Elsewhere in Malaysia, the $5 billion, 2,400-megawatt Bakun Dam project is slated to flood a rainforest area the size of Singapore. The government says the dam is needed to help spur economic development and bring new industry to the 2 million residents of Sarawak, the country’s largest state. But opponents say the dam will displace thousands of tribal minorities and destroy the habitat of 100 endangered species. Some 10,000 of Borneo’s 200,000 indigenous peoples have already been forced off their ancestral lands to make way for the dam. Sarawak originally contained 21 million acres of rainforest; less than 1.2 million acres now remain and some observers expect those acres to be logged within five years.
