[Kabar-indonesia] Time Magazine: Indonesia's Eco Hero - Tisna Nando

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Time Magazine
Issue cover-dated 
October 9, 2006

Asia's Environment: Rising to the Challenge

Tisna Nando, Indonesia

All Is Not Lost

By Jason Tedjasukmana/Jakarta

photo: Seeds of hope: Nando promotes rubber 
farming as a sustainable alternative to logging. 
Kemal Jufri/Polaris for Time

The 2004 Asia tsunami destroyed villages, towns and lives. But in
calamity there is sometimes opportunity_a wiping of the slate that,
for better or worse, allows people to start over. In the aftermath of
the disaster, Tisna Nando, a 35-year-old environmentalist from
Indonesia's North Sulawesi province, saw that kind of clean-slate
opportunity. As an education-and-awareness manager at Fauna & Flora
International (FFI), a U.K.-based environmental NGO, Nando has worked
for the past two years to help the people of devastated Aceh province
create a better future for themselves by learning to live in greater
harmony with their surroundings.

"It's difficult to talk about conservation when people are still
trying to find a place to live," Nando says. "It was easier to speak
about the environment when people were not so traumatized." After all,
she and a handful of colleagues at FFI work in Calang, a district of
Aceh where most of the homes and businesses were flattened by the
tsunami, where half of all residents were killed, where survivors are
still struggling to make enough money to put rice and fish on the
table.

But Nando has slowly built trust among the locals. After the tsunami,
the first order of business was damage control. So Nando started a
program employing 300 people who cleaned up mangroves ripped out by
the waves and replaced them with live plants in order to restore the
shoreline's potential for shrimp and crab farming. An additional 25
hectares were planted along the coast to act as a natural barrier
against future tsunamis. Now, with normalcy returning to the lives of
the area's fisherman and farmers, Nando and her colleagues talk to
residents one-on-one about the long-term benefits of preserving their
environment.

Progress is often measured in small victories. For example, Nando says
her group convinced a local official to refrain from opening a
restaurant that featured dishes made from the area's wild birds. But
they are also tackling greater challenges. Aceh's forests are the most
ecologically diverse in Indonesia, but clearcutting has taken a heavy
toll. FFI was able to convince the heads of six Acehnese villages that
reckless logging was destroying their future.

In July, the village leaders signed an agreement banning the clearing
of any more forests in their districts. Since then, "the water is much
cleaner and not yellow like before," says Muhib Budin, a local leader.
As part of the project, Budin received 12,000 rubber-tree saplings
from FFI to plant as an income substitute for the village. Hashimi, an
ex-logger who before the tsunami cut down more than 10 trees a month
to satisfy demand for Aceh's precious seumantok wood, is also thinking
long term. "If we replant the trees by the lake," he says, "maybe we
could increase eco-tourism in Aceh." Those are hopeful words from an
island where hope has been in short supply.

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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