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Drinking Water from Plant Root in Papua's Tropical Rainforest
Indigenous people in Papua island have a long tradition of drinking water from roots that are abundant in the forest. Long before animals are domesticated, Papuan were great hunters. They could travel around their tropical rainforest for days in search for animals. Most of them did not bring food and water from their homes in their village. Instead they only ate food and drank water that were available in nature. When there were not any streams of water or lakes, they will cut certain types of plant roots on the ground or hanged on the trees and drink their water.
The water from these roots tastes delicious. This is what the tourists say when we escort them hiking around the Papuan tropical rainforest and try to drink some water from these water roots. The last time when I drank water from plant roots was on 7 February 2010. I, Dewi, Nico and Kuri escorted a Norwegian researcher, Tan, to see the conditions of the rainforest near the Manokwari town - the capital of West Papua province. When we found the water root, Kuri cut some segments of it and gave them to us to drink the water. Its taste was really delicious because we were thirsty that day.
The tropical rainforest in Papua is now facing rapid deforestation due to illegal and irresponsible logging. I try to introduce ecotourism scheme as one of the alternative solutions in preserving the rainforest besides writing more articles about rainforest to create awareness from readers around the world. In an era where global warming and environmental degradation have been the concern of everybody, tropical rainforest plays an important role in absorbing most of our CO2 emission. Besides reducing our energy consumption and creating more energy efficient products and using renewable energy resources, protecting the forest must not be neglected. Thus it is important to save the last 2 percent of world's tropical rainforest including the Papuan rainforest. I also hope that by reading these rainforest related articles that I have uploaded in this website and my Manokwari Papua Blog, more and more people will become interested in coming to Manokwari as eco-tourists. The development of eco-tourism in this town is important to reduce pressures on tropical rainforest in Papua island through the creation of alternative jobs for the local people who have been exploiting the forest particularly their logs for supporting their economy. by Charles Roring
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