[rhealk]

Wow, just few days away and this thread had sparked into an interesting discussion.
All I can say is conservation value in most Asian countries are still low. I believe most of us agree with this.

In western countries, conservationist scientist and groups bring endemic / rare / threatened plant and animal to court to stop development. In the history of conservation, these groups managed to stop a number of developments both on private and federal land just because there's a poor threatened species inside. What about here?

They too have committee in parliament which oversees conservation issues, universities were given big grant to do research on threatened species and in return their studies are used to debate and fight for these animals / plants right. What we have here?

Conservation value is high in their government and their education system, to the extend they poke their nose all over the world and collect lots of rare / almost extinct sp back to their country, be it legally of illegally (probably that's why Sarawak's government hate these ang moh scientist so much. They took out lots of our endemic sp BUT they cultivate them and make sure of their continuous existence). Their people, majority of them, normal people like you and me, have high conservation awareness level. They feel obliged to protect the plants and animal and report to authority when they see something not so correct is happening.

How about here? The mentality is absolutely opposite and you all aware of it. As the saying goes, everything start from ourselves. We can be the one who starts to cultivate the sense of protecting our rich nature. Start from ourself, our family, our children and perhaps, friends (provided your friend is not that Lizard King).

Oh! by the way, I absolutely agree to one of the many point mentioned by our friend from the previous post - in this land, where the national and opposition parties just all the time busy kicking each others asses and raising racial issues and got no time for conservation, we have to shoulder the conservation responsibility by ourselves - save them from the bulldozers.

I once talked to a forestry officer about this issue - protected species in about to be bulldozed area. He said saving them from there is still illegal without paper - its called poaching. I asked him, what about those protected species inside? He said each development will have NREB and EIA report and they will know what to do. What a sad answer because all I know no one did anything to save those plants in the Bakun dam area. Now that area is flooded. All I know is a few parties get windfall profit extracting timbers from this area.

That's so far the difference between the history of our countries' conservation value vs western's. And now we're stuck between 'To-save-them-or-not' issue. Perhaps my best personal conclusion is 'we should do the right thing at the right time and at the right place'.

You might be interested why I bragged so much - just the guilt inside me. I major in conservation in Uni but I worked for a timber and oil palm company after grad. LOL
Oh we have tissue culture company but guess what the enthusiast collectors tell me? I want the plant from the wild because I want it different from others. Duh!