Nothing can prepare you for the shock of seeing how Borneo is being destroyed by the world’s hunger for coal. I emerged from the rainforest to see a pile of felled trees the height of an apartment block and a crater the size of several football pitches. For the previous two hours, I had heard the drone of the diggers get louder and louder until they started to drown out the natural sounds of the forest.
I was accompanied by Swanto, the local village leader, who explained how his village’s water supply had become polluted by waste from the mine. His village, Maruwei, is just one of the many indigenous settlements paying the price for the coal boom under way in Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo.
