Photo: Carl Josef Kleingrothe/National Gallery of Australia
The photo above is an access road through the forest to a plantation in North Sumatra around the 1900s. Photographed by Carl Josef Kleingrothe, a German living in North Sumatra.
Roads are the main infrastructure of everything. Without roads, a place will be cut off from access to other places, it is impossible to develop without road access.
Plantations area, which are usually obtained by clearing forests, make plantation locations remote and require opening their own roads.
Decades later the proliferation of plantations became a problem for the balance of the rainforest ecosystem because it was replaced with plantation monoculture crops such as tobacco, oil palm, coffee, and tea. The native flora and fauna of the rainforest have lost their habitat.
As a result, our living spaces often collide between humans and animals such as tigers and elephants.