It surely is not an easy task to trans­form the dry arid land that stretches out from Gunungkidul, Wono­giri to Pac­i­tan in south­ern part of Java into prof­itable forests. SOLOPOS jour­nal­ist, Suhar­sih, writes on her two day jour­ney (Wednesday-Thursday, 21–22/4) explor­ing the com­mu­nity forests of south­ern Java.

Explor­ing the south­ern part of Java, from Gunungkidul in Yogyakarta Province to Praci­man­toro, Giri­woyo and Batuwarno in Wono­giri then to Pac­i­tan in East Java is an excit­ing jour­ney. Lush green­ery stretches far beyond eye­sight, dot­ted with hills on both sides of the road.

Rock, as the major geo­log­i­cal struc­ture found in this karst area, is no longer vis­i­ble. All are cov­ered with plants, rang­ing from teak, albizia, rain tree, mahogany and other hard­wood species.

Sea­sonal plants, such as cas­sava and ground­nuts are planted on the spaces between the hard­wood trees to sus­tain farm­ers’ daily needs.

For­est plant­ing activ­i­ties in the for­est of south­ern Java was started in 1950s. Lim­ited access to state forests, the decrease in land and envi­ron­ment qual­i­ties, demands for woods, cat­tle feed and water sources, all had encour­aged the sur­round­ing com­mu­ni­ties to plant their land with peren­nial and sea­sonal plants. Thus, com­mu­nity forests came to grow and var­i­ously named wana, alas, talun, kebun cam­pur, and lembo by the communities.

It took around 20 years for the com­mu­nity in Selop­uro, Batuwarno Sub­dis­trict – the first com­mu­nity in Indone­sia to obtain sus­tain­able for­est man­age­ment cer­tifi­cate from LEI in 2004 – to pro­mote plant­ing cul­ture and aware­ness on main­tain­ing for­est sustainability.

Some of the tree-planting pio­neers, such as Mis­man and Siman, expe­ri­enced the hard­ship of pro­mot­ing such cul­ture and aware­ness. Together with Persepsi NGO, they fought the chal­lenges and can now proudly state that the plant­ing rate is higher than the log­ging rate.

“At the begin­ning, we even cul­ti­vate seeds by our­selves and dis­trib­ute the seedlings to the com­mu­ni­ties so that they would be will­ing to plant their land with hard­wood plant,” said Mis­man. – By: Suharsih

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