Tracing Timber, Law, and Lives in Borneo

Written by Mila Jameelah

Conducting fieldwork in Borneo means stepping into a space where biodiversity and exploitation are constantly in tension. The island was once dominated by vast stretches of lowland rainforest that covered more than one-third of its surface. In just a single decade, from 2005 until 2015, more than six million hectares of this forest disappeared.

These losses were not random. They were driven by the rapid expansion of oil palm estates, pulpwood industries, and other forms of industrial agriculture. What remains today is no longer a continuous forest but rather a fragmented landscape. Large concessions sit next to smallholder plots, abandoned shrubland, and narrow ribbons of degraded forest. This patchwork reflects both the ecological damage and the deep economic interests that shape the island. 

Each point along the supply chain provides an opportunity for legality to be manufactured.

My research examines these transformations through the lens of timber regulation and through what I describe as the practice of green laundering. Green laundering refers to the process through which timber of illegal origin is made to appear legal. This is not achieved in a single moment but through a series of steps that involve sawmills, checkpoints, altered documents, and transport hubs. Each point along the supply chain provides an opportunity for legality to be manufactured. The result is that timber cut from protected areas, or logged far beyond the limits of a concession, can move into the market as if it were produced sustainably. 

This system did not appear overnight. Its roots stretch back to the colonial period, when Dutch administrators established the first large-scale exploitation of teak and other hardwoods for export. After independence, the New Order regime under President Suharto expanded this approach by granting vast concessions to political allies and corporate actors. Timber became one of the engines of Indonesia’s economic growth, but also one of the primary causes of deforestation and social conflict. In the contemporary period, under President Joko Widodo, regulatory reforms such as the omnibus law have been presented as ways to streamline governance and stimulate investment. Yet in practice, these reforms often create more space for oligarchic networks to consolidate their power over forests.
 

The sawmills are the first stations of disguise.

Taken together, this history shows that timber has always occupied a central position in Indonesia’s political economy. It has been a source of wealth for elites, a driver of infrastructure and state revenue, and at the same time a cause of ecological crisis and community dispossession. What I observe in the field is the living outcome of this long trajectory. Rivers serve as highways for logs. Villages live with the daily presence of trucks carrying timber to sawmills. Checkpoints become sites where documents are adjusted and illegality is obscured. These everyday realities are the ground-level expression of a much larger structure in which law, economy, and ecology are deeply entangled. 

In the field, history does not sit quietly in archives. It flows with the rivers and hums along the highways. Villagers in Kinipan and Meratus describe the waterways as highways of timber, where logs drift downstream like uninvited travellers, carrying with them the memory of vanished forests. Along the asphalt roads, heavy trucks move in endless procession, each one a reminder that the forest has been converted into commerce. The sawmills are the first stations of disguise. Here, raw timber, freshly cut and stained with the scent of resin, is transformed into planks and boards, acquiring a new name and a new legitimacy. The story continues at checkpoints and depots, where papers are stamped, documents reshaped, and shipments blended until the truth of origin is hidden beneath the folds of bureaucracy. When mapped, these movements resemble overlapping constellations: rivers, junctions, and harbours that together compose a system of concealment so intricate it is nearly impossible to separate the legal from the illegal on paper. 

I hear how conflict is sometimes arranged not to solve problems but to divert attention.

Yet the forest itself tells other stories. In conversations with Indigenous Dayak communities, I hear how conflict is sometimes arranged not to solve problems but to divert attention. Memories linger of the 2001 Sampit and Madura violence, when the spectacle of bloodshed allowed timber exploitation to accelerate unnoticed. Conflict became a curtain; while the world looked at the flames, the forest was being cut in silence. These practices are not uniform across the island. In West Kalimantan, the stage is dominated by local brokers who mediate the flow of timber. In Central and South Kalimantan, the actors shift to the police and multinational corporations, whose presence ensures that exploitation continues under the veil of legality. Each region performs its own variation of the same script, yet the refrain is always familiar: the forest pays the price. 

To stand in these places is to witness a choreography of extraction, where law and illegality dance together in practised steps. It is an academic problem of governance, but it is also a ballad of loss. Rivers turned into highways, sawmills into laundries of legality, checkpoints into theatres of paper and ink. And through it all, the Dayak voices remain like a chorus, reminding us that the forest is not only an economic resource but a home, a memory, and a fragile inheritance. 

Fieldwork unfolds slowly, in fragments scattered like leaves across the forest floor. An interview begins with a whisper and ends abruptly when fear enters the room. At checkpoints, armed men lean against their posts, their silence louder than any question I could ask. Stories arrive in pieces, sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradicting one another, like verses sung out of tune. And yet, each fragment is a truth. Each broken sentence, each uneasy glance, each sudden silence tells me something about the world I am trying to understand. 

To document these traces is not a simple exercise in criminology. It is a form of witnessing.

Taken together, these fragments sketch a picture of survival. Communities walk a delicate line, finding ways to resist while also learning when to remain silent, when to comply, and when to bend. The rice fields, the logging trucks, the river crossings, and the promises of international markets are woven together in this fragile calculus. The fate of the forest is not only decided in corporate offices or government ministries. It is decided every day in these villages, on these highways, in the quiet choices people make about how to live in a system that leaves them few options. To document these traces is not a simple exercise in criminology. It is a form of witnessing. It requires acknowledging that law is not abstract but lived, that ecology is not separate from human survival, and that daily life is co-constructed with forces far beyond local control. What disappears with each felled tree is not only biodiversity but also the security of food, the dignity of livelihoods, and the promise of justice. 

In the end, this research is less about crime as a category and more about entanglement as a condition. Biodiversity loss bleeds into questions of hunger, human rights, and belonging. The forest becomes a ledger where legality and illegality are written in the same hand, where the lines blur until they vanish. And in that vanishing, Borneo’s rainforest—the lungs of the Earth, the home of the Dayak, the sanctuary of countless species—becomes both the stage and the casualty of a story that is still being written.