LETTER | As an Englishman I have had an unusual relationship with Malaysia, my adopted second country. Currently, I am a professor at a local private university in Kuala Lumpur. My journey here was not all straightforward.

At age 13, I accompanied my social anthropologist mother Sue Jennings into the jungle in Kelantan where she conducted research in the Temiar community, one of the largest of the 18 Orang Asli groups of Malaysia, living mostly in the jungles of Perak, Pahang and Kelantan. 

This all happened back in the early 1970s when there was still wild jungle in Malaysia. I matured among the Temiar. Living among them, I learned a new way of living, adapting and surviving in a self-contained environment that empowered me with skills and abilities to live in harmony with nature. 

The jungle is not hostile if you know how to adapt to its ways. My own senses developed along with the beliefs of the Temiar who ascribe great significance to dreams and spiritual healing.

Among some of my memorable experiences while living with the Temiar are being attacked by a large swarm of ferocious ants on my legs and thighs. On another occasion, I avoided the spitting venom of a spider. I also helped chase tigers away from my village on more than one occasion. 

Most memorable though are the people, the sharing, the generosity. It was with the Temiar that I learned how to give without any expectation and how to never make vain promises. I was adopted into the Temiar kinship network and became an honorary Temiar.

Among the skills I learned from the Temiar include building wooden/bamboo houses without any nails. I am pretty adept with the blowpipe as a life-sustaining tool and can still hit a bullseye at a distance of a hundred yards. 

I am also experienced in midwifery, having helped deliver three babies in the jungle – a skill which I put to good use in helping to deliver three out of my five children at home.

This preamble leads me to my current feelings of great sadness. I grew up in a relatively unspoiled Malaysian jungle. On my repeated visits since then, I have seen the steady decline, the steady destruction, the steady diminishing Malaysian jungle. 

This has nothing to do with aesthetics; an oil palm, a rubber tree or a durian tree can look beautiful. I say this as I witness my Temiar brothers and sisters losing their land, their homes, their language and ultimately their culture.

To most of us, the loss of the jungle is development, its progress, its money, and brings prosperity. Out of sight is really out of mind. Most of us can’t tell the difference anyway between a huge oil palm plantation and a virgin jungle – just a load of trees right? Wrong. 

Monoculture plantations not only rob people like the Temiar of their traditional homelands, but they also create unsustainable habitats for other plants, shrubs and trees and of course the birds and animals. 

Cultures are dying out, animals are going extinct, rivers are being polluted and even the air that we breathe is becoming hazardous to our health. We don’t only wear masks due to Covid. The haze was here, from the burning of huge swathes of forest, long before Covid.

We have lit the fuse to a time bomb that will not only affect the country of Malaysia but will also affect the whole world. We are cutting off the lungs from our planet. Clean air and clean water will soon be the new gold, more valuable and more scarce than rare earth minerals.

It is not too late, the jungle has a remarkable way of renewing itself. We can still stop the rot; we can still put out the fuse. There is a big 'but' coming, it will mean a drastic change to our lives. It will not be enough just to put out the fuse, we will have to give back the plantations to the earth, to the forests. 

We need to engage with the Orang Asli, we need their help to continue. We need to give them their old jobs back to be the guardians of the forest for the good of us all. The Temiars and other Orang Asli can be the saviours of Malaysia and of the planet as a whole.

We do not have to do this on our own, although we should start now and not wait for others to follow our example. I believe it is time to start engaging with the West to discuss compensation. A thriving jungle will benefit the whole world and the West should be helping to pay for this.

I have many ideas to help build this regeneration of the jungle; letting the jungle do its work, creating awareness of recycling, stopping the illegal dumping of rubbish and finding ways to reuse what we no longer value. 

The Orang Asli can help us with all of this. All we need to do is give them back the land we have taken from them. It’s that simple to build a sustainable future that will lead to a better, healthier and happier world for us all. 

We need the Orang Asli, they are our future.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.