Hi,

If these rainforest areas have been designated conservation or heritage sites, surely it is an illeagal act to take areas of land such as this - especially when there is so much wildlife at stake !?!

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear friends,

We are enclosing an invitation from the Bruno Manser Fonds and the Society for Threatened Peoples to a media conference on Thursday, 3 May, in Zurich.

Both organisations are calling upon Credit Suisse, in anticipation of its shareholders' meeting on 4 May, to reimburse the indigenous peoples of the rainforest living in Guyana and Malaysia who are the victims of the initial public offering that CS coordinated for Samling, the Malaysian timber group.

Leading experts and indigenous representatives from Guyana and Malaysia will report on the alarming, and partly illegal, activities of the Samling Group. The press conference will be held in German and English.

We would be pleased if you could attend the conference and are asking you to register with the reply coupon.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Lukas Straumann, Director
Bruno Manser Fonds, Basel / Switzerland

Christoph Wiedmer, Director
Society for Threatened Peoples, Berne / Switzerland

Here is the nonsensical reply from Samling. It looks like bullshit, it sounds like b/s it...etc
It must be b/s
Dave

*******

Dear Dave,

We are concerned with the allegations and want to set the record right. Samling is a responsible forestry company and practises sustainable forestry adhering to local and international forestry standards set out by authorities in the areas we operate namely Sarawak, Guyana and New Zealand; we took bold step to undertake the voluntary certification of responsible forest management - this is our policy across the board in all areas that we operate. We reiterate that we care for the indigenous people in the areas where we operate. There are over 24 different indigenous groups in the Malaysian State of Sarawak alone and we are pleased to have assisted every group living in our concession areas, including the Penans.

We are saddened and concerned about this negative perception. As a public listed company, we are exposed to criticisms, but we operate transparently. Samling met with Bruno Manser Fonds on 3 May 2007 to address the group’s concerns. Samling appreciates those who are genuinely concerned with the environment and local communities notwithstanding any misconception that they may have against us. We are always willing to continue our dialogue with concerned parties and are grateful for the opportunity to point out and explain unfounded allegations and to set the record straight. We would be glad if you can spend some time to go through our response to some common misconception about Samling in the link below.

http://www.samling.com/faq.html

Thank you.

Best regards,
Communications Department
The Samling Group

Well, thank you for sending this, and as you requested I have spent time reading your FAQs. But if you open up roads into the forests, even though this may assist indigenous people in getting medical assistance or education, then there will be traffic coming the other way, and unless human nature has radically changed in the last five minutes, I'm afraid some of that traffic will have with it chainsaws over which you have no control.

The fact is that any incursions into pristine forest are destructive, and only the most naive can persuade themselves otherwise. I too welcomed the FSC initiative some years ago when it was introduced, but the steady destruction continues.

You were kind enough to write to me and give me your side of the story: I wonder if you would now get out a pocket calculator and do me the courtesy of calculating a sum? We have, of course, no reliable data on the human population of a million years ago but best archaeological estimates are that the population of 6,000 BC was about five million people and that it had taken a million years for the human population to double to that point. What with farming, the next doubling of the number of humans on the planet is thought to have taken a thousand years, and by 1650 it is thought there were half a billion people on the planet. The next doubling after this, we believe, took two hundred years, to 1 billion people in 1850. The human population then doubled in just eighty years, taking us to approximately 2 billion by 1930. The doubling rate continued to creep up and was once every 37 years by 1970. It's now standing at once every thirty years, and the world population is, as we're all aware, over six billion. Just pick up your calculator and see how many people might be in the world, demanding sustainable forest products by the time you (whoever you might be) reach retirement age and your job is in the hands of your grandchildren. That's why I'm concerned.

I'm aware that we're all of us, including you in your job in the Samling Group, trapped by the work we do and the places we live. But things don't change unless we make them change, and all of us, as individual people, have to play an equal part.

I send you my good wishes as one individual to another, and hope that you, too, can make a contribution to the enormity of the ask that we all face if our grandchildren - however many of them there happen to be - are to have a worthwhile planet to live on.

Richard Middleton