In the mid-1800s, the extraordinary biodiversity of the Aru Islands helped inspire the theory of evolution by natural selection.Several years ago, however, a corrupt politician granted a single company permission to convert most of the islands’ rainforests into a vast sugar plantation.The people of Aru fought back. Today, the story of their grassroots campaign resonates across the world as a growing global movement seeks to force governments to act on climate change. This story was co-published with The Gecko Project. Additional support was provided by Earthsight. (Baca dalam Bahasa Indonesia.) I. The movement begins Late one rainy night in August 2013, a college student named Collin Leppuy arrived at the doorstep of Father Jacky Manuputty, a church minister in the coastal city of Ambon, Indonesia. He had come to ask for help; his homeland was under threat. Collin, then 23, had grown up in the Aru Islands, a heavily forested archipelago in the eastern margins of the world’s largest island nation. He was studying social welfare policy at a university in Ambon, the capital of Maluku province. Collin had recently organized rallies in the city against a corrupt politician who had governed Aru for nearly a decade. Convicted of siphoning off millions of dollars in state funds, the politician had absconded before law enforcers finally caught up with him. Collin had felt proud of the outcome, but this gave way to a renewed sense of urgency when he discovered what else the politician had done before his arrest. For decades, Aru had escaped the attention of the companies clearing Indonesia’s rainforests. But as the jungles of Java, Sumatra and Borneo dwindled, those in search of timber and agricultural land began to look east. Aru now lay in the sights of a company called the Menara Group. Collin had learned that before he was ousted from office, the politician had secretly approved a plan by Menara to plant sugarcane across nearly two-thirds of Aru. If it went ahead, the firm would reap billions of dollars by logging Aru’s forests and replacing them with what could be the world’s biggest sugar plantation. But it would destroy the existing livelihoods and food supplies of tens of thousands of people, including Collin’s friends and family. It would ruin the habitats of Aru’s unique wildlife, of animals like the ethereal birds-of-paradise, and the natural world from which the Aruese drew their identity. Male greater birds-of-paradise (Paradisaea apoda) display their plumage in the Aru Islands. Image by Tim Laman/courtesy of Tim Laman and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Jacky welcomed Collin into his house and listened to his appeal for help. Then in his late 40s, with closely cropped, curly black hair, a thick mustache and a gentle but stern demeanor, Jacky held a senior position in the Protestant Church of Maluku, which had more than 700 parishes across the region. As a younger man, Jacky had been inspired by the ideas of liberation theology, a Christian movement that emerged in Latin America to aid the poor and oppressed, and by popular uprisings against authoritarianism. He had spent decades helping rural communities in eastern Indonesia fend off unsolicited advances from extractive companies. Now Collin wanted Jacky to do the same for the Aruese. Jacky was wary. He knew how fraught things could get for indigenous groups who resisted government-backed projects. On his home island of Haruku, a short boat ride from Ambon, his own community had fractured when a mining firm tried to gain a foothold. Clashes between neighboring villages for and against the project had turned violent. Jacky’s side had tried to sue the company, but the conflict reached a decisive end only when villagers burned the firm’s camp to the ground. Now, Jacky wondered if the Aruese would be strongly united in their opposition to the sugar plantation, or if he might be walking into a situation that could spiral out of control. As the rain pattered down, Jacky and Collin formed a plan. They would invite Aruese students in Ambon to a candlelight vigil as an act of solidarity. Collin would gather his peers in a classroom at his school, and Jacky would lead them in prayer. Then they would all discuss how best to proceed. The Aru Islands’ total area is 8,570 square kilometers (3,310 square miles), about the size of Puerto Rico. The following night, Collin arrived with a dozen students. During Jacky’s service, they asked if they could sing a folk song that told the origin myth of Aru’s people. Jacky listened as they murmured the lyrics, recounting a quarrel between two brothers over a golden spear with supernatural powers for catching fish. The brothers’ infighting prompted God to strike their island with an earthquake and tidal wave, splitting it in two and forcing its inhabitants to set sail for the archipelago known today as Aru. But Jacky soon cut them off. The song had a deep cultural resonance, but the students sung it as if they were ashamed of their heritage. To Jacky, it spoke of a lack of spirit — spirit that would be direly needed if they were to confront the forces ranged against Aru. “Don’t start this struggle if you’re not proud of your identity as Aruese,” he warned. “If you are not, then the company will come and pay you, and pick you off one by one. “Sing it again,” he said. “More dynamic than you sing the national anthem.” They did, this time with more verve. At the end of the evening, they wrote two words on pieces of paper: SOS ARU. Jacky, center, stands with Collin, third from right, and the other students at the candlelight vigil in August 2013. The signs say, “Pray for Aru!” Over the coming months this phrase, and others like it, would become a clarion call for a grassroots movement that reverberated from Aru to Ambon, to Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, and far beyond. It brought together indigenous men and women of all ages, a cast of outsiders who rallied to their cause, and supporters from around the globe. At stake were competing visions of development. The company and its political backers told the Aruese they were backward and poor, and that the only way out was to trust their fate to a faceless conglomerate. But the people of Aru took stock of the natural world that surrounded them, and they said no. It would soon become clear they were fighting not just against a plantation, but for something more fundamental — to make government accountable to the people, in a country where business interests have widely co-opted the levers of state power. It was a battle whose outcome would decide the fate of one of the world’s last great tracts of rainforest, and of the people whose lives and culture were entwined with it. Today their struggle resonates across the planet, as a growing global movement seeks to confront the same binary choice between prosperity and the environment that the Aruese decided, to profound effect, was false. But at first, it was just a dozen students, a priest and two words on paper. “That’s the movement starting,” Jacky would later say. “In that room.” II. ‘In the end, it comes down to power’