FINDING EDEN

A JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF BORNEO

IB Tauris, 269pp, £17.99, Oldie price £12.95 inc p&p

‘Finding Eden is a record of a pristine world at the moment of its discovery, a loving portrait of a people and a place, a superb primer on leadership, and a call to arms, demanding that we relish and protect what is left of the wild world,’ Horatio Clare enthused in the Spectator. Robin Hanbury-tenison’s Eden is the Gunung Mulu National Park in Sarawak, Borneo, which he first visited in 1977, ‘at the end of a golden age’, and described in a previous book, but according to Clare this is ‘the blockbuster version, a compendium of diaries and recollections’. Hanbury-tenison’s concern is for the nomadic Penan, once head-hunters, victims of what he calls ‘the deforestation holocaust’.

‘There are few places left on earth for travellers to enjoy nature’s wild garden,’ Adam Ford commented in the Church Times, ‘We are mindlessly expelling ourselves from paradise.’ It ‘is never too late to put things right’, Hanbury-tenison believes, arguing that the indigenous people themselves ‘are the best conservationists’. ‘The vivid pictures he paints of a world that has almost disappeared leave a deep sense of melancholy,’ Chris Fitch lamented in Geographical, ‘albeit one tinged with faint optimism that, maybe, just maybe, this unique landscape could still be saved, if only local tribal people were again allowed to manage the forests as they previously did for millennia.’