Paperback: A unique way of life in the rainforests has been destroyed in a single generation. Read this book and weep. But then get angry. - Wade Davis, author.
Money Logging (2014) investigates what Gordon Brown has called "probably the biggest environmental crime of our times" - the massive destruction of the Borneo rainforest by Malaysian loggers.
Historian and campaigner Lukas Straumann goes in search not only of the lost forests and the people who used to call them home, but also the network of criminals who have earned billions through illegal timber sales and corruption.
Straumann singles out Abdul Taib Mahmud, current governor of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, as the kingpin of this Asian timber mafia, while he shows that Taib's family - with the complicity of global financial institutions - have profited to the tune of fifteen billion US dollars.
Money Logging is a story of a people who have lost their ancient paradise to a wasteland of oil palm plantations, pollution, and corruption and how they hope to take it back and highlights the role of corruption as a key driver of tropical deforestation.
"This book investigates two crimes. The first is how a single man, Abdul Taib Mahmud, along with a small group of very rich politicians and businessmen could destroy the richest ecosystem on earth despite not owning it, despite local and global outcry, despite international laws and regulations. Simply put: Who has stolen our trees?"
"The second crime is more subtle. Surely, if my people have lost their ecosystem, their traditional way of life, their clean drinking water, and their freedom to roam the forests, they must have gained something. Yet they haven't. Many of the people of Sarawak are as poor as they were when I was born. And yet, the value of the trees that have been felled is estimated to exceed US$50 billion. This profit has fed corruption, kept oligarchs in power, been used to commit further crimes. Fortunes have moved through the world's financial system, mostly secretly, to places as distant as Zurich, London, Sydney, San Francisco, and Ottawa."
"This book should be essential reading for anyone who uses a bank, buys property, or invests in the stock market. Only by understanding how a rainforest can be converted into a building as far away as the FBI headquarters in Seattle can we hope to stop the kind of corruption that threatens the world's natural places and the people for whom these are home." - Mutang Urud, Kelabit tribe native to the tropical island of Borneo, July 2014.
About the author: A historian by training, Lukas Straumann is the executive director of the Bruno Manser Fund, a human rights and environmental organization that champions the rights of the indigenous peoples of Borneo.
Before joining the Bruno Manser Fund, Lukas was a research fellow with the Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland - Second World War, which was tasked to probe Switzerland’s wartime past. He is the co-author of a widely-reviewed study on Swiss Chemical Enterprises in the “Third Reich”.
Lukas was born near Basel, Switzerland, in 1969. He holds a PhD in History from Zurich University and worked as a freelance journalist for various Swiss media. His first book, Nützliche Schädlinge (2005), covered the history of applied entomology and the discovery of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane).
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