As Taisa Mating, a grandmother of nine, bends down to pick up a seed from the forest ground, she sometimes pauses and whispers to it.
"Please don't die. I'm going to take care of you," she would tell the seed. "When you're big enough, I'm going to give you a big playground where you can grow into the tree you're meant to be."
The seeds that Taisa, 67, gathers are destined for Lower Kawag, part of the Ulu Segama-Malua Forest Reserve, where Sabah is restoring one of its most degraded rainforest landscapes. Decades of intensive logging between the 1980s and 2007, together with major El Nino-induced fires, have left large swathes of the forest degraded and vulnerable to recurring fires.
Taisa is one of the women from Kampung Tampenau, a small village on the edge of Sabah's rainforest, who have been trained to sow the seeds of forest regeneration under a scheme that started in 2021. The seeds collected are sown in backyard nurseries in their villages and eventually grown into young trees to replenish the rainforest.
Whenever their backyard nurseries run low on seedlings, the Kampung Tampenau women head to the forest's edge carrying plastic pails or any containers they have at hand. Their eyes scan the ground for fallen seeds — hidden beneath leaves and forest debris.
