Do you count orangutans as "local Malaysians"? In any case, the rainforest is certainly useful to all of the indigenous humans whose home and way of life are also being destroyed. You might find the rainforest "too dense to walk through" but unique cultures have inhabited them for millennia.

You are, by the way, more likely to contract a mosquito-bourne disease in a town than a rainforest, where much higher mosquito species diversity, plus much lower human population density, equal lower prevalence of the mosquitoes that carry human pathogens.

Also it's not "otherwise it would be all jungle". It's "otherwise more of it would be jungle, or would more resemble an intact jungle in various ways". Intelligent policy on land use and allocation is nuanced, not either/or.

Yes, the jungles are "useful for local Malaysians" in all kinds of ways. But you can find Malaysians from all backgrounds battling for the preservation of their vanishing patches of forests, against the interests of the big agribusiness and timber extraction elites. The forests are treasurehouses of biodiversity and there are powerful aguments to be made on economic, environmental, ethical and custodianship grounds.

They're probably useful in long term and not so obvious ways we won't figure out until it's too late.

The average Malaysian lives in a city and isn't greatly affected by jungles either way. There are small numbers Malaysians who live off the jungle and others who work in jungle tourism and conservation too. And other Malaysians who work on palm oil plantations, of course.

The jungle's considerably more useful than palm plantations for the animals that live there, obviously.

Rainforests not jungles. Gotta talk the talk.

The people in Malaysia who I talked to used the word jungle.

I think poster means "saving the Jungle!" just doesn't have same appeal as "saving the Rainforest!"

I would assume there are ways to make palm plantations sustainable. I mean the German word "Nachhaltigkeit" comes from old treaties on forest cultivation, planting and harvesting in a way that keeps the overall forest intact. Seems we all forgot to care about the aspect quite a while ago.