Eco-Reporting Takes Wing in Indonesia

JAMES FAHN/INTERNEWS Harry Surjadi, in white shirt, directs the Society of Indonesian Environmental Journalists, which the Earth Journalism Network helped launch last year.

The year was 1998, and Indonesian reporter Harry Surjadi had just gotten a confidential tip from someone at the Ministry of the Environment. It seemed two Indonesian companies were planning to import marine clay from nearby Singapore for a reclamation project in Riau Province, Indonesia.

The strange thing about the plan, Surjadi thought, was that Singapore was going to pay the companies to receive the clay. Also, Singapore had its own reclamation project going; why not use its own marine clay for that?

Surjadi started asking questions, and through his dogged investigative reporting over several months, it was discovered that the clay Singapore wanted to export was contaminated with heavy metals.

“I focused all my efforts in reporting this issue to reveal that there was something wrong with this project,” Surjadi wrote in an email interview. After the citizens of Riau Province protested, the project was cancelled.

“I believe I can make a difference as an environmental journalist, and I have a passion for this work,” Surjadi wrote.

Surjadi’s commitment to environmental reporting, as well as his two decades of experience as a journalist, made him the obvious choice to be voted Executive Director of the newly formed Society of Indonesian Environmental Journalists (SIEJ).

The Earth Journalism Network (EJN), a project of Internews, sponsored the launch of SIEJ at a conference near Gunung Leuser National Park in Sumatra on Earth Day in 2006. SIEJ has since held environmental training workshops and discussions with experts.

According to EJN Executive Director James Fahn, “Environmental journalists in Indonesia and other developing countries are often quite isolated. They operate with few resources and face enormous pressures from vested interests, advertisers, even from their own editors. So professional organizations like the SIEJ can provide crucial technical, financial, and moral support, and help get individual reporters access to critical information and sources that they wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Surjadi, 48, got his first exposure to environmental issues as a student of agricultural engineering, learning that aspects of modern agriculture, such as the use of pesticides in rice paddies, had a dark side. He began reporting on agricultural issues and then expanded to environmental and other topics, starting and selling an online publication along the way.

“Environmental problems are approaching a critical point of irreversible conditions,” he said. “This is the moment when Indonesian journalists have to inform people about the problems.”