‘WOMEN make better nature lovers than men,’ she declares. “But in most cases, our voices are often the last to be heard in environmental planning and management. We need to change that!”
That a female trailblazer in environmental activism was on point on the feminist conversation du jour reveals where Puan Sri Shariffa Sabrina Syed Akil came from: a place where a woman’s strength and independence isn’t simply about walking the talk, but it’s also about being more vocal and “talking” the talk.
The 55-year-old activist and founder of PEKA (Environmental Conservation Organisation) had gotten tired of not being taken seriously: “They said I’m just a woman. I don’t have a degree or a PhD so what do I know?” and going through the diplomatic route on speaking out for the environment. “We’ve done the meetings, the writing of letters ... We got ignored,” she remarks drily, before shrugging her shoulders and adding: “So I became vocal.”
Speaking out and making news created the effect Sabrina hoped for. It also meant that she frequently got into trouble with the authorities for bringing to the media’s attention, environmental issues that were prevalent in this country. “We have no other alternative, but to make news. But when we did, PEKA was suddenly seen as anti-establishment and anti-government.”
A case in point would be the recent news she made sometime last year when she and her assistant were remanded for allegedly insulting a royalty. “We were thrown into the lock-up and treated like common criminals for raising the question as to why the only remaining forest reserve in Mersing was being de-gazetted for oil palm plantation conversion,” recalls Sabrina candidly without a trace of rancour or bitterness. “Speaking up isn’t an easy thing to do. Sometimes you have to pay the price for doing the right thing.”
A mutually beneficial collaboration, she adds, is possible between the NGOs and governments – but the relationship is often fraught and sometimes hostile. Frustration and mistrust abound on both sides.
“We do want to work with the authorities,” she insists, adding: “It’s wrong for humanity to think that we can live in a way that shows no regard to animals and forests. PEKA’s only agenda is simply to protect our precious natural heritage.”
NATURE LOVER
Her environmental roots grow deep. Smiling, Sabrina confides: “I grew up with such a profound love for nature. I was a loner. I preferred the company of nature to people actually!”
She doesn’t look at all like an introvert, much less an activist, I admit aloud and she breaks into peals of laughter. At close quarters, Sabrina is overwhelming; all that mass of blondish brown hair shaped today into two loose plaits, pink pillowy lips and dark mascaraed eyes. She’s stylish, colourful and a far cry from what you envision an environmental activist would look like.
“How does an activist look like?” she wonders with a chuckle. “We women need to take care of ourselves and look good. I love fashion but I don’t even try to keep up with it, to be honest.” She then tells me tongue-in-cheek that “... magazines aren’t interested in interviewing me for that very reason. I’m not into brands or the latest handbags!”
Continuing, she shares, her tone wistful: “I really, really love nature. I grew up loving waterfalls, rivers, beaches. I’ve climbed the Penang Hill hundreds of times. In fact, back in the days, there were rivers and waterfalls in the Penang Botanical Garden. I used to bathe there when I was little.”
She grows quiet, before adding softly: “Penang Hill is thankfully still there, but you don’t see waterfalls and rivers in the Botanical Garden anymore. Those are gone.”
“I used to be quiet but I witnessed too much hypocrisy and double standards when I was growing up. This made me become very rebellious,” she adds soberly. “I couldn’t keep quiet anymore.”
Something needed to be done, she tells me. “I remember going often to this orchard in Raub, Pahang, where a particularly beautiful waterfall was located until one day, the orchard owner told me, ‘Oh you know, all of these will be cleared soon.’ ‘But there’s a waterfall there. How can they do logging there?’ I asked him, feeling shocked,” relates Sabrina. “At that time I didn’t really know much about saving the forest. But I remember this man shrugging his shoulders and answering dejectedly: ‘You know lah this country. Whatever they want, they’ll do.’”
We can’t just keep logging and logging until we run out of forests, she exclaims vehemently. “Our forest is our water catchment area. You kill the forest, you kill off our water supply. People may not care about animals. But water... we all need water to live.”
NATURE GETAWAY
It seemed a natural choice for her to buy up swathes of forests and convert them into eco-friendly resorts. Certainly taking direct control of land has been a tried and tested conservation tool for decades. Tanah Aina, her local patch of inspiration, exists because she wanted to turn it into a nature reserve of sorts.
“I said to myself, ‘You have to walk the talk’. Because I’m such a nature lover, I wanted to teach people all about the environment. It’s pointless to just talk or protest about land clearing activities. We have to educate the masses about the importance of jungles. At least I know the jungle plots and orchards that I own will not be cleared,” she explains, adding: “This was one way I could protect the forest.”
The building of the resort, she tells me, respected the area’s topography and the existing vistas were preserved. “Not a single stone or rock was removed. We didn’t cut any trees down, unless it was rotten. Even then, we replanted trees,” she says. “Nothing should be built at the expense of nature.”
The process of building can be exciting as Sabrina would attest. She had a team of builders and bought plenty of materials to construct the resort. But she also needed transportation to bring those materials in.
Eyes dancing, she reveals that she’s licenced to drive a lorry. “I can show you my licence!” she exclaims, laughing. Rather than rent a lorry, she thought it would be prudent to buy the vehicle and drive it herself.
“I remember going to the driving school to take the test. I was the only woman there and the men just looked at me and said: ‘Mem! Tak payahlah belajar pandu lori! Kita orang boleh pandu untuk Mem!’ (Ma’am, you don’t have to learn how to drive a lorry. We can drive for you!)”
But she insisted — and got her licence. “The police would stop my lorry whenever they saw me behind the wheel. I mean, look at me!” she remarks, gleefully waving her hands about her. “With full make-up, earrings and a dress ... I can’t imagine what they were thinking!”
The police were understandably baffled. “They’d go around the lorry twice and check my licence. Then they’d ask me, ‘Why do you want to drive a lorry?’” she shares, throwing back her head and chuckling. “That was fun!”
Do you still drive a lorry? I ask. “No!” Sabrina replies, smiling. “Still, it took a lot of courage. I believe in life, when you want to achieve something, you have to be brave. You can’t hesitate.”
Her can-do spirit drove her on, especially when her eco-resort wasn’t an immediate success. “I didn’t have any background in management or hospitality,” she confides, adding: “I was just a fitness instructor. I loved my exercise, baking and of course, jungle trekking.”
When she first mooted the idea of opening the resort, a lot of people thought she was crazy. “Who’d want to come to a jungle? I just said, ‘Never mind. We try to change. We have to start somewhere.” She reveals that there were no takers for that first year. “Nobody came! I called friends, I asked people to come and stay for free. I tried everything.”
But eventually, people did come. “It helped reinforce my belief that we need to reconnect people back to nature.” The natural world’s benefits to our cognition and health will be irrelevant, she adds, if we continue to destroy nature around us. “Destruction is assured without a human reconnection to nature.”
NATURE CHAMPION
There was no looking back since. Tanah Aina has been accorded several awards, the latest being the Best Hotel Services award at the recent 20th Malaysia Tourism Awards in March this year. “I started the resort as a platform for people to get to know our forests and it’s been hugely gratifying to see that people are beginning to understand and recognise just how amazing our Malaysian forest truly is.”
There’s still so much to be done, she believes. Her nature havens aside, she tells me half-wistfully that although Malaysia has amazing biodiversity and is home to one of the oldest rainforests in the world, “... it’s all disappearing rapidly.”
Something — an adjustment in the chair, a re-angling of the head — warns me the tone is about to shift. And it does. “Let me ask you this question. How many more highways do we need? Why can’t we upgrade what we have? Why must we go through a phase where we need to really fall before we can come back up?”
She’s all at once both fiery and passionate. I get a glimpse of the impassioned activist who steps on toes and gets on the wrong side of the authorities whenever she strides into an issue or an event with guns blazing. “Every time you cut down a forest, you’re disturbing the ecosystem. It’s simple: we must save our forests, for there is no Plan B to tackle climate change or many of the other critical challenges that face humanity without them.”
She had sent letters to stop the logging at a nearby forest near Karak back in 2014. When a massive landslide hit the Karak Highway in Peninsular Malaysia back in November 2015 exactly a year later, she was furious. “We warned them! And they denied that it had anything to do with the logging that was taking place nearby.”
When locals complained that waters near Taman Negara, Pahang, were getting silted up, she led a media expedition up the Tembeling river to expose the logging going on there. She also led the campaign against logging at a catchment area in Frasers Hill which led to a stop order by the authorities on all logging activities there. “We’ve had some success, but it’s often an uphill battle trying to change mindsets. We don’t have to be dependent on balak (timber) as our major source of income.”
But the real power, she believes, belongs to the people. “We must get people involved.” Civil society and non-governmental organisations, she says, have long been keys to challenging systems that would favour the few over the many, and give a voice to the voiceless. “But we need the voice of the majority in order to make it work.”
The one thing that she wants to shift is the idea that environmental NGOs like PEKA has been tasked to save the world; that activists — as brave and courageous as she has been — will come in, take action, rage public opinion and make changes happen. “At some point, I’m hoping that we can campaign together with people, and break the idea that people can outsource their conscience to us.”
With all that’s been said and written about her, what would she want Malaysians to know about her? I ask. “Me?” She’s clearly baffled at my question. “What they think of me is immaterial. There’s really nothing great about me anyway.”
A pause and she concludes: “I wish to get more people to understand and appreciate our environment. Respect and love Mother Nature. That’s not so difficult, really.”