Borneo Log: The Struggle for Sarawak's Forests [Hardcover]

William W. Bevis (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Winner of the 1995 Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, this work tells of the adverse effects of rain-forest destruction on native populations. Bevis (Ten Tough Trips: Montana Writers and the West, Univ. of Washington Pr., 1990) describes the conditions he saw and the people he met while on sabbatical in Borneo. "This is a book not so much about the native resistance to logging as a series of stories from inside that struggle," he writes. The author is not an environmentalist but rather an English professor at the University of Montana who has a strong interest in protecting the environment. Clear and easy to read, Borneo Log is recommended for public and school libraries.?Amy L. Paster, Pennsylvania State Univ. Lib., University Park
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 245 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr; First Edition edition (October 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0295974168
• ISBN-13: 978-0295974163
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,369,148 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #99 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Rain Forests

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Third World resources feed First World consumption and waste, November 10, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Borneo Log: The Struggle for Sarawak's Forests (Hardcover)

This is a story written in diary format by the author
who after a year as an exchange professor at Tokyo University
spent part of the next year living with native activists
fighting the resistance to Japanese logging, and Japanese timber
camp managers, on Borneo,the third largest island on earth which lies
just north of the Indonesian archipelago in the South China Sea.
This is a poignant travel narrative as well as a serious environmental
study of the exploitation of third world resources.
The true irony of the story of Borneo's rapdily disappearing
rainforest, and the local corruption and greed which siphon off
most of the profits, while native rights and land uses are
obliterated, (sounds like America in the early 19th century!)
is that most of the timber shipped to Japan
is used to feed Japan's wholesale adoption of American habits:
buy it, use it, throw it away, buy another! Much of the wood is
being used to make cheap furniture
and plywood forms for concrete that are thrown away after several uses.
Unlike America's own trees on vast land masses,Japan has little
to support such habits. This is really another story which is symptomatic
of first world countries exploitation of third world resources - and the
hypocrisy of the United States' condemnation of such practices.