Nature is more than just a beautiful backdrop one could look at. For Indonesian nature conservationist Farwiza Farhan, nature is a friend she can go to whenever life’s burdens become too much to bear. As a child, Farhan often climbed trees whenever she had problems, staying there until she calmed down.
“Nature has always been my solace,” Farhan, one of the five Ramon Magsaysay awardees for 2024, said in a recent interview with select media, including Rappler. She grew up by the beach and near a patch of forest in Aceh, a province in Indonesia at the northwest tip of Sumatra Island. Aceh is home to the Leuser Eecosystem, a 2.
6-million-hectare expanse (equivalent to 42 Philippine National Capital Regions) considered by experts to be the last place in the world where several critically endangered species like the Sumatran tiger, orangutan, elephant, and rhino still roam together in the wild. A silent confidante, nature has always been there for Farhan. This is why, even as a child, she tried to be there for nature when it needed her help.
When she was 12, she would constantly ask her father, then a member of the Indonesian parliament’s environment and energy committee, to protect the Borneo landscape. She said that despite feeling “powerless” as a child, she knew she had the power to convince her father. “I [was] campaigning constantly to make sure that I [included] that to the policy that he [was] working on,” Farhan, now 38 years old, recalled.
This lifetime of.