Sound guardians

Sound guardians

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For Abidin, a Balik elder who lives in East Kalimantan in Borneo, Indonesia, the sounds of nature aren’t merely a backdrop but a vital part of how he navigates the world. But as the rainforest around him has become more developed, the calls of creatures once heard everywhere have grown scarce. And that process is speeding up. To relieve Indonesia’s capital city of Jakarta, which is sinking due to overdevelopment and vulnerable to climate change, the government is building a new one, Nusantara, close to Abidin’s home. The noise of construction and city life is beginning to overpower the soundscape he relies on, and researchers suspect they may already be pushing wildlife away.

In this short documentary, the US director Leah Varjacques traces an effort to record the sounds of the rainforest before they’re altered forever. The film follows Abidin working with a research team that includes Wendy Erb, a bioacoustic scientist from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York, to collect audio from caves, treetops and everywhere in between. In doing so, they hope to create a record for posterity so that the rainforest’s soundscapes – and the culture and ancestral knowledge embedded within them – are never fully erased.

Director: Leah Varjacques

Producer: Rizky Rahad

Websites: Scientific American, Mongabay, Project Multatuli

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