Project Description
Between 1998 and 2004 I did a string of consultancy assignments in Sumatra: for the World Bank as part of their team supervising the massive GEF investment in Kerinici-Seblat National Park West Sumatra , for FFI on their elephant landscape project in Aceh and for ProForest doing HCV assessments in Lampung.
By this time I had the trust and credibility to go in deep: I knew the questions to ask, where to look and had the experience and conceptual resources to interpret what I saw. This is where I came to understand the complexity and nuances of resource extraction and the limits of international and state capacity to govern the social order of the frontier.
This was a disturbing, if insightful, period of my carrier – a time when the atmospheric melancholy of Radiohead’s OK Computer became the sound track of my life. On one flight home I drafted The End for Indonesia’s Lowland Forests published in Science as a sad appeal for everyone to get real and act.