Come Earth Hour on March 24 you can do a bit something for the environment, even if symbolically. For starters, you can turn off all your lights and electric appliances for an hour as millions around the planet and Malaysia do each year during Earth Hour. And, if you’re in…
Plastic bags sure can come in handy. We can pick them up freely at stores and shops, carry our goods in them, and then dispose of them without a second thought. The trouble, of course, is that they are a scourge on the environment. Discarded mounds of non-biodegradable bags add…
Recently 4,515 hectares of a permanent forest reserve was degazetted in Terengganu, allowing for it to be turned into an oil palm plantation by a government-linked company, TDM Berhad. That means that on an area the size of more than 4,500 football fields where now trees stand will soon be lost,…
An endangered Malayan tapir was killed in a road accident, then it was presently skinned and dismembered by several men who decided to retrieve its body parts. Around the same time, over the Christmas holidays, an endangered Malayan sun bear, too, was run down and killed in a road accident….
A half century ago there were still around 3,000 tigers in the wild around Malaysia. Today there may well be as few as 250 left, less than a tenth of that figure. And if we don’t do all we can to save the last few hundred tigers, there won’t be…
A small slap on the wrist is how conservationist groups see the sentence handed down in Ipoh to a man who was convicted of having been in illegal possession of the carcass of a Malayan tiger. The man was caught by Perhilitan officials as he was carrying the dead tiger…
Many poachers do not go about killing wild animals out of fun. Nor do many farmers take revenge on wild animals just because they feel like it. Rather, there are routinely economic reasons behind both wildlife poaching and revenge attacks against animals, like elephants, that destroy crops, thereby unwittingly inviting…
Two pygmy elephants and a hundred sea turtles. These are just the latest victims of poachers in Sabah. Conservationists and government officials are duly outraged at the continuing slaughter of the state’s endangered wildlife. “The recent discovery of hundreds of turtle bone fragments and turtle carcasses floating in the sea…
Illicit wildlife products have been pouring into and out of Malaysia: elephant tusks, pangolin scales, deer antlers, tiger claws, sun bear teeth and claws. We know because in the past few weeks alone Malaysian authorities have managed to seize tons of such items at ports and airports from Sabah to…
Water. Malaysia has lots of it. That bounty has lulled many citizens into a false sense of complacence about the country’s water reserves. Yet Malaysia’s freshwater sources need to be managed better. Much better. If you would like to help spread that message, you will be able to do so…
Ending all poaching of Malayan tigers is an august goal, and key players in Malaysian have set out to do just that. Several governmental bodies (including the Malaysian Armed Forces, the Royal Malaysian Police and the Forestry Department) have joined forces with conservationist groups like WWF-Malaysia to save the nation’s…
If you participate in wildlife crimes, directly or indirectly, you should stop. If you do stop, you will be let off lightly. If you continue breaking wildlife laws, however, you risk getting nabbed and possibly slapped with a severe penalty. That’s the message that Abdul Kadir Abu Hashim, director-general of…
To her keepers, Puntung, one of Malaysia’s last three Sumatran rhinos, was a precious animal beloved for her gentle nature. To animal lovers across the country and farther afield, she was no less precious: she was one of her species’ very last Mohicans in Malaysia. Her loss has dealt a…
The Ulu Muda forest reserve is a 160,000-hectare hotspot of biodiversity in Kedah and one of the largest swathes of lowland dipterocarp forest in Peninsular Malaysia. Its wildlife boasts well over a hundred species of mammals, including Asian elephants, Malayan tigers, Malayan tapirs, Malayan sun bears, gaur and flying squirrels….
When it comes to corals in tropical waters, good news is hard to come by. Battered by global warming and pollution, these fragile creatures, and their ecosystems, are increasingly under threat of mass bleaching worldwide. Australia’s famed Great Barrier Reef may be doomed, and Malaysia’s own stunningly beautiful reefs, which are…
If there’s something Malaysia doesn’t seem to lack, it’s water. The country is blessed with abundant rivers and each year more than 900 million cubic liters of the life-giving substance fall from the sky, ready for the taking. And yet Malaysia, or at least large parts of the country from Peninsular Malaysia…