In the early 1960s, as a child I travelled the Ranau-Jesselton road, and the Penampang-Tambunan-Keningau road in the late 1960s, that traverse the Crocker Range. As the oldies in this group can attest, those were newly built roads then, still mostly just red earth routes with only a few sections laid with river stone gravel.
Now what has changed today are the roads are much better, but we have lost something too: the microclimate afforded by the much thicker growths and extensive coverage of virgin forests.
Travelling across the Crocker Range felt much cooler then because it was colder: rain clouds and mists extended far lower towards the plains. Kundasang was misty and so too was Sunsuron in Tambunan. Even Ranau town, as was Tambunan town, was shrouded in morning mists on most days, at least until the sun was higher—one could barely see the old Liwagu bridge near Ranau town while crossing it in the morning.
Easter Island, Chile in the far South Pacific has a few trees now, but researchers, having done many pollen studies, showed that it was heavily forested at one time. So why were the old Easter Islanders such idiots to even want to cut down the last groove of trees (probably used to transport and erect the last of the giant stone heads—chieftains’ vanity projects, these seem to be)?
It was a case of “creeping normality,” the example above being shown by Pulitzer Prize winner and author, Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005). It is a process by which a major change can be accepted as normal and acceptable if it happens slowly through small, often unnoticeable, increments of change. People tend to think only within the span (and experience) of their lifetimes—call it a species of “recency bias,” if you will.
I wonder if one day the temperate vegetables of Kundasang will refuse to grow because of deforestation and climate change.
The summit of the Crocker Range in 2024.
Picture owner:
Published here with the kind permission of Ankol Tom
https://www.facebook.com/ankoltom
Frog on a Wire 