“It always seems impossible until it is done.”
– Nelson Mandela, activist and former President of South Africa
AS we approach the close of April, I want to take Digital Zen back to 2016 – to a patch of forest in Sarawak, where a researcher from Miami named Elliot Gardner was conducting fieldwork alongside two Iban field botanists, Salang anak Nyegang and Jugah anak Tagi. Gardner was studying a fruit tree. His guides had two names for it. He had one.
That quiet moment in the interior of our own land set off a chain of events that ended in 2022, when all three men became co-authors of a study published in Current Biology – one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the life sciences.
The paper’s opening stated plainly: “Indigenous peoples are important stewards of biodiversity, often living near and possessing intimate knowledge of ecosystems. As a result, species new to science may be long known to indigenous people”.
Here is what that means in plain terms. Western science had classified the terap tree as a single species since a Spanish botanist first described it in the 1800s – armed, over two centuries, with herbarium records, taxonomic frameworks, and eventually DNA sequencers and phylogenetic software.
They were wrong. It was not one tree. It was two. The Iban had always known this. They called them lumok and pingan, and told them apart by the shape of the fruit. No laboratory required.
Two Sarawakian field botanists, carrying knowledge passed down through generations from this land, corrected 200 years of Western botanical doctrine – without a single piece of technology. That is what I mean by the title of this column.
We were never behind.
Today’s world
For most of the twentieth century, development was measured in one direction. You were either moving toward the model – the industrial city, the concrete skyline, the quarterly GDP report, or you were behind it.
Sarawak, with its longhouses and river highways, its oral traditions and forest pharmacies, its ways of governing that existed long before the nation-state was invented, was often placed in the second category. The word used was always “developing”, as though the destination were obvious and the journey only a matter of speed.
But something has shifted in the world’s understanding of what progress actually means.
The United Nations’ Wellbeing Economy framework – now being adopted by governments from Scotland to New Zealand – argues that GDP alone is a broken compass. It says, what matters is ecological balance, community cohesion, cultural continuity, and the ability to think across generations.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report identifies the most valuable human skills of the coming decade as: systems thinking, collaborative decision-making, contextual wisdom, and the ability to hold long-term perspectives under short-term pressure.
The Iban tuai rumah – the longhouse chief – has been practising all four of these for centuries. He just never had a certificate to prove it.
The world spent fifty years building toward something Sarawak already understood.
Ancient intelligence, modern proof
Consider what researchers now call Traditional Ecological Knowledge – the accumulated understanding indigenous communities hold about their ecosystems: which plants restore soil, which fish signal a healthy river, which patterns in the sky precede drought. Scientists from Oxford to MIT now spend vast sums attempting to reconstruct this knowledge through satellite imaging and machine learning.
The Penan mapped it in memory. The Kenyah encoded it in song. The Bidayuh embedded it in agricultural calendars more sophisticated than many commodity forecasting models governing today’s global food supply chains.
This is not nostalgia. It is data.
A landmark study in Nature Sustainability found that indigenous peoples manage 28 per cent of the world’s land, containing over 80 per cent of remaining biodiversity. Sarawak lies within that 28 per cent. Its custodians were not behind. They were ahead.
Our grandparents already knew
The Daoist concept of wu wei – acting in harmony with the natural order – was long dismissed as philosophical curiosity.
Today, scientists studying complex systems use similar language to describe resilient ecosystems and communities: not rigid control, but distributed intelligence, adaptive response, and knowing when not to intervene. The forest understood this. So did those who lived within it.
Islam carries the same principle. The concept of khalifah – stewardship of the Earth – is not environmentalism appended to faith, but part of its original instruction. It is a civilisational duty, inherited centuries ago, not discovered when sustainability became fashionable.
Daoist, Islamic and indigenous Bornean traditions converge on the same truth.
That is not coincidence. It is wisdom.
Sarawak isn’t catching up – we’re stepping forward
Premier Datuk Patinggi Tan Sri Abang Johari Tun Openg’s Post-Carbon Sarawak vision is not merely an energy transition. At its core, it is a civilisational repositioning – a quiet assertion that Sarawak is not catching up, but reclaiming its place at the forefront of a question the world now urgently asks: how do we live well, sustainably and together?
The Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy, the hydrogen economy, and expanding digital infrastructure into the interior are not instruments of imitation. They are the means by which a civilisation updates its language without losing its soul.
The longhouse is no relic of underdevelopment. It is a living prototype of communal, ecologically rooted living – something global cities now strive to replicate. What it once lacked was broadband. Sarawak is building that too.
What we pass on
Our children will grow up in a Sarawak that is both ancient and forward-looking. They will learn the names of trees in the language of those who have always known them. They will write code, grasp climate systems, and move through a world only now asking questions their grandparents had long answered.
They will not see this as contradiction, but as a single inheritance – a birthright no report, index or external measure of progress can grant or take away.
I think of this whenever I look at my daughter. She does not yet know the word lumok. She does not yet know pingan. But she will. And when she does, she will understand something more – that the land she comes from was never behind the world. It was simply ahead of its time.
That is what I want her to carry: not the anxiety of catching up to someone else’s notion of progress, but the confidence of a place that has always moved in the right direction. The world wandered. Sarawak waited. Now the world is finding its way back.
This is no small inheritance.
It is everything.
The practice
Find one piece of wisdom your grandparents held – about plants, seasons, rivers, or resolving conflict – that no university has captured in a textbook. Write it down. Share it with someone younger. In doing so, you are not preserving the past; you are shaping the future.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
