Orangutan Outreach Website - Saving the Orangutan

BOS supporter Nikki Anderson recently held a cake sale at her office and made almost £200, which will buy quite a lot of milk and food for the orangutans that BOS looks after. Thanks to people like Nikki, who go out of their way to spread the word and raise funds, many more orangutans have a chance at a future. Please, won’t you try to organise some kind of fundraiser, big or small, at your place of work, your school or in your community.

Nikki reports: “Everyone was very generous! We made £152.70 on the Friday. I put what was left over in our 24/7 control room and asked for donations over the weekend. I also made a load of flapjacks for Father’s Day as the family were over at my parents and made another £10! Then, desperately trying to make the total up to £200 I made some more flapjacks (by now a legend in their own right!) and hoofed them up to Birmingham for a Team meeting and made a further £20!! Not one to be beaten, I brought the remainder (there were only 4) into work and auctioned them off! What with the extra donations and some loose change I’m happy to say we made the £200 mark– possibly even a couple of pounds over…!!”

July 24, 2007 19:29 PM
By Mohd Haikal Mohd Isa

JOHOR BAHARU, July 24 (Bernama) — Stores or what syndicate members refer to as “terminals” come equipped with cages and freezers to keep live animals and fresh meat.

The stores located deep in oil palm plantations to avoid detection were set up by a syndicate behind the wildlife illegal trade, said a researcher with a non-governmental organisation (NGO) here today.

“The stores act as temporary holding centres until the protected animals and meat are smuggled out of the country or ordered by restaurants serving exotic dishes,” the researcher who declined to be identified told Bernama.

The researcher who feared for his safety said the stores supply restaurants which put exotic dishes on the menu including the much sought after tiger meat.

The syndicate members also conduct regular patrols to protect the stores from intruders.

“I wanted to snap photographs of the stores but was prevented by a colleague who said it was too risky as the members carry firearms,” said the researcher.

Assistant director (Enforcement) of the Wildlife Protection and National Parks (Perhilitan) Wildlife Crime Unit, Celescoriano Razond admitted the stores’ existence.

“The stores are located in remote oil palm plantations and Orang Asli settlements making detection difficult.”

He refused to reveal their locations as it would disrupt investigation by his department.

Rezond said exotic dish restaurants rarely keep wildlife meat at their premises.

“The meat is taken from the stores after orders are received,” he added.

When contacted, Johor Perhilitan director Abdul Razak Majid said the department would investigate the researcher’s claim.

Recently, Perhilitan’s Wildlife Crime Unit seized some 950 monkeys destined for China and Holland from a rambutan orchard in Pontian.

Perhilitan had also raided several stores in oil palm plantations used to keep protected animals and fresh meat.

Source: BERNAMA

JAKARTA - Thursday, July 26, 2007

Workers on Indonesian palm oil plantations are deliberately killing endangered orangutans on the island of Borneo to stop them eating their seedlings, activists said on Wednesday.

Hardi Baktiantoro, director of the Center for Oran­gutan Protection (COP), said at least 1,500 orangutans perished in 2006, most as a result of deliberate attacks but also due to their habitat disappearing to make way for palm oil plantations.

“Orangutans have become the victims of torture by plantation workers as they wander and eat palm oil seedlings for survival,” Baktiantoro told reporters.

As plantation workers had to pay concession companies for the loss of the seedlings, they had no choice but to pursue the primates, he said.

Video footage screened at a press briefing showed dead orangutans with severe head wounds allegedly inflicted by workers as well as severely injured animals that were treated by COP and other local rescue teams.

Baktiantoro said that “even though this kind of cruelty violates Indonesia’s law on biodiversity conservation, no one until now has been arrested for this crime.”

The COP urged the Indonesian government to immediately cancel concessions to palm oil companies in a bid to protect the orangutans.

“Central Kalimantan is the final frontier of the oran­gutan population in Indonesia. If the forest clearing continues, we will soon lose our national treasure,” he warned.

Scientists estimate that 34,000 orangutans remain in Central Kalimantan province on Borneo.

Vice-President Jusuf Kalla has said that Indonesia plans to be the largest palm oil producer by 2008 amid strong demand from the global food, biofuel and chemicals industries.

Indonesia is currently the second largest producer after Malaysia although it has a much larger area for plantations. The two countries account for 85 percent of world production.

A spokesman for the Indonesian Palm Oil Producers’ Association was not immediately available for comment.

Source: http://www.manilatimes.net/

We can always find inspiration in our young supporters no matter how good or bad things are going…

Rebecca Stevens (9 years old) shows us all that you don’t have to be a grown-up to know what is going on in the world. In her own poetic way, she shares how she believes an orangutan might feel as it watches its home disappear…

Thank you so much, Rebecca!

Laura Garrard is an avid supporter of the plight of the orangutan and utilizes her talents to great effect through her artistic talents. She recently completed an Art Foundation Course at Lincoln College, gaining a merit. In September she is going to study illustration at the University of Derby.

For her final major project at college she decided to illustrate 3 posters on behalf of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, to help raise awareness of the desperate situation the orangutans face today. She found her inspiration from a documentary aired on BBC1 (Orangutan Diary). It had a significant effect on her, and awoke in her a belief that more people should be aware of the situation. Using a less typical approach, she decided to express the sadness of the situation through illustration. Laura has been using her posters and badges to raise money for the cause during her exhibition.

Here are three of her posters. For more information, please contact us.

The Jakarta Post - National News - Saturday, July 21, 2007
Alvin Darlanika Soedarjo, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) has accused the government of encouraging deforestation by allowing eight industrial timber plantation companies to cut down trees in Riau province beyond the legal limit.

“The Forestry Ministry has issued permits for these companies to continue exploiting forest and peatland in Riau for the pulp and crude palm oil industries,” Walhi chairman Chalid Muhammad told a media conference Friday.

The eight timber plantations, which control more than 2 million hectares of land in Riau, are responsible for the disappearance of forests in the province, he said.

“The ministry has failed to conserve the forests there and it should be held responsible for deforestation, which contributes to global warming,” Chalid said.

Walhi cited letter of dispensation No. 613/2006 issued by Forestry Minister Malam Sambat Ka’ban, which allows the industrial timber plantations to continue to exploit the forests.

Indonesia, especially in rural areas, emits more than 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually. A large part of this is caused by deforestation.

Indonesia is considered the third leading emitter of greenhouse gases after the U.S. and China.

Ka’ban, who is reportedly locked in a dispute with the National Police over forest-related crimes in Riau, issued a letter of support for Adelin Lis, the financial director of logging company PT Keang Nam Development Indonesia who is on trial for illegal logging in Riau.

The letter said Adelin was guilty only of administrative errors, not criminal action in logging outside the company’s concession area.

Walhi Forest Campaign division head Rully Syumanda said forestry officials and the police put more effort into arresting poor rural culprits rather than the directors or owners of big companies involved in illegal logging.

“By 2015, about 93 percent of Riau’s forest will be gone,” he said.

Walhi said industrial timber plantation companies usually operated by cutting down the forest, clearing the land with fire and then planting industrial timber.

Haze from forest fires in Indonesia is an annual occurrence, affecting large parts of the country and neighboring countries such as Singapore and Malaysia.

Chalid said a scheme proposed by several international organizations to reward rural people for forest conservation would not be effective, considering much of the land was controlled by plantation companies.

Besides Riau, Walhi representatives from West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, North Sumatra and Southeast Sulawesi reported on deforestation in their provinces.

The environmental group says police, judges and prosecutors must find new ways to stop illegal loggers, because previous efforts have proven useless.

Forestry Ministry spokesman Masyhud told The Jakarta Post he had not seen the dispensation letter allegedly issued by the minister granting the eight timber estate companies permission to fell more trees.

Source: The Jakarta Post

The Jakarta Post - Opinion News - Saturday, July 21, 2007
Bramantyo Prijosusilo, Ngawi, East Java

It is quite alarming that with the desperate conditions our forests are in, the Forestry Minister has sought to influence the course of justice (at the early stage of law enforcement) by suggesting police chiefs in Riau and Papua be sacked because of their efforts to break illegal logging and the mafia in their provinces.

One might have imagined the efforts of the police would have been applauded by the forestry ministry, but a lot of the deforestation in this country has been done legally. So perhaps it’s best to appreciate the forestry ministry is as much of a problem as it is a solution to our national forestry crisis. To say nothing of the global crisis we have added to.

At the beginning of our efforts to profit from our previously vast areas of rain forest, lack of knowledge, information and participation fueled our disregard for the environment.

Huge tracts of forest were chopped down by concession holders. With neither proper analysis of the environmental impact of logging activities nor consultation with all the stake-holders — particularly the forest communities who had lived there since the beginning of human dreams.

Maps were drawn and rights were granted and areas as big as countries were laid bare by the chainsaw and the bulldozer.

Travel by road through Sumatra or by river through Kalimantan and you will find practically no jungle left. Riau, the birthplace of our language, Bahasa Indonesia, is no more the beautiful province of wild honey-bees, sophisticated villagers who tap their private rubber trees and compose pantun poetry.

Much of it has been transformed into environmentally unsound plantations of oil palm and wood for paper pulp. The society has been fragmented and is now unable to sell their labor to the industries of paper, palm or oil, marginalized in their own birthplace.

The rich, black soil under a jungle has a very fragile structure and when vast areas are logged bare and left through a rainy season, the monsoon waters carry all the fertile topsoil down river to the sea.

What you have left is a young desert and anything you plant there will struggle to survive. The plants in the vast plantations of Riau appear sickly; the soil they grow on is red and unfertile. This means the plants must demand heavy inputs of man-made chemical fertilizers and pesticides to survive.

I imagine there are thousands of Riau or Papua born policeman who warmly welcomed the apparent political will to stop illegal logging not too long ago.

But it must be painful to be a policeman helplessly witnessing forests of your birthplace being taken away by powerful people whom you’ve never met.

In the past it appeared the logging mafia was too powerful to be halted. On the ground they were dangerous to oppose but profitable to help.

The international shaming of Indonesia in regard to its deforestation and the renewed national political will to stop illegal logging might have been the jump-start the police needed to swing into action. They were in the midst of doing their job when the forestry minister stepped in to interfere with the course of justice.

No one should be above the law and the minister of forestry should feel ashamed of his conduct and apologize for attempting to intimidate and discredit the police chiefs in Riau and Papua. These policemen have, despite their shortcomings, been working hard on the dangerous task that has never yet been completed successfully: tackling and bringing down the logging mafia.

The honorable minister claimed he had looked through the cases the police had worked on and saw they had made too many mistakes. It might be true that our policemen made mistakes in Riau and Papua illegal logging cases. Everyone makes mistakes and we all know that our police force often blunders.

The police making mistakes should come as no surprise, but surely our legal system has ways to hold police accountable for the mistakes they make without a politician making a request to sack them.

By attempting to abuse his political power to sack the chiefs of police in Riau and Papua, our minister is causing widespread damage. Not only will now the police feel hindered in their job but the profiteers in deforestation will feel they have been given a morale boost.

From a cultural perspective, our honorable minister has jeopardized our efforts to build a democracy based on a civil society and set us back to the old New Order mode of governance. How can a democracy work if politicians interfere in the administration of justice?

From a sociological perspective, such an unpopular and unintelligent move as this erodes public support for the government he is in, making him a liability rather than an asset for the President.

From a political perspective, as a minister from an Islamic political party, he takes away all the credibility in the anti-corruption talk his party claims to stand for. From an environmental perspective his action represent madness. Internationally our minister’s effort to sack the two police chiefs is a total embarrassment as it provides one more vivid illustration to further strengthen the opinion that we can’t get our act together to save our forests.

The case of the forestry minister wanting to get the police chiefs of Riau and Papua sacked should be seen as an opportunity for Indonesia to prove to the world and to the people of this country that the government is concerned with the development of a civil society, with the eradication of corruption, and most importantly, with the conservation of our fragile natural resources.

The very fact a politician has blatantly tried to interfere with the course of justice is a reason to seize the this moment.

We must use this opportunity to further strengthen the morale of our police in their attempts to shatter the deforestation mafia in this country.

Rather than asking the chief of police in Jakarta to sack his brave policemen in Riau and Papua, we should demand the President sack his forestry minister.

The writer is a rice farmer and artist living in Ngawi, East Java.

Source: The Jakarta Post

Dear Ape Allies in UK and Europe

Animal Defenders International is running a lobbying campaign to end the use of primates in research in Europe.

ADI drafted a Written Declaration which has been tabled by MEPs John Bowis (UK – European People’s Party), Martine Roure (France – Party of European Socialists), Jens Holm (Sweden – European United Left), Rebecca Harms (Germany – Greens) and Mojca Drcar Murko (Slovenia – Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe) and others.

The Declaration now has the support of all the main parties in Europe, and someone from every country has signed. It has cross-party and international support.

This is Written Declaration 40/2007, which calls for:

* An end to the use of Great Apes
* An end to the use of wild-caught primates
* A phase-out of primate testing in favour of replacement techniques

Today, 11 July 2007 – 250 Members of the European Parliament have now signed ADI’s Written Declaration calling for an end to primate research in Europe.

We are in Strasbourg with the MEPs this week. We are knocking on doors, handing out literature, and we have produced a scientific briefing for MEPs which challenges all of the assumptions made in the policy statement supporting primate research, of the EU’s Scientific Steering Committee. Every MEP has been given a copy.

NOW WE NEED YOU – YOU CAN HELP THIS CAMPAIGN

Whether there are 2 people, or 10 people in your office, you can call your MEP and ask them to sign WRITTEN DECLARATION 40/2007 on primate rese arch.

We have detailed how to replace the use of primates in research in our report, as mentioned above. The laboratory animal trade is one of the four great threats to primates – but we do not need to drive our closest relatives to extinction – there are other ways to conduct scientific and medical research.

You can help this campaign by calling your MEP this week. Don’t email as it might get automatically blocked – call or send a fax (you’ll need to call for fax number) but if you are not sure who represents you in Brussels, type your post-code into http://www.writetothem.com/

The European Parliament is in Plenary Session in Strasbourg this week, and the Declaration is on a table outside the Hemicycle (the main debating chamber).

You can call them in Strasbourg until Thursday of this week, and then in Brussels on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday next week.

Strasbourg – main number: + 33 3 881 74001 (call and ask for MEPs by name)

Brussels – main number: + 32 2 284 21 11 (call and ask for MEPs by name)

Click here first to see whether your MEP has signed:

http://www.ad-international.org/mmap/go.php?id=827&ssi=60

Please help TODAY!

——
Animal Defenders International
Millbank Tower
Millbank
London SW1P 4QP, UK.
Tel. +44 (0)20 7630 3340
Fax. +44 (0)20 7828 2179
www.ad-international.org
**********

2007/07/17

Humans evolved to walk upright because it uses less energy than travelling on all fours, according to researchers.

A US team compared the energy used by humans and by chimpanzees in walking.

The human bipedal gait is about four times more efficient than chimps getting around on either two or four legs, the researchers found.

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they say this may explain why we walk bipedally, and some of our anatomical features.

Other research groups have proposed alternative explanations for our two-legged gait.

Some suggest it evolved because early humans needed to reach upwards to collect food or pass it to a mate, while others maintain it predates four-legged locomotion in primates, citing the often upright posture of orangutans as they move across slim branches.

On the treadmill

A study from 1973 found little difference in efficiency between two-legged and four-legged walking in primates, but its conclusions had been disputed because only juvenile chimpanzees were used.

So David Raichlen from the University of Arizona in Tucson and colleagues set up a study in which five adult chimps were trained to use a treadmill, either on two legs or four.

The subjects were fitted with masks to collect exhaled air so that parameters such as oxygen use could be measured. Blobs of white paint on critical parts of the body such as elbows and knees allowed researchers to analyse the gait using video.

The results were compared with four human subjects using the same treadmill.

Generally, the humans were about four times more efficient than the chimps.

Three of the chimps found bipedal walking used more energy than going on all fours. But one of the others showed the opposite pattern; and intriguingly, she was the only chimp to lengthen her stride.

“We were able to tie the energetic cost in chimps to their anatomy,” noted Dr Raichlen.

“We were able to show exactly why certain individuals were able to walk bipedally more cheaply than others.”

The hypothesis, then, is that early humans began to evolve in a direction which allowed for easy bipedal travel.

David Raichlen suggests that early humans should show adaptations such as a longer leg length, and that there are indications of this in fossils of the genus Australopithecus , such as the famous “Lucy” specimen discovered in Ethiopia in 1974.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/6902379.stm

By Glenn Hurowitz of The Huffington Post
Posted July 17, 2007 | 12:02 PM (EST)

Lately, I’ve been inundated with phone calls from venture capitalists, private equity guys, and hedge fundistas. They’re coming to me because I’m their environmentalist friend and they all want to know one thing: how they can make a buck off the surge in interest in combating global warming.

In a way, that’s a sign that the environmental movement has finally arrived. After decades of struggling to convince the titans of finance that protecting the planet and making money weren’t mutually exclusive, the tycoons are now coming to us.

But many of these capitalist converts need watching. While Wall Street’s eco-splurge has generated a flood of financing for legitimately clean ventures like wind and solar power, it’s also spawned extremely dangerous projects that are painted green by their unscrupulous backers, but that at their core are as black as, well, coal.

The green sheen plastered on some of these projects — like burning down the rainforest to generate electricity for homes — has actually convinced some members of Congress to start throwing billions of taxpayer dollars their way. Of course, not all those representatives and senators are gullible enough to believe that making forests into electricity is really good for the planet. Some just think voters will be so dazzled by the spin doctors’ lovingly applied emerald veneer that they won’t notice them pocketing these eco-pretenders’ campaign donations.

Take that burning-the-rainforest-to-power-your-iPhone proposal. All over the tropics, international agribusiness giants like Cargill, as well as smaller domestic operators, have turned pristine rainforests into millions of acres of soy, sugar, and palm oil plantations. Much of that provides raw material to make biodiesel, touted by its numerous backers as a quintessential green fuel.

Unfortunately, rainforest biodiesel is triply bad for the planet. When rainforest is burned to clear the land, the carbon that had been safely stored in tree trunks, orangutans, and other living matter gets incinerated and becomes the carbon dioxide responsible for warming the planet. Also incinerated: vital habitat for endangered species (like the orangutans) and indigenous people who need intact rainforests to survive.

Then, the farms that replace the forests spew out greenhouse gases as workers drive their tractors and spray pesticides made in factories running on coal, natural gas, or more biofuels. And when that biofuel finally arrives in your gas tank or the local power plant, it may actually produce slightly more cancer-causing toxins than regular old gasoline, according to a recent Stanford University study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology (though the study didn’t evaluate rainforest biodiesel, but other biofuels instead).

But you don’t have to go to the tropics to see billionaire faux-environmentalism at work. Just drive out to West Virginia, where Big Coal executives are hoping for a renewed mining bonanza if they can somehow convince members of Congress that coal is clean and that liquefied coal can replace gasoline. They’re lobbying hard for taxpayer guarantees for liquid coal projects that they argue can help free America from its reliance on foreign oil. That’s the kind of sweetheart deal that could make even oil executives jealous.

But not only is the proposal expensive, it’s also extremely dangerous to the environment. Turning hard coal into an automotive fuel takes a lot of energy, which is why liquid coal produces twice the greenhouse gas emissions of regular coal. Liquid coal backers claim that, with the right amount of additional taxpayer support, they can use advanced technology to capture and store that extra global warming pollution. Even if that’s true (and taxpayers are willing to take the hit), it doesn’t do anything about coal’s remaining non-climate environmental hazards: the soot and smog that kill more than 30,000 people every year and the destruction of mountaintops across Appalachia and elsewhere.

That’s bad, but it’s nothing compared to the scam being pushed by the timber lobby. The logging industry not only cuts down the forests that act as the planet’s lungs, they also use tremendous amounts of energy to turn dead trees into furniture and paper. If Congress takes serious action to stop global warming, the loggers would have to clean up their act. But their resident wonks at the American Forest and Paper Association have found a way to reap a financial windfall from likely climate legislation.

Call it the Sofa Scheme. They’re arguing that every sofa, Post-It note, and Kleenex tissue they produce should be counted as carbon storage, just like forests are. Their logic is that even when these forest products are discarded and put in a landfill, they’re keeping that carbon safely in the ground rather than sending it into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide.

If the timber lobby gets its way, that could mean big money for the logging companies. Under the carbon trading schemes likely to be a part of any global warming legislation, they could use all the credits they get from producing furniture and paper to avoid having to make any actual reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions or preserving actual living forests. Alternately, they could sell those credits to other polluters who would use them to avoid making their own reductions.

That could perversely endanger recycling programs, which are huge energy savers (it takes less energy to make paper from paper than from virgin trees). If wood and paper are given value just for lying in a landfill, it could create an incentive for trash operators to dispose of them that way, rather than recycling them. Indeed, whoever is able to get credit for landfilling the 59 million tons of forest products disposed of annually would reap more than $1 billion in profit, based on the price of carbon pollution permits being traded in European markets.

The good news is that some lawmakers are starting to get wise to these polluter schemes. Facing worries about the impact of increasing demand for palm oil grown in ecologically sensitive parts of Southeast Asia and Colombia, Europe may ban biofuels grown unsustainably. During the debate over the energy bill, the Senate defeated an attempt to provide billions of dollars in subsidies and loan guarantees for liquid coal. And there’s growing support for giving financial value to living forests instead of forests that have been turned into toilet paper.

But even if these particular scams are beaten back, environmentalists and others must remain vigilant. Capitalism is, for good and bad, an infinitely creative phenomenon. America must be sure to harness that creativity to solve the climate crisis rather than letting rogue billionaires make it worse.

Originally published in The American Prospect, July 17, 2007.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-hurowitz/environmentalism-for-bill_b_56580.html