Friend’s 500-mile walk for rainforest
'Hoon Teo, of Central Manchester Meeting, is aiming to raise £10,000 to defend the rainforest home of Borneo’s orangutans.'
A Manchester Friend is walking 500 miles in the next twelve months to raise funds for a lawsuit to protect Malaysian people from environmental exploitation.
Hoon Teo, of Central Manchester Meeting, is aiming to raise £10,000 to defend the rainforest home of Borneo’s orangutans.
Writing on her Just Giving page (www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/hoon-teo-4), the native Malaysian says: ‘In 2015 the Penan and Kenyah tribes defeated the building of a mega-dam that would have drowned over 1,000 hectares of primary rainforest on the island of Borneo, home to many endangered and iconic animals including the orangutan. With the support of international NGOs they want to create a national park, the Baram Peace Park, which would be managed in perpetuity by indigenous tribespeople. However this project is in grave danger because a multinational logging company has obtained… concessions to log in Baram.’
The Manchester Friend pledges that for every mile she walks, she will raise at least one pound for Baram rainforest. The recently-formed group Stop the Chop UK is now working on a strategy to help halt the sale of conflict timber from the Borneo rainforest in the UK.
Hoon Teo raised the issue with Manchester Friends when she told them about allegations that the international company was granted logging rights without consultation with local indigenous people. As this is a requirement of the international certifying body, any agreements made at COP26 or COP27 to protect forests are ‘meaningless’, she claimed.
