There is a supply chain that runs from the shops of the developed world to the most marginalised communities on earth, and it runs in both directions. The devices we buy are assembled from materials extracted from some of the poorest and most vulnerable places on the planet. When those devices are discarded — and we discard them faster with every passing year — they complete the circuit, returning to communities in the developing world to be dismantled by hand, burned and broken apart for whatever can be salvaged. The people at both ends of that chain have one thing in common: they have no say in any of it.
Between 20 and 50 million tonnes of electronic waste are generated worldwide every year, making it one of the fastest growing waste streams on the planet. A significant portion is shipped from Europe and North America to West Africa and Asia, often mislabelled as second-hand goods. Much of it arrives broken or beyond repair. In Agbogbloshie, a vast settlement in Ghana’s capital Accra, around 200,000 tonnes of discarded electronics arrive each year, feeding an informal economy in which 30,000 people — many of them migrants from Ghana’s north — survive by dismantling, burning and salvaging what they can. The work is dangerous, the pay is minimal, and the health consequences are severe. Australian filmmaker David Fedele travelled to Accra for his award-winning documentary E-Wasteland, filmed entirely in Agbogbloshie without dialogue or narration. It’s not comfortable viewing. It’s not meant to be.
The same logic of extraction plays out across the Pacific. Papua New Guinea is part of the world’s third largest intact tropical forest ecosystem — a rainforest of extraordinary biodiversity that has taken millennia to develop. It is being destroyed at a rate of hundreds of thousands of hectares per year. PNG remains one of the few countries in the world that still permits the export of raw logs, and as Malaysia and Indonesia have banned the practice, Asian logging companies — many of them Malaysian-linked, connected to politically powerful families in Sarawak — have moved their operations to PNG.
The World Bank estimates that between 70 and 90 percent of all logging in Papua New Guinea is illegal, one of the highest rates in the world. Transparency International has described the industry as synonymous with political corruption, police racketeering and the brutal repression of those who resist. Logging roads tear through river systems, compact soils and accelerate erosion far beyond the immediate site of felling. Over five million hectares of PNG’s forests were lost or seriously degraded in the three decades to 2002 alone.
The forests of one of the world’s great ecological treasuries are being sold off by corrupt politicians and foreign companies for whom the communities that depend on them are, at best, an inconvenience. Customary landowners are pressured into signing documents they cannot read, promised roads, schools and clean water that never materialise, while their ancestral forests — and the way of life sustained by them — are destroyed forever. Fedele’s Bikpela Bagarap — which translates from Tok Pisin as Big Damage — tells this story through the voices of the villagers themselves, without narration, with the same unflinching patience he brought to Agbogbloshie.
Across the border in West Papua, the situation is compounded by military occupation. Indonesia has controlled the territory since 1962, and the resources it contains — copper, gold, natural gas, timber — have been systematically extracted ever since. The Grasberg mine in the central highlands, operated by American company Freeport-McMoRan, is one of the largest gold and copper mines in the world, with estimated reserves of six billion tonnes of waste to be generated over its lifetime. Since 1973, more than 200,000 tonnes of toxic mining tailings have been dumped into local river systems every single day — waste containing arsenic, cadmium and selenium, toxins linked to cancer, kidney failure, bone disease and cardiovascular damage.
By 1990, Freeport’s tailings had polluted over 84,000 hectares of river systems. A 2016 study found that tailings had smothered and destroyed 13,800 hectares of forest inside the adjacent Lorentz National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Kamoro and Amungme tribes, whose ancestral lands surround the mine, have seen their fishing grounds destroyed, their hunting lands consumed, and their communities separated from the resources and livelihoods their way of life depended upon. Freeport has paid the Indonesian military millions of dollars annually for security at the mine — payments that human rights organisations have directly linked to violent crackdowns on local communities protesting the destruction of their land.
The connection between resource extraction and political repression in West Papua is not incidental — it is structural. Keeping the territory under control is, in significant part, about keeping the resources accessible. Forgotten Bird of Paradise, Dancing Turtle’s undercover documentary filmed covertly inside West Papua, documents what that control looks like from the inside.
These are three different places, three different stories, and one argument. The global economy as it is currently organised does not distribute its costs evenly. The communities that bear the greatest environmental and human consequences of the world’s consumption are almost always the ones with the least power to resist it. The films Dancing Turtle has made and supported over the years are an attempt to put faces and voices to that abstraction — to make visible what the supply chain prefers to keep hidden.
e-wasteland, Bikpela Bagarap and Forgotten Bird of Paradise are all available to stream in HD through the Dancing Turtle online store. Together they form a portrait of a world in which the benefits of progress are concentrated at one end of the supply chain, and the consequences are exported to the other. Until that changes, the least we can do is pay attention.
