Image: Leo Plunkett/The Gecko Project. Retrieved from eco-business.com
More than 10 years have passed since a young official in Indonesia’s eastern Aru Islands saved his archipelago from becoming a monoculture plantation. Today, Mika Ganobal is drawing on his campaigning background as he governs part of the remote island chain he helped preserve a decade ago.
“Right now Mika is the top person to be able to eliminate illegal logging,” said Alo Tabela, head of the Aru Islands’ trade and industry office.
The Aru archipelago comprises almost 100 small islands in the east of Indonesia. The island chain, around the size of Puerto Rico, was part of the Australian landmass until separation occurred 8,000 years ago owing to rising sea levels. Today, the islands are home to around 100,000 people, more than 500 kilometres north of Australia’s Northern Territory.
Mika was in his mid-30s in 2013 when prospectors from a shadowy company called the Menara Group (menara means “tower” in Indonesian) arrived with the intention of razing the Aru Islands for a massive sugarcane plantation.
In the late 2000s, the district leader of the Aru Islands, a retired army colonel named Theddy Tengko, signed over most of its land area to be converted to a sugar plantation.