Several visits later, the scientists realized that the creature showed no fear of humans.  The creature allowed itself to be picked up.  The scientists soon realized that what they were holding in their hands was really a giant rat.
 
At the other end of the size scale, thought to be one of the world’s smallest marsupials was a pygmy possum – creatures which carry their young in a pouch!

Says Bruce Beehler, Vice President of the US based wildlife group, Conservation International:  “These are two animals which were totally unknown to science and we’re absolutely thrilled to have discovered them”.

It was in 2005 that the team first visited the Foja Mountains where, it is believed, no modern human had ever stepped.

On that first visit, scientists discovered dozens of new plants, birds, butterflies and frogs.  On their second, they were excited to find more, along with the monster rat and pygmy possums.

It is comforting to know that there’s a place on earth so isolated that it remains the absolute realm of wild nature.  

The monster rat is the biggest known in the world by far and weighs 3 lbs; about 5 times that of a typical sewer rat.  It is over 2 feet long plus tail and shows no fear of humans.

As they traveled through the jungle, the scientists heard the calls of birds they could not identify and were convinced that there were many more creatures yet to be discovered.  

Foja has been described as wildlife’s last frontier, where exotic creatures live without any threat from mankind, mainly because there are no roads or tracks and the nearest native villages are scores of miles away.

Indonesian Papua alone has close to 104 million acres of tropical rainforest and some of the richest biodiversity in the world.

Therein lay the nub of the problem.  Being blessed with such rich biodiversity and the dense tropical rainforest that is the envy of the developed world, Indonesia is subjected, fairly or unfairly, to constant attacks from the world’s environmental and conservation organizations in view of the countries obvious desire to develop itself.  Malaysia’s proximity to Indonesia and the fact that the better developed South East Asian neighbor nation has the largest palm oil plantation footprint in the world opens it to being tarred with the same brush as Indonesia, despite Malaysia having devised sustainable plantation practices for some years now.

Environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, in an obvious attempt to exploit world media attention on the United Nations Climate Change  Conference  held in Bali from the 3rd to the 14th of December 2007, published a report called “Palm Oil: Cooking the Climate” and even blockaded a shipment of palm oil from Indonesia, ostensibly to protest against the destruction of rain forests that they say goes hand in hand with the extinction of the orang utan.  Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior had been anchored next to an India bound tanker laden with palm oil at Dumai Port on Indonesia’s Sumatran Island.  Over at Rotterdam Port, in the Netherlands, Greenpeace continued its activism, preventing the unloading of Indonesian palm oil from the Indonesian tanker, Doroussag. 

In the view of Deforestation Watch, such irresponsible activism gives the environmental movement a bad name.  We have to ask, just what is a developing nation like Indonesia to do? Hold back development and let its people live below the poverty line, just so that Indonesia could fulfil its obligations to the nternational community to preserve its rainforests, in the name of blind conservation?  It is irrational positions such as these taken by environmental and conservation movements like Greenpeace, that will eventually lead to a gradual erosion and weakening of the credibility of environmental and conservation causes.

In our respectful view, the conservation movement carries a corollary responsibility to be measured in its response to countries such as Indonesia.   As demonstrated by the discovery of exotic and unknown animals such as the giant rats and pygmy possums of the Foja Mountains of Indonesia and the existence of millions of hectares of pristine jungles in these regions, countries such as Indonesia has lots to offer the world in terms of conservation.  Just because we, in the developed world, have destroyed our forests cover centuries ago, does not give us the moral high ground to preach to a people pursuing their legitimate national aspirations of economic development and progress!

If the cultivation of palm oil, which in the view of Deforestation Watch can be pursued alongside reasonable forest management and sustainability practices, it is certainly preferable to the Indonesians abandoning palm oil and turning to indiscriminate logging of its jungles for timber and other forms of agriculture and the wanton destruction that that entails - a path that we in the developed world had pursued in the past.  After all, the Indonesians have a legitimate right to progress whether it is through planting palm oil or exporting timber or vegetables!

It is only right, in the view of Deforestation Watch that the voice of reason should prevail and that we should preserve a modicum of good sense in our criticism of countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, as the delicate tugging between conservation and development has to be even-handedly and sensibly balanced!  It is only when cool heads and insightful mature thinking start permeating through environmental issues such as these, that a solution that is fair and acceptable to both sides of the equation will be found.  THE END.