Fibers from the forest are essential for making mats, baskets and other tools for daily chores.

Malaysian backed operations are usually better equipped with heavy machinery, first opening roads with bulldozers and extracting with trucks.

Even in the remote villages, need for cash is increasing. While traditional sources of cash are limited to crops, such as rubber , pepper and coffee, cash is needed to buy many things, such as gas, fuel, oil, clothes, and other basic goods. Beyond the bare essentials, many villages now also boast VCD players, satellite dishes, and pickup trucks.

Environmental impacts are also already apparent as watersheds become too dirty or dry. Many people still rely on rivers for drinking and cooking water, washing and bathing. In this photo, people ride on trucks owned by a Malaysian timber company to this river each evening to bathe and take water back, as their own river is dry from several years of intensive logging.

Malaysian investors woo communities with promises to build roads, bring water pumps, power generators, and cash payments, in return for cheap logs. While the compensation may seem miniscule in light of high price of tropical timber in the international market, this fills a need for remote villages.

Communities are often lured with the promise of better life from oil palm plantations, causing them to give up valuable forests that provided food, medicine and other materials.

Many commercially valuable species are found in lowland swamp forests.

Dependence on natural wealth from the forests is still strong in the interior communities.

Many communities still rely on shifting cultivation for subsistence.

Social impacts of illegal logging on communities include the increase in incidences of "horizontal conflict" among villages. Territorial disputes over traditional borders are becoming more frequent as contract loggers move into new areas.

Illegal logging is now rampant in most national parks and protected forests. With regional autonomy, local government can now create small-scale logging concessions, many of which extract timber from protected areas.

Another social shift can be seen in the increased involvement of women in an activity traditionally reserved for young adult male.

Will this tree survive in the next 10 years?

Even children join the logging crew.

Hunting in forests and fishing in rivers provide vital protein, but livestock breeding is also becoming more common as natural resources become more scarce. Even in lake communities of Danau Sentarum, cattle is kept in pens on floating platforms, like the houses in the back.

Since the Sarawak state government prohibits the import of raw logs, many small-scale sawmills have sprung up all along the border.

It may not be too long before fish as big as this one can no longer be found in the upper reaches of the Kapuas river.

Locally operated teams log and extract timber with simple tools.

Strangler fig trunk

Gold mining is another unregulated activity that is highly damaging to river ecosystems as well as human health.