Willie's Blog

• 3 July 2010
  
• 2 July 2010
  
• 30 June 2010
  
• Sintang Sinting

Willie Smits is a trained forester, a conservationist and animal rights activist. Smits took a degree in tropical forestry and soil science at the Agricultural University of Wageningen (The Netherlands). He did his doctoral thesis studies and subsequent research in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan. He graduated in Wageningen on a thesis on the symbiosis between mycorrhizas and the roots of Dipterocarpaceae tropical rainforest trees.

Since 1985 he has worked on the tropical forest research station near Balikpapan Wanariset in the Indonesian Province of East Kalimantan. In the early 90s he was team leader of the Tropenbos Kalimantan Project Indonesia, an international partnership between the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry and Tropenbos Foundation.

In 1991 Smits founded the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS), in Borneo (Indonesia), the world's largest organization for the protection of the immediately endangered orangutans. It began with an encounter with a baby orangutan in the market:

"Somebody stuck a crate in my face at the market in Balikpapan. Looking out between the slats were the very, very sad eyes of a baby orangutan. I couldn’t forget them. That evening I went back after the market closed. Walking around in the dark, I heard a horrible gasping sound. The baby in its crate was on the garbage dump, dying. I picked her up."

He nursed her back to health and named her Uce for the labored sound she made while gasping for breath. A few weeks later he was given a sick orangutan to look after, which he named Dodoy.

With the help of thousands of schoolchildren in Indonesia contributing small amounts of money, Smits was able to set up what became the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation to rehabilitate orphaned and misused orangutans and return them to a safe place in the wild.

The Wanariset became home to hundreds of confiscated orangutans, rescued from illegal animal smuggling, kept as pets or exploited in other ways.

Smits believes that protecting orangutans in their habitat not only benefits our orangutans but also the environment and biological diversity, the poor in Borneo and all the world’s people. The peat swamp forests of Borneo are one of the few remaining refuges for orangutans. That habitat is disappearing at a tremendous rate, due mainly to the impact of oil palm plantations.

Thinkers of the Jungle - The Orangutan Report, by Gerd Schuster, Willie Smits with photographs by Jay Ullal

In 2001, BOS started purchasing land near Wanariset. The 2000 hectare (5000 acres) area it acquired had been deforested by mechanical logging, drought and severe fires and was covered in alang-alang grass (Imperata cylindrica). The aim was to restore the rainforest and provide a safe haven for rehabilitated orangutans while at the same time providing a source of income for local people. The name Samboja Lestari roughly translates as the "everlasting conservation of Samboja". Reforestation and rehabilitation is the core of the project, with hundreds of indigenous species planted. By the middle of 2006 more than 740 different tree species had been planted.

The Orangutan Reintroduction Project at Wanariset was moved to Samboja Lestari. "Forest Schools" were established, areas that provide natural, educational playgrounds for the orangutans in which to learn forest skills. Here the orangutans roam freely but under supervision and are returned to sleeping cages for the night. "Orangutan islands" were created where the orangutans and other wildlife that cannot return to the wild are nevertheless able to live in almost completely natural conditions.

At his 2009 TED talk Smits claimed there had been a substantial increase in cloud cover and 30% more rainfall due to the reforestation at Samboja Lestari.

To finance the nature reserve, BOS created a system of "land-purchasing", a "Create Rainforest" initiative where sybolically adopt square metres of rainforest. Donors are able to view and follow the progress of their "purchase" in the project area with Google Earth satellite images from 2002 and 2007 with additional information overlaid.

Smits has continued to be involved in the study of the mycorrhizal fungi that improve the uptake of water and nutrients from the soil by the Meranti tree. By using this fungus he has achieved faster growth of young seedlings. He is beside his current work for the orangutans at Wanariset, the Chairman of the Gibbon Foundation and consultant for the Indonesian Orangutan Survival Program.

His Masarang Foundation raises money and awareness to restore habitat forests around the world and to empower local people. In 2007, Masarang opened a palm-sugar factory that uses thermal energy to turn sugar palms into sugar or ethanol, returning cash and power to the community and, perhaps, beginning the cycle toward a better future for people, trees and orangutans.

His wife's family in North Sulawesi manages a beach about ten kilometers long, where sea turtles grow and a visitors may see coral. Smits also captures tropical birds from the illegal pet trade. He also promotes the use of palm sugar, because in he sees it as more environmentally friendly than cane, also providing small farmers with an income.

Smits was the first non-Indonesian to receive the Satya Lencana Pembangunan Award (1998) and he was decorated for his conservation work by the royal family of the Netherlands. In 2010 Smits became an Ashoka Senior fellow.