President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and acclaimed Hollywood director James Cameron have been named the inaugural recipients of the Global Home Tree Award for their environmental commitment.
Presidential spokesman Dino Patti Djalal said Yudhoyono had been recognized for Indonesia’s crucial role as a forest country.
The award ceremony in Los Angeles was organized by Richard Greene, author of the book “Words That Shook the World,” which features a chapter on Yudhoyono and his administration’s tree-planting campaign. Cameron produced and directed the science-fiction blockbuster “Avatar.”
The film tells the struggle of the forest-dwelling Na’vi people against colonist miners to preserve their sacred Hometree, the source of life on their planet.
Subijaksono Sujono, from the Indonesian Consulate in Los Angeles, accepted the award on behalf of Yudhoyono.
“The award was in the form of an oak tree, which represents the president’s campaign to plant a billion trees a year,” Dino said.
Yudhoyono has called for people to plant trees on empty land in a bid to slow global warming and has singled out the rain tree (Albizia saman) as ideal for the job.
In his acceptance speech, read by Subijaksono, Yudhoyono lauded Cameron’s film for spurring global awareness about the need to protect forests.
“This of course is an issue that is of enormous importance to Indonesia as a tropical rain forest nation,” the president wrote.
“The activities of the human species in the last 200 years have caused climate change, which in turn has threatened the well-being of humanity and the future of planet earth. There is no man-made machine that can reabsorb the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The only thing that can do this is the tree, and Indonesia has plenty of them in our tropical rain forests.”
He also said the government was committed to a policy of sustainable forestry development, through reduced deforestation, fighting illegal loggers, preventing forest fires and the ambitious tree-planting campaign.
“We do this because we know we have the moral responsibility to preserve our ‘home tree,’ upon which hangs the fate of our planet,” he said.
Yudhoyono also urged developed countries to do their part to achieve sustainable forestry while helping rain-forest countries develop.
“We cannot afford to fail to protect our forests,” he said. “After all, we all share the same planet, we all share a common destiny, and we are all Na’vi.”
