The Road to Renah Kemumu...

Over the past week or so my assistant and I undertook an expedition to visit several villages located inside Kerinci Seblat National Park.  Along the way we stopped for a couple of days each in the villages of Renah Kemumu, Tanjung Kasri, and Rantau Kermas, all of which are part of a cultural group referred to as the Serampas.  Over 8 days we covered approximately 100 kilometers, between 50-60 of those on foot, through the Bukit Barisan mountains.  Though the trip was grueling, we gathered an enormous amount of data through interviews, observation, mapping, village walks, focus groups, and just being in the area.  Over the next three posts I’ll discuss various aspects of the journey.

Where is Renah Kemumu?

Map from David Neidel's dissertation; see references

Renah Kemumu is part of the Serampas region of Sumatra.  Serampas is in an isolated area of the Bukit Barisan mountains, and Renah Kemumu is particularly interesting from the point of view of my dissertation research because it is actually inside the national park, and thus the legal status of the village and its farmers is ambiguous, which has led to a significant amount of conflict between the people and the park.  The Serampas people are also interesting for a number of other reasons; they have been in the region for hundreds of years (they claim at least 800) and they have a very strong adat or customary law system.  They also have a language all their own.  Over the past several hundred years the Serampas region was known for its strong magic, and people would come from far and wide to consult with traditional healers and other seers.  Now, though, Renah Kemumu and the other villages of Serampas are far removed from the nearest markets, which is reflected in the price of goods and the cost of transporting agricultural products to market.  For instance, in Renah Kemumu, the cost of gasoline is 12,000 rupiah per liter (US$1.33) as opposed to 4,500 rupiah (US$.50) at the pump.  Moreover, the cost of getting goods from Danau Pauh, located on the main road to Bangko, the district capital, to Renah Kemumu is 2,000 rupiah (US$.22) per kilogram.  This greatly alters the economic calculations of farmers and limits the options of marketable, profitable crops to choose from.  Moreover, the "road" to Renah Kemumu, as we will see in future posts, is difficult to pass in the dry season and impossible to traverse in the rainy season.

For me this is remote.  I refer to Renah Kemumu as "five steps out", which refers to how far away from my home in Hawai'i it is.  To get there you must:

1. Fly from Honolulu to Jakarta, the national capital.
2. Fly from Jakarta to the closest provincial capital, Padang (about 1.5 hours)
3. Ride overland from Padang to the regional capital, Sungai Penuh (7 hours)
4. Take public transport from Sungai Penuh to the nearest market town, Lempur (about 1.5 hours)
5. Walk from Lempur to Renah Kemumu, about 8 hours.  

In my experience, each step takes you a little further out of your comfort zone, and it helps to have a couple of days to adjust.  For me just the feeling of knowing that it would take about 3 days just to get back to Hawai'i is sometimes pretty daunting.

To Renah Kemumu

Making camp along the trail.  

Our first leg took us from the village of Lempur in Kerinci regency to Renah Kemumu in Merangin regency.  Though it’s only 18 kilometers from Lempur to Renah Kemumu, there is no road and the footpath traverses the rainforest of the national park, crossing steeply sloping terrain bisected by several rivers.  I wanted to walk the trail for a couple of reasons.  The first is that it’s the fastest way to get to Renah Kemumu; although it’s only 18 miles from Lempur, because Renah Kemumu is in the park to drive there you have to travel around the periphery of the park, which takes approximately 20 hours.  The second reason is related to the first; the people of these villages and the wider area in general have been pressuring the government for years for a road through the park, which would help people in Serampas get their goods to market.  It would also provide an easy route to the regional center Sungai Penuh (where I live), which would provide access to a variety of goods and services currently only available in Bangko, the capital of Merangin, which is about a day’s drive away.  I wanted to experience the walk as a sort of participant-observation to help me better understand the difficulties faced by the residents of Renah Kemumu.  

We set out at about 2.30 in the afternoon due to delays in transportation from Sungai Penuh (about an hour and a half from Lempur by bus), each of us carrying about 20 kilograms of gear (PhDs get porters, PhD candidates carry their own stuff).  We hiked until just before sundown and made camp between a couple of streams in a “shelter” that had been built by folks that frequent the trail.  My assistant tried to make a fire but failed since all the wood was damp from recent rains (and due to the fact certain members of the party didn't seem to understand basic principles of combustion; I decided not to advise how to make a fire since, after all, part the job of assistant is to be a “forest guide”, and I didn’t want to insult his competence).  We cooked instant noodles on a kerosene stove and settled in for the night.  Fortunately for us it started raining about 3am, otherwise we wouldn’t have experienced the full affect of the rainforest.  

Large, fresh tiger print from previous outing; I've been asked
not to reveal the location of this one.  

The next day we broke camp and set out on the trail.  One of the first rules you learn in the forests of Sumatra is that you never directly use the Indonesian word for “tiger” (harimau) since locals believe that will call the beast.  Rather you refer indirectly to the top predator using terms such as “king of the jungle” (rajo rimbo) or “the old one of the forest” (yang tuo di rimbo).  There are other forest rules to avoid tigers as well; for instance you don’t pee standing up.  We had previously had a close-enough encounter with a tiger, and so I’m always diligent about adhering to the local beliefs.  I'm not the kind that is eager to see a tiger; for me the further away they are the better.  Thankfully we didn’t see any tigers on the trail, but we did see some neat birds (2).  

We finally arrived in Renah Kemumu around 3:30pm, tired and exhausted.  We met a local farmer whose brother we knew, and he was happy to put us up for the night.  After bathing in the river we had a walk around the village, which has about 134 households.  Most of the people here make their living farming coffee or harvesting cinnamon while wet rice is cultivated for household consumption.  We stopped by the local shop, which carries instant noodles, motor oil, and sardines.  At night people watch TV with electricity provided by a microhydro generator in the nearby river, which was furnished by an NGO about 2 years ago.  

Dinner was rice and leafy vegetables, which would be the staple for the next week.  As my new friends chatted I tried to keep up, but the Serampas language is very different from the Indonesian I know, and so I only picked up bits and pieces here and there.  After an interview with the secretary of the village we went to bed for some well-earned sleep.  The next day we wandered around, mapped the village, and talked with residents.  They told us about the difficulties of living in the park, and they all felt like the park constrains the options available to them.  This would be a theme that reappeared in the next to villages we visited, which will be described in upcoming posts.  One of the most important points was about education; there is a primary school in the village but the teachers are perceived to be low-quality.  The nearest middle school is in Tanjung Kasri, about 15 kilometers away (see next post), but this school has similar human resource issues, so most families send their kids to Lempur or Bangko for middle school, which requires money for transportation and boarding, which is beyond the reach of most families.  The closest high school is about 70 kilometers away, but again, most people that are able send their kids to Lempur or Bangko for high school.  The village secretary told us that only about 25% of elementary school graduates go on to secondary school, and the poorer families almost never send their kids out for education.  So there is a vicious cycle here whereby the poorest don't have access to education, which would improve the economic opportunities, and so they are locked into a life of farming on the periphery of Indonesian society.

Notes


(1)  This was before the proposed increase to 6,000 rupiah per liter.

(2)  On the way back we did encounter fairly tiger tracks, a mother and cub, which followed the footpath for around 4 kilometers.  Tigers often follow human-made trails and sometimes ambush prey along the trails.  The presence of the tracks caused consternation in both me and my assistant, who made sure that I was walking in front of him so that I would encounter the tiger first.  I consented, my parang at the ready, because I knew (unlike my assistant), that if tigers attack they generally approach from the rear.  Fortunately we didn't encounter the mother and cub, but we did find the footprint you see in the picture to the left.  As you can see, there is are distinct toes and a heel, approximately two and a half times as long and twice as wide as my assistant's foot.  The creature that made this footprint is a likely never-before seen nor described hominid approximately 20-30 feet in height.  As the first discoverer of this monstrous beast, I reserve all naming rights.


References and For Further Reading


Some material for this post and others comes from the outstanding dissertations of David Neidel and Bambang Hariyadi, both of whom I am also indebted to for personal communication and guidance as well.  If you'd like to read more, you can find their works online.

Hariyadi, Bambang.  2008. The Entwined Tree: Traditional Natural Resource Management of Serampas, Jambi, Indonesia.  PhD dissertation, University of Hawai'i.

Neidel, John David.  2006.  The Garden of Forking Paths: History, Its Erasure and Remembrance in Sumatra's Kerinci Seblat National Park.  PhD dissertation, Yale University.  

Road Construction and Kerinci Seblat National Park Part 2: The Edge Effect and other Ecological Impacts

Cartoon from here.

Few forces have been more influential in modifying the earth than transportation -- EL Ullman in The Role of Transportation and the Basis for Interaction, 1956.

Over the past couple of posts I've been discussing the "road problem" at Kerinci Seblat National Park.  Currently there are at least 32 proposals that would penetrate the interior of the park.  In the first post I talked about why people want roads.  In the second post I described how the lack of roads impacts residents of Kerinci valley while simultaneously suggesting that additional roads might not be the best solution to the problem.  Today I'm going to look at the ecological impacts of roads.  Though as an impartial and neutral researcher I have no dog in the fight, I do think it's important that policymakers have as thorough an understanding of what's at stake before making far-reaching and irreversible decisions.  Most people are not aware of the multitudinous ways that roads alter the environment.  From the actual surface itself to the "road corridor" (the road surface plus maintained roadsides and any parallel vegetated strips) to the interior several hundreds of meters away from the road itself, the road trace shapes the surrounding environment in obvious and not-so-obvious ways.  

Deforestation associated with new roads in Amazon basin.  From Mongabay.

The well-publicized arguments against roads through Kerinci Seblat National Park (TNKS) focus mainly on very visible secondary effects; anti-road folks are worried about the baggage that comes along with a road.  They argue that roads provide access for illegal loggers and poachers.  They also argue that the roads create avenues for frontiersman-farmers to open up new fields to cultivation.  All of these arguments are based on experiences common across Sumatra; in the loose regulatory environment it has proven very difficult to stop forest destruction stemming from roads.  In addition, dwellings and shops tend to be established along the road.  In addition roadkill is an ever-present concern when constructing new roads.  In the US, for example, motorists now kill more vertebrates than hunters, and it's estimated that one million vertebrates are killed each day on roads there.  But besides these commonly-cited concerns there are a whole host of more subtle direct and indirect effects from roads.  Though geographers have traditionally been very interested in roads, networks, and transportation, the relatively new field of transportation ecology has made the most significant contributions to our understanding of these complex impacts on the environment.

Lesser-known Impacts of Roads on Animals and Plants...

The most conspicuous direct impact of roads is on certain large wildlife species.  Specifically at TNKS conservationists worry about how the roads will affect one of the last remaining populations of Sumatran tigers, which are very endangered (1).  Tigers are what ecologists refer to as an "interior species"; this means that they avoid the edge areas of forests.  They also need large "patches" of forest to thrive.  The construction of roads fragments the habitat and thus divides the tiger population into smaller populations.  The tigers won't cross the road to find mates, and in the long run these smaller populations are much more vulnerable to extinction than one large, contiguous population.  Avoidance behaviors have many different causes; traffic noise, visual disturbance, pollutants, and predators moving along the road have all shown to contribute.  This is known as the barrier effect.  Roads also affect tiger livelihoods; Kerley et al (2002) showed that Amur tigers living in roadless areas stayed longer at kill sites, ate more meat, and thus lived healthier and survived longer than tigers living near roads. 

Roads have species-specific effects which also vary depending on location, traffic, and road conditions.  For example, one study showed that moderately traveled tropical roads (as opposed to heavily-used roads) have higher incidents of roadkill for amphibians and reptiles.  Possibly related to this is the fact that blacktopped roads absorb a great deal of solar radiation, re-radiating it at longer wavelengths as thermal energy.  In other words, the road gets hot, which attracts animals like reptiles that use the external environment to regulate their body temperature.

The Edge Effect...

Diagram from Proust Bushland Services

Roads create "ecotones", which are abrupt transitions between different ecosystems.  There are natural ecotones, like the transition between a meadow and a forest, but these are a part of nature and there is usually a systemic equilibrium surrounding them.  Roads emerge out of nowhere and are more or less permanent.  Ecologists use the term "edge effects" to refer to the specific characteristics of these places.  Mortality for certain species (many species of birds fall into this category) is greater at the edge because they are more visible to predators.  Researchers have demonstrated many other subtle effects of roads as edges; for example, vibrations associated with traffic may affect the emergence of earthworms from the soil thus negatively impacted crow populations!  Edges also affect plants; these are areas of increased light which allows opportunistic species to grow rapidly.  There are certain species of plants that are very good at colonizing edge areas, and roads open up new spaces for expansion.  In addition, seeds can be carried and deposited along roads by passing vehicles, which opens avenues for invasive species.  Constructing the road can help invasive species to spread as well.  One very well-known example of this is the spread of Imperata cylindrica, a type of grass commonly found in the US and known in Indonesia as ilalang.  This grass was originally introduced in Florida in the 1940s and 1950s to control erosion.  Though this grass doesn't spread very far on the wind, it moved quickly through the state by hitching a ride on road construction equipment.  In addition, the rhizomes (like roots that help the plant reproduce itself) got mixed up in road fill material which was spread at construction sites.  The rhizomes quickly took root, allowing the grass to spread.  Byt the 1980s the grass was considered a major problem throughout the state (2).  Air turbulence caused by vehicles also might help seeds to disperse. 

Other Ecological Effects

From Chicago Wilderness Magazine

In addition to direct and indirect effects on plants and animals, roads alter the environment in other ways as well.  The impacts of roads on hydrology and streams has been extensively studies.  Roads in hilly areas do a really good job of concentrating water flows.  This has some pretty esoteric impacts on watersheds and catchment areas which you can read more about in the references cited below.  More basically, though, concentrated water flows means that the flow has more energy and generally moves faster than in areas with no roads.  This means that more water enters rivers faster, increasing the occurrence of flooding and the rate of erosion.  Increased erosion creates a cascade effect; when more sediment is suspended in the stream the river gets turbid and it makes it harder on certain aquatic species.  At the same time, all of that sediment that has been eroded upstream has to be deposited somewhere, and so streams silt up and get shallower.  Shallower streams combined with the increased turbidity and less vegetated banks increases water temperature of rivers, which can stress certain species.  In addition, silt gathers behind dams, decreasing their useful life.  Though one road through the park is unlikely to have huge effects on drainage and streams, a lot depends on the way the road is constructed.  And though one road might not have as much of an impact, 32 roads definitely would.  In addition to these, roads serve as conduits for pollutants to enter streams.  

As you can see, there is a lot more to the road than meets the eye.  Researchers have learned much about the ecological impacts of roads, but there is still a tremendous amount of research to be done.  Much of the lessons of roads have been learned via experience.  Australia, the US, and the Netherlands are all countries where the impacts of roads have been studied after the fact.  Hopefully other countries, including Indonesia, can utilize this experience for better policy making. 

Notes

(1)  Estimates as to the number of Sumatran tigers remaining range from around 300 to 1000.  According to recent research, Kerinci Seblat is the biggest remaining habitat for the tigers and has the highest numbers.

(2)  Roads also helped the spread of fire ants, which were introduced to the US in the 1930s in Mobile Alabama.  Though the ants can thrive in any habitat, they are most often found within 150 meters of roads. 

References and For Further Reading....

Coffin, Alisa.  2007.  From Roadkill to Road Ecology: A Review of the Effects of Roads.  Journal of Transport Geography 15, pp396-406

Forman, Richard.  2003.  Road Ecology: Science and Solutions.   Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Forman, Richard and Lauren Alexander.  1998.  Roads and Their Major Ecological Effects.  Annual Review of Ecological Systems 29, pp207-31

Kerley, Linda, John Goodrich, Dale Miquelle, Evgeny Smirnov, Howard Quigley, and Maurice Hornocker.  2002.  Effects of Roads and Human Disturbance on Amur Tigers.  Conservation Biology 16:1 pp97-108.