In his new book, The Last Wild Men of Borneo, author Carl Hoffman brings together the stories of Bruno Manser and Michael Palmieri, two very different, yet very similar men, who shared an obsession with one of the wildest places on Earth. Manser was a Swiss environmental activist who wore a loincloth and learned to hunt with a blowpipe, writes National Geographic. He mysteriously disappeared in Sarawak. Palmieri was an art dealer from California who traded a life of surfing for a life of adventure, and traveled deep into the jungles of Borneo in search of the art of the Dayak people. They Dayaks of Borneo have an incredibly “rich, high culture that was influenced by many different places for a thousand years,” Hoffman told Nat Geo. They painted, carved, did beadwork. Their art is also a reflection of their spiritual world. Manser became a cult hero in Europe, while Palmieri mapped vast tracts of Boreneo by hand. Hoffman explains all of this in his new book, and he also talks about the deforestation of Sarawek, which former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called “one of the greatest environmental crimes in history.” Logging began pushing into the traditional lands of the Eastern Penan and the Dayak in 1984. According to Hoffman, the Penan were seen as the lowest of the low in the eyes of the Malaysian government, and ultimately, the “logging destroyed their whole world.”
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