COMMENT | The sound of a forest tree being felled tugs at some primal place of fear in our bodies - the thunder of a trunk losing its structural integrity, the ripping of vines and branches, then an eerie silent millisecond before its full weight hits the forest floor with seismic intensity.

“It’s the sound of death,” remarked Ipa Lian, elder to the indigenous Kenyah family who ran the jungle homestay from where we witnessed the tree’s killing.

I awoke that morning to the sounds of chainsaws. Bleary-eyed, I stumbled out from my bunk to the mechanical roar closing in from two directions, and an acute sense of doom...