Transcript:

Living Off the LandCelebrating three decades of Pulse of the Planet, here's a program from our archives.In the rainforests of Indonesia, living off the land means taking only what you need. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.Ambiance, rainforest sounds, birds Photographer Michael Griffiths lived with Punan people in the rainforests of Borneo.Griffiths: I spent a long time living with the Punan people. We lived off almost anything we could find, which was fish or tortoises, sometimes snakes, occasionally rats, monkeys, and so on. But I found that it was interesting that these people had a natural inborn sense of balance. For instance, when we had enough food, even when we were very close to a small herd of deer that we could have easily shot with our blowpipes, we didn't, because we had enough food, and sometimes the men with me would not take monkeys from a certain troop because they would say, 'No, the numbers of this troop are already low enough. We've extracted one or two monkeys a couple of months ago and this troop needs to be given time to recover its numbers to a normal level.'I remember the economy with which these people harvested leaves to make little shelters each night. We would use as much as possible of the naturally growing leaves and plants around to make a framework, and sometimes we wouldn't cut them, we would just bend them over, tie them together with vines, and then just cover the gaps in between with leaves in order to protect us from the rain. Nothing that didn't have to be destroyed was, and these people are basically very primitive conservationists; they have to be because their life depends on it, and I suppose in a bigger scale, we all have to become conservationists because our life depends on the biological health of the planet.This archival program is part of our thirtieth anniversary celebration. Im Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.