Editorial

Looking back over the past year the news is, as might be expected partly good, partly bad. On one hand many people are arduously engaged with revisions of various Malesian taxa, on the other hand others waste precious time and energy in ideological squabbles: it seems as if the theological wars of the Middle Ages have broken out all over again. The Sabah National Parks, including the precious Kinabalu National Park, have been degazetted and demoted to ’Sabah Parks’, whatever that may be. An argument used was that ’the forests have now returned to the people’, a situation similar to opening the vaults of the National Treasury declaring that the people will now take care of monetary matters. They certainly will! It is a great shame that national heritages are thus squandered for the contemporary gain of a few and the loss of the many of present and future generations. The situation in Sabah is unfortunately not an isolated case, the same thing happens all over the world, both in the tropics as well as in temperate countries that call themselves well-educated (See the Greater Daintree National Park in Australia, Chapter X). It is a sad thing that those working in herbaria have to realize that they soon will be neopalaeobotanists. Our Chapter IV ’Progress in Malesian botany’ seems rapidly to become an ironic euphemism.