The Man Who Became the Forest

 

Charlotte, my little big star. As soon as I arrive at this beautiful place, exhausted, I’ll think of you, enjoy the view, and—with a bit of luck—hunt a small wild boar.

That was the last thing Bruno Manser wrote before the jungle ate him alive.

Not all at once, you understand. The jungle doesn’t work like that—it’s patient, the way cancer is patient, the way madness creeps up on you one sleepless night at a time. No, the jungle had been swallowing Bruno Manser for sixteen years, bite by bite, until there wasn’t much left of the Basel boy who’d grown up in starched collars and polished shoes. By the time he wrote that letter to Charlotte, he was already more forest than man, more ghost than flesh.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s the thing about stories like this one—you know how they end before they begin. The ending is written in the first sentence, inevitable as a tumor, patient as the trees.

The Boy Who Couldn’t Fit

Bruno Manser was born on August 25, 1954, in Basel, Switzerland, into the kind of family that had money enough to insulate itself from the world’s sharper edges. But money can’t insulate you from yourself, can it? Can’t build walls high enough to keep out the thing that’s wrong inside you—the thing that makes you different, that makes you other.

The kid never fit. Simple as that.

While other boys played football and chased girls and did the things Swiss boys were supposed to do in the 1960s, Bruno was outside during a blizzard, camping in the yard like some kind of miniature arctic explorer, testing himself against the cold. His parents probably thought it was a phase. Parents always think it’s a phase. They don’t understand that sometimes the weird shit their kids do isn’t a phase at all—it’s a preview, a coming attraction of the disaster to come.

By his teens, Bruno was deep into Gandhi, into Taoism, into Zen Buddhism—anything that wasn’t the gray, suffocating weight of Swiss respectability. And then, because he was seventeen and stupid the way seventeen-year-olds are always stupid, he swallowed a handful of morning glory seeds in seventh grade. The kind with LSA in them, the kind that’ll make you see God or the devil or both at once.

It made him sick as a dog. Sent him to the hospital and out of school.

His parents must have thought: Okay, now he’ll straighten out. Now he’s learned his lesson.

But Bruno Manser wasn’t the kind who learned those lessons. Some people aren’t built that way. Some people are built to crash and burn, over and over, until they find the thing that’ll finally consume them completely.

The Refusenik

At nineteen, the Swiss government handed him a rifle and told him to point it at enemies he didn’t have. Switzerland takes its military service seriously—even in peacetime, even when there’s no one to fight. Doesn’t matter. You put on the uniform, you carry the gun, you do your duty.

Bruno refused.

Just flat-out refused, the way you might refuse a second helping of dessert. No drama, no big speech. Just: No. I won’t do that.

They threw him in prison for four months.

Four months in a cell for refusing to hold a weapon—that’s Switzerland for you, all tidy and orderly and absolutely insane underneath, like a serial killer’s basement. But here’s the thing: prison didn’t break him. Didn’t even bend him. He came out harder than he went in, more convinced than ever that the world was doing it all wrong, that civilization was a sick joke and there had to be something better.

Something real.

He tried medical school next—his parents probably breathed a sigh of relief, thinking he’d finally found his way. But medical school was just another cage, just another set of walls, and Bruno couldn’t breathe there. Within a year he was gone, back to the land, back to something that made sense to him in a way that textbooks and lectures never could.

The Shepherd

For twelve years, Bruno Manser was a shepherd in the Alps.

Twelve years.

Think about that. Think about spending more than a decade in the high meadows of Graubünden, making cheese the old way, tending cattle, living in stone huts that probably hadn’t changed since the Middle Ages. Your hands cracking and bleeding in the cold. Your lungs burning in the thin air. Your body hardening like leather, becoming something other than what it was.

He learned to sew his own clothes, repair his own tools, survive in conditions that would kill a softer man in a week. He took up speleology—cave exploration—learning to navigate in absolute darkness, in spaces so tight you had to exhale just to squeeze through.

You could say he was preparing himself, training for something he didn’t even know was coming yet. Or you could say the thing that was wrong in him was getting worse, metastasizing, spreading through him like a cancer that looked like enlightenment if you squinted hard enough.

The Alps made him strong. Made him capable. Made him into something that could survive damn near anything.

But it didn’t make him happy.

Because there was still something missing, something he couldn’t name. Some hole in him that all the mountains in Switzerland couldn’t fill. Late at night, in those stone huts with the wind screaming outside, he’d read anthropology books by lamplight, searching for something he couldn’t quite define.

And then, one day, he found it.

A name on a map: The Penan.

The last nomads. The last truly free people on Earth, living in the rainforests of Borneo without money, without hierarchy, without any of the bullshit that civilization had layered on top of what it meant to be human.

That’s when the thing inside Bruno Manser finally knew where it was going.

That’s when the ending started to write itself.

Into the Green Hell

In 1983, at age thirty, Bruno Manser got on a train in Bangkok.

He had a backpack, some basic gear, and a plan that was either brilliant or completely insane—probably both. Before he even got to Sarawak, he decided to test himself on an uninhabited island near Trengganu, Malaysia. Six weeks alone, living entirely off the land, no modern technology, no supplies, no local knowledge.

He nearly died.

Fever took him first, the kind that makes your teeth chatter so hard you think they’ll crack. Then he poisoned himself eating plants that looked edible but weren’t. By the time he dragged himself off that island, he’d learned what the jungle could do to you if you didn’t know its rules.

Most people would have gone home after that. Would have said, Well, I gave it a shot, time to go back to civilization.

Bruno Manser went deeper.

In 1984, he arrived in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak. The interior was off-limits—the Malaysian government didn’t want foreigners wandering around the rainforest, especially not in Gunung Mulu National Park. But Bruno had learned to think sideways, to slip through cracks. He joined a British cave expedition as their speleology expert, and just like that, he was in.

When the expedition ended, he didn’t go back.

He went deeper.

Into the primary rainforest, into the green cathedral where light filtered down like something from a dream and the air was thick enough to choke on. He went looking for the Penan with nothing but a backpack and a will that was either iron-strong or completely broken, depending on how you looked at it.

For weeks, he was alone in that jungle. Completely, utterly alone.

Most people can’t handle that kind of alone. It does something to your head, makes you hear voices that aren’t there, see things in the shadows. The jungle gets inside you, starts rewriting your brain chemistry. You either go mad or you become something else entirely.

Bruno Manser became something else.

The Man Who Disappeared Into People

When he finally found the Penan, they didn’t want him.

Of course they didn’t. Here was this pale, strange man who didn’t speak their language, didn’t know their ways, stumbling through their forest like a ghost. They were suspicious—and why wouldn’t they be? Every white man who’d ever come to Borneo had wanted something. Wanted to study them, convert them, exploit them, change them.

But Bruno was different in a way they couldn’t quite figure out at first.

He came unarmed. Didn’t bring trade goods or technology to dazzle them with. Didn’t act superior or try to teach them anything. He just… followed them. Ate what they ate. Slept on the ground like they did. Walked when they walked, stopped when they stopped.

For weeks, they mostly ignored him.

He was like a stray dog that had attached itself to the group, tolerated but not welcomed. He trailed behind the nomads as they moved through the forest, picking up scraps of the language, watching, learning, becoming.

And slowly—so slowly you could barely see it happening—he stopped being Bruno Manser from Basel, Switzerland.

He stopped being Bruno Manser at all.

He shed his Western clothes like a snake shedding skin. Cut his hair in their traditional style. Wore bark loincloths and went barefoot, his feet toughening until they were like leather. Learned to hunt with blowpipes, to read the forest’s signs, to move through the jungle silent as smoke.

The elder Along Sega gave him a name: Laki Penan. Penan Man.

Not foreigner. Not outsider. Not white man.

Penan Man.

He learned their language fluently, taking notes on vocabulary and grammar like the anthropologist he’d never formally become. In the 2007 documentary about his life, he talked about fasting in a cave for weeks, about the revelation that came to him in that darkness.

Molong.

Take only what you need. Leave the rest for tomorrow, for your children, for the forest itself.

It was the opposite of everything civilization had taught him. The opposite of accumulation, of growth, of progress. It was the principle that held the Penan’s entire world together—the idea that you could live without destroying, that you could take without depleting, that balance was possible.

He also learned that private ownership was almost nonexistent among them. When someone killed a wild boar, the meat was shared equally among everyone. No one went hungry while others feasted. No one accumulated wealth while others went without.

It was everything Bruno Manser had been searching for since he was a boy camping in a blizzard.

It was everything the modern world had lost.

And that’s when the real horror of the story begins—because the thing about finding paradise is that someone always wants to burn it down for profit.

The Sound of Chainsaws in Eden

By the mid-1980s, the chainsaws were coming.

You could hear them in the distance at first, a high whining scream that didn’t belong in the forest’s ancient quiet. Then you could hear them closer. And closer still.

The timber companies had arrived—massive operations like Samling, tied directly to Sarawak’s political elite, holding official government concessions to log the primary rainforest. The Penan’s ancestral home, the land they’d walked for thousands of years, was now just timber on someone’s balance sheet.

Bruno watched it happen.

The shaded jungle canopy cut down, leaving barren earth that baked in the sudden sun. Clear rivers turning muddy brown from erosion, the fish dying belly-up in water that had run pure for millennia. Sago palms—the Penan’s staple food—bulldozed to make logging roads. Fruit trees felled indiscriminately. Rattan destroyed. Ancestral burial sites crushed under tractor treads.

The game animals fled deeper into the shrinking forest, and suddenly the Penan were hungry in a land that had always fed them.

In his book Voices from the Rainforest, Manser recorded their despair: “This is tearing communities apart and lowering quality of life: polluting drinking water, ruining land.”

But words on a page don’t stop chainsaws. Words don’t stop bulldozers.

So in September 1985, they did something else.

The Barricades

Under Bruno’s coordination and Along Sega’s traditional leadership, the Penan blockaded the logging roads.

Hundreds of them—men, women, children—standing in front of bulldozers and trucks, stretching rattan across the roads, using logs as barriers, using their own bodies as shields. Peaceful resistance, Gandhi-style, the kind Bruno had studied as a teenager.

It worked, for a while.

The blockades halted operations for months. Cost the companies serious money. Made the news internationally.

And that’s when the government decided Bruno Manser had to go.

The Sarawak government, under Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, labeled him “Public Enemy Number One.” Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad called him intolerably arrogant, accused him of wanting the Penan to live “like animals” for Western romanticism.

“These people come to Sarawak, live in the jungle, then tell our people not to accept development,” Mahathir said. “They tell the natives they should stay primitive so European anthropologists can come study our ‘primitive’ society.”

It was a beautiful piece of propaganda, really. Paint the Swiss activist as a colonialist, as a white savior who wanted to keep indigenous people in poverty for his own romantic ideals. Never mind that Bruno lived exactly like the Penan, owned nothing, wanted nothing except for them to keep their land. Never mind that he’d given up everything—family, country, comfort, safety—to stand with them.

The police came. The military came. The blockades were dismantled, violently. People were arrested en masse, intimidated, beaten.

And Bruno Manser went underground.

From 1986 to 1990, he lived on the run in the forest, moving between hidden Penan camps, always one step ahead of the authorities. There was a bounty on his head. Informants everywhere. The jungle that had been his paradise became his prison.

By 1990, he realized something that must have broken his heart: the forest struggle alone wasn’t enough. If the world didn’t know what was happening here, the Penan would lose everything. Their land. Their way of life. Their very existence.

He had to leave. Had to go back to the world he’d escaped, the world he’d thought he was done with forever.

His escape was like something out of a spy novel—fake passport, shaved head, suit and tie, slipping through immigration checkpoints with his heart hammering, probably certain at any moment someone would recognize him and it would all be over.

But he made it.

He made it back to Switzerland, back to Basel, back to a place that must have felt like another planet after six years in the rainforest.

The Hunger Artist

In 1991, he founded the Bruno Manser Fonds at his modest home on Heuberg 25 in Basel. Started writing books, giving lectures, lobbying European politicians about tropical timber imports and rainforest preservation.

But politicians move slowly. They talk and talk and form committees and study the issue and meanwhile the chainsaws keep screaming and the trees keep falling.

So in 1993, Bruno did what Bruno always did when conventional methods failed: he went extreme.

He staged a sixty-day hunger strike outside the Swiss Parliament in Bern, demanding a moratorium on tropical timber imports and mandatory origin labeling.

Sixty days without food.

Think about that. Think about your body consuming itself, burning through fat and then muscle, your organs beginning to shut down, your mind going strange and distant. People probably walked past him every day—this skeletal man wasting away on the Parliament steps—and most of them probably didn’t even look.

He lost drastic weight. Nearly died.

But he got attention. Got headlines. Got people asking questions about where their furniture came from, about whose forest had to die for their hardwood floors.

It wasn’t enough—it’s never enough—but it was something.

The Flying Sheep

By 1999, Bruno couldn’t stay away anymore.

Despite Malaysia’s ban on him, despite the bounty on his head, despite every rational reason to stay safe in Switzerland, he went back.

He disguised himself as a businessman—wore his brother’s ill-fitting wedding suit, probably looked ridiculous—and smuggled in motorized paragliding equipment. His plan was completely insane, which means it was perfectly Bruno Manser.

On Eid al-Fitr, while everyone was celebrating, he fired up his paraglider and flew over Kuching. Flew directly over Chief Minister Taib Mahmud’s residence, gliding through the sky like some kind of avenging angel in a borrowed suit.

The New Straits Times reported it with barely concealed amazement: “A police and immigration team waiting took Manser—who was wearing a sheep T-shirt—into a four-wheel-drive vehicle heading toward the city center.”

A sheep T-shirt. Of course he was wearing a sheep T-shirt.

They arrested him, jailed him, deported him back to Switzerland. But the stunt had done what it was meant to do—humiliated Malaysian security, made international news, proved that one determined man with a paraglider could pierce walls of power that tanks couldn’t touch.

It was probably the last time Bruno Manser smiled.

The Last Walk

In early 2000, news reached Bruno that logging operations were approaching Batu Lawi—a sacred Penan site, one of the last truly untouched places.

He couldn’t bear it.

The guilt must have eaten at him, the knowledge that he was safe in Switzerland while the people he’d lived with, the people he’d become one of, were losing their last refuge. He had to go back. Had to see it one more time.

He crossed into Sarawak overland through Kalimantan, slipping across the green border illegally. Traveled briefly with BMF secretary John Kuenzli, then went on alone.

Before he left, he mailed a final letter to Charlotte, his girlfriend. Drew her a simple sketch. Said he’d think of her when he arrived, that he’d enjoy the view, that maybe he’d hunt a small wild boar.

It reads like a suicide note when you know what’s coming. But maybe all last letters do.

On May 25, 2000, Bruno Manser asked his Penan companions—Paleu and his son—to wait at the base of Batu Lawi while he climbed the sacred peak alone.

They waited.

He never came back.

The Vanishing

Search expeditions combed the area for weeks. The Penan looked everywhere, using all their forest knowledge, all their tracking skills. BMF organized massive search parties.

They found nothing.

No body. No clothes. No metal gear. Not a single bone or scrap of fabric.

Bruno Manser had vanished as completely as if he’d never existed.

There are theories, of course. There are always theories.

Some think he had an accident on the steep, slippery terrain. Fell, broke his neck, got covered by jungle growth within days.

The most widely believed theory—among his family, the BMF, the Penan themselves—is that he was killed. He was a wanted man with a bounty on his head, in an area crawling with illegal loggers, company thugs, soldiers who’d been trying to catch him for years. The Penan reported hearing helicopters around the time he disappeared. Found boot prints that didn’t belong.

Some think it was suicide. That he couldn’t bear to watch the destruction anymore, couldn’t live in a world where the chainsaws always won. That he chose to die in the place he loved most, to become part of the forest in a literal way.

Others—and this is the one that gives me chills—think he didn’t die at all. Think he just… dissolved. Walked into the forest and kept walking until there was nothing left of Bruno Manser, until the jungle had finished swallowing what it started eating in 1984. Until he became what he’d always wanted to be: not a man trying to live like the Penan, but the forest itself.

On March 10, 2005, after five years without a word, the Basel-Stadt Civil Court officially declared him dead.

What Remains

His body was never found, but Bruno Manser left marks.

The BMF’s Community Mapping Project has documented nearly 10,000 square kilometers of customary Penan land. Recorded over 7,000 rivers, 1,800 mountains, thousands of sago trees and ancestral burial sites, all with their original Penan names. In 2019, it won the international Prix Carto award. Now it serves as evidence in Native Customary Rights land claims in Malaysian courts.

Every map is a small victory. Every court case won is another piece of their land protected.

It’s not enough—it’s never enough—but it’s something.

Before Along Sega died in 2011, he said: “When Bruno lived with us, he helped protect the forest. Now we must fight alone. Without outside help, it’s very hard.”

Epilogue: What the Forest Takes

I think about Bruno Manser sometimes, late at night when the house is quiet.

I think about that seventeen-year-old kid swallowing morning glory seeds, looking for something beyond the gray walls of Swiss respectability. About the shepherd in the Alps, reading anthropology books by lamplight. About the man who walked into the Borneo jungle and never really came out.

There’s a certain kind of person who can’t live in the world as it is. Who sees the machinery of civilization grinding everything beautiful into dust and just… can’t. Can’t pretend it’s okay. Can’t go to work and pay bills and watch TV and act like it’s all normal while the planet burns.

Bruno Manser was that kind of person.

And the terrible thing—the thing that keeps me up at night—is that he was right. About all of it. The forest was being destroyed. The Penan were losing everything. The modern world had lost something fundamental about what it means to be human.

Being right didn’t save him.

Being right didn’t stop the chainsaws.

The forest he loved is still being logged. The Penan are still fighting for their land. The machinery grinds on, patient and relentless, turning paradise into board-feet and profit margins.

But somewhere in the green heart of Borneo, there’s a place where Bruno Manser walked. Where he laughed with the Penan, where he learned to hunt with a blowpipe, where he fasted in a cave and learned the principle of molong—take only what you need.

And whether he’s buried there, bones turning to soil, or whether he’s still walking somehow, dissolved into the forest he became—

Well.

Maybe that’s the same thing after all.

Maybe the jungle finally finished what it started in 1984.

Maybe Bruno Manser got exactly what he was looking for.

And maybe that’s the most horrifying thing of all—that paradise exists, that it’s real, that you can find it if you’re willing to give up everything.

And it still won’t be enough to save it.

The chainsaws are always louder than one man’s voice, even when he’s screaming with his whole soul.

Even when he’s willing to disappear into the forest forever.

Even then.