tahu anda tidak datang untuk membeli ubat tradisional… Mengapa sebenarnya anda datang ke sini?”
Tanpa menghiraukan pandangan mereka, Ng terus mengunjungi kedai-kedai sebegini. Sejak Mac lalu, pelajar Ijazah Sarjana ini telah mengumpul maklumat mengenai kepelbagaian penggunaan kuda laut dan bagaimana rakyat di Semenanjung Malaysia menggunakannya.
(Gambar: Kuda laut kering digunakan dalam Perubatan Tradisional Cina selama berabad-abad | Foto:Reana Ng)
[Updated 26 August 2021] The fascinating seahorse can be a marine conservation and climate change icon. To get Malaysians on board, a researcher looks at cultural practices.
WHENEVER conservationist Reana Ng walks into a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) shop, she gets a “look”, she says wryly. “They just know that you’re not coming in to buy traditional medicine…Why are you here?”
Undeterred, Ng continues to visit these shops. Since March, this Masters student has been gathering information on the many uses of seahorses and on how people in Peninsular Malaysia use them.
(Photo: Dried seahorses have been used in Traditional Chinese Medicine for centuries | Image by Reana Ng)
MANTANANI native Mohd Faizul bin Madali is twiddling his thumbs waiting for the pandemic to end and tourists to return.
He is a divemaster and has been without work since lockdowns began in March 2020, relying instead on his family to support him.
“Previously, my life was diving, eating, sleeping,” says the 22-year-old. “Now, it’s eating, sleeping, eating, sleeping.”
He says virtually everyone in his village of 100 people has been dependent on tourism. The same is true of the other, larger village on Mantanani, the only inhabited island of a small group off Sabah’s northwest coast.
Back to fishing
With tourists still unable to visit, many islanders have returned to fishing as a way to make a living. As Faizul remarks, there are very few alternatives: “Where else are we going to get an income if not from the sea?”
When asked if they use fish bombs, he is quick to respond: “No, no, no! Not any more.” If fish-bombing is taking place around the islands, he is adamant the perpetrators are “outsiders, maybe from Kota Kinabalu [on the mainland]”.
Faizul has reported to the authorities the intrusion of non-local fishing boats during lockdown, incensed that they used nets in shallow waters, destroying the coral.
“I felt sad because the coral used to be alive, but they killed it. Thank goodness there are laws [to tackle this]… Tourism also depends on corals being beautiful and healthy. Who wants to look at dead corals? And Chinese tourists are very particular!”
Faizul (second from right) joins other Reef Check Malaysia divers to “plant” new corals on a Mantanani reef destroyed by fish-bombing (All images: Adzmin Fatta / Reef Check Malaysia)
A certified “eco-diver”, Faizul is also part of Reef Check Malaysia’s Mantanani Youth Club, a capacity-building conservation initiative, and takes an active part in the NGO’s reef surveys.
Unlike other islanders, however, he has not turned to fishing to make ends meet: “How would I know how to do that? What I can do is bring people diving and teach them how to dive.”
Juggling between development and environmental conservation is difficult when it comes to forest-use. But there are ways to be more inclusive. This is Part 4 of Forest Files.
MALAYSIA has had decades of continuous economic and population growth since independence.
In 2019, the country achieved a gross domestic production (GDP) of about RM1.5 trillion, more than a hundred-times the GDP in the 1960s. The population almost quadrupled over the same period.
However, before Malaysia industrialised in the 1980s, it exploited its natural resources, including its most accessible at that time: primary forests, some of the oldest in the world.
(Public participation allows citizens affected by forest-use change to voice out; pictured at the North Kuala Langat Forest Reserve degazettement townhall are [clockwise from top] Kg OA Pulau Kempas’s Tonjoi Bin Pipis and Batin Raman Pahat, and Kg OA Busut Baru’s Rosnah Anak Senin. Pics by Shakila Zen/KUASA)
To understand forest-use dynamics in Peninsular Malaysia, one must know how state governments – the sole authority on land use – perceive forests. This is Part 3 of Forest Files.
IN AUGUST 2019, when then Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad launched a forestry exhibition in Kuala Lumpur, he took the audience down memory lane.
“At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, as the Prime Minister of Malaysia back then, I made a pledge that Malaysia is committed to maintain at least 50 percent of our land mass under forest cover,” said Mahathir.
(Photo: Logs, like these harvested from a permanent reserve forest in Johor, are an important source of revenue for many state governments. Pic by YH Law.)
Decades ago, rampant logging looked set to decimate forests in Malaysia. That is no longer the case but a less familiar force is driving forest change – one over which state governments have full control. This is Part 2 of the Forest Files series.
THE 1970s were the golden age of logging in Peninsular Malaysia, veteran loggers told Macaranga.
