Edward Gargan, Bangsri – The last of central Java's great teakwood forests ends up in places like this, a place filled with the whine of buzz-saws and the burr of electric sanders, a place like Abdul Jambari's garden-furniture workshop.

"This is for export," Jambari says, stroking the finely polished arm of an auburn-grained folding chair. "It's the best teak, what we call class A." And because his order book is full, a month or two from now, for about $A200, Jambari's chair will sit on a patio or deck somewhere in the United States, Europe or Australia.

But that chair and the 4,000 others that are part of Jambari's latest export shipment have left behind a swath of utter devastation, one of thousands that afflict this archipelago and spell the end of the majestic forests that once blanketed Indonesia. Their disappearance also means the extinction of innumerable indigenous animal and plant species.

"We are facing a cataclysm," said Togu Manurung, the director of Forest Watch Indonesia, an environmental organisation that documents the destruction of the country's forests. "That is not an exaggeration. Our forests are disappearing faster now than under [the former president] Soeharto. It is worse than any time in Indonesia's history."

The tropical forests of Indonesia, one-tenth of the world's total, have fallen victim in part to the virtual collapse of political authority. The toppling three years ago of Soeharto's authoritarian regime has been followed by widespread violent upheaval, including multiple secessionist movements. In this chaotic atmosphere, illegal logging has gone unchecked. In an unpublished report on Indonesia's forests, the World Bank found that all the lowland forests in one of the country's largest islands, Sumatra, will be extinct before 2005, and in Kalimantan, the island formerly known as Borneo, by 2010.

Swamp forests, according to the report, will disappear five years later. In the past decade, the rate of Indonesia's deforestation has accelerated from almost a million hectares annually to 1.7 million hectares.

Based on an analysis of satellite photos of Indonesia's forests, the report, written by Mr Derek Holmes, a consultant to the World Bank, says that unless the Government acts immediately to stop rampant illegal logging "the only extensive forests that will remain in Sumatra, Kalimantan and Sulawesi in the second decade of the new millennium will be the low stature forests of the mountains."

For people like Mr Manurung there is little evidence that the Government, in disarray over the impending impeachment of President Abdurrahman Wahid and beset by waves of sectarian and ethnic conflict, is capable of slowing the destruction. "Illegal logging is going on everywhere," he said. "Lots of people are involved. Lots of these people have connections – high-ranking officials, members of parliament, the army, police, local officials."

Even national parks are being logged at a frenetic pace. On Kalimantan the Tanjung Puting National Park, designated by the United Nations as a biosphere reserve, a term bestowed on lands of exceptional plant and animal diversity, is being systematically and illegally logged, according to reports by Forest Watch and another environmental group, Telepak Indonesia, as well as Indonesia's Ministry of Forestry and Estate Crops.

Suripto, the secretary-general of the Forestry Ministry, alleged last year that timber companies and sawmills owned by an MP, Mr Abdul Raysid, were illegally processing ramin logs, the most valuable tree in the national park. Despite his findings, after an extensive investigation, the logging has continued and Mr Raysid remains untouched by the law.

"You must understand that people like Raysid are like Robin Hood in their localities," said Forest Watch's Mr Manurung. "They put a lot of money into their communities, and they have a lot of support from local people. So when government investigators, or investigators from groups like ours, go to the park to check on logging, there are gangs that try to intimidate us. Some people have been beaten up." Most of the timber plundered from the national park and from Indonesia's other forests winds up in China, Europe, the US or Australia.

Here in Bangsri, a nub of land protruding from the northern rim of central Java, local officials say a breakdown of law and authority has fuelled the surge in illegal logging, and with it, the end of the forests. Everywhere, stumps of what were once towering teak trees pepper the landscape.

"In 1999 this was all forest," said Rahmat Wijaya, the district manager for the state logging company, Perhutani, his hand sweeping across a barren vista stretching towards distant hills. "That year thousands of people came and cut down the trees – local people and people from outside, both. The last tree was taken in November 2000. There was nothing we could do.