by Jules Ong from Malaysiakini.com

A review of the 36-minute documentary by Hilary Chiew and Chi Too

Watch the film online

What Environment? It’s occupation and terrorism.

I watched What Rainforest? and immediately felt that it should not be called an ‘environmental’ documentary. But it was conveniently lumped under environment at its debut showing at the 2008 Freedom Film Festival recently.

As environmental issues become mainstream, its messages becomes simplified and stereotyped…. and boring. Add the indigenous people, and the Hollywood theme of Guardian of the Rainforest gets even more tiresome.

Here goes – Primitive but wise with the way of the jungle, the indigenous people fight a losing battle against modern development to protect their way of life and identity. How heroic. How sad.

I think it’s time to move on. Because if you sing this refrain over and over, people stop caring. And it gives ammunition to those who don’t give two hoots about the environment or native rights to respond: Hey, wake up man. We have to develop. We have hungry stomachs to fill. Why should we be sorry for cutting down a few trees?

The West finished cutting their trees and now wants to stop us?! And those lazy natives, why are you so anti-development? You want to be uneducated, poor and hungry ah? (as if they were offered any choices).

That’s the typical answer politicians in Sarawak love to give when you present them facts about illegal logging. Nevermind the criminal element of illegal logging, they will bring out that tiresome narrative about development vs environment.

The 36-minute documentary What Rainforest? by Chi Too and Hilary Chiew is a different sort of film with an environmental sounding name. It made me sit up. It made me burn. It’s not about development vs environment with pretty pictures of virgin rainforests and its cute denizens thrown in.

Palestine-like

It’s really about occupation and terrorism. Much akin to what the Palestinians are facing in their homeland. Driven out of their land and occupied by others while the rest of the world looks on.

Except that in this case, it is perpetuated not by foreign enemies but done with the aggressive support of the state using our tax dollars backed by dubious sections of the law. So in effect, it’s state terrorism.

Ok, I’d say the Palestinians have it much worse, but the fact of the matter is that occupation and terrorism is happening in the Land of the Hornbills. Occupation – people’s land are being occupied illegally. Terrorism – people are being threatened and even beaten if they refuse to leave, if they put up blockades, or if they’re organising their people. There have also been cases of mysterious disappearances and deaths of activists. Recently, NGO’s have claimed that Penan women and girls were raped and sexually abused by loggers. All these are part of the terrorism tactics to cow a people into submission and to abandon their claim of the land.

If the same events were to be transplanted into Peninsular Malaysia middle-class life, there would be lawsuits, and rolling heads. No, it wouldn’t even happen to begin with. If it did, the closest thing that can bring that kind of outrage is the demolition of places of worship. It would bring no less than a Hindraf Makkal Sakti kind of respond.

When handbags get snatched, when houses get burglarised, especially when it’s a politician’s wife and a minister’s house, they get frontpaged. When someone’s land in Sarawak is being grabbed in broad daylight, and the owners terrorised by gangsters and police stand and watch, it’s either too sensitive or too complicating to report. Let me just put it simply.

Licence to log

Imagine someone coming into your house and cart all your furniture out. Then, they put their own furniture inside your house and tell you, get out, this house belongs to us now. You go to the police. They do nothing. Ok now, put yourself in the native’s shoes, or bare feet. Those bulldozers and loggers come, and they plunder your trees – trees that give shade, wood and fronds to build homes, herbs and roots for medicine, trees that shelter animals so you can hunt them for food, and strong roots to keep soil in place so you have water to drink and wash from clean rivers– in short, everything you need to survive. No need to venture into global warming talk or critters at the brink of extinction.

The greedy loggers don’t care about any of that. They show you their licence to log with Sarawak chief minister Abdul Taib Mahmud’s signature on it and laugh in your face. They send their gangsters to intimidate you if you try to fight back. And while you’re slogging out in court moving at a snail’s pace to prove that the land belongs to you because your ancestors were there first, they flout court decrees and start logging anyway.

Before the judge can postpone the next trial date, they start planting palm oil. Then they claim the land is theirs because instead of leaving the land ‘idle’, they cultivate it. Next they apply ownership papers to justify it.

What do you do? You’d better start planting palm oil before they come. Forget about your old life of living in harmony with nature. Forget about your cultural identity and traditional way of life, and most of all, the environment. Log the trees, sell the timber and with the money, plant oil palm. Lots of them. Then you can prove that the land is yours. Beat the greedy companies in their own game ha ha. That’s what the last man standing did, Segan anak Degon. Hmm, tidak Segan sama sekali, brave man. Hell, that’s what I’ll do if I were in his place.

Watch What Rainforest? online

(Note to future film fest organisers keen on showing this film: This film should be put under the category: Occupation and Terrorism and shown with other films of this nature, such as the Palestinian conflict, and the War against Terrorism. Not under Environment.)

Source: http://whatrainforest.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/occupation-and-terrorism-at-home/

BOS Nyaru Menteng Clinic — Everyone who sets foot in the BOS Nyaru Menteng Clinic is puzzled by the behavior of Randang and Bonita. The same question always comes to mind. People simply assume that the two orangutans are mother and child.

But it’s not only people who seem to think this way. Bonita, a six-year-old female orangutan, is clearly attached to Randang, a small female orangutan aged around two to two-and-a-half years who hangs on to Bonita as though seeking protection from her own mother. This has been happening on for around two months. Almost every day the two are always together and don’t want to be separated. Randang always climbs onto Bonita’s back as though she is her mother.

This story began about 2 months ago, when Randang and Bonita were both in the same group at the playground clinic. This area is for orangutans from Forest School who are recovering from illness, were recently rescued, or are in the process of having their regular health exams.

Previously, Bonita had been on the transitional forest island Pallas II (known to millions of television viewers as ‘Orangutan Island’, but last year when she fell seriously ill, she was taken off the island and brought back to the Nyaru Menteng clinic for treatment. She is still recovering.

Randang was confiscated from the KSDA (forestry) office of the village of Timpah, which is in the Kapuas Province in Central Kalimantan, on the 26th of June 2007 when she was between one-and-a-half and two years old. According to her ex-owner, Randang hadn’t been in captivity long and she was not used to being around people. This meant that Randang had to be placed in the playground clinic, as she was too wild to be able to join the Forest School.

When she first arrived at the playground clinic, Randang certainly looked scared and tended to seek protection from larger orangutans, one of whom was Bonita– who often let Randang climb onto her.

At first Bonita seemed indifferent to Randang’s habit, mostly because there were many other orangutans the same age as Bonita who she could play with in the playground clinic. Bonita didn’t try to follow or approach Randang. However, two months later, all of the other orangutans had recovered and only Bonita and Randang were left.

From that day onward, the two were always together. Wherever Bonita went, Randang always followed, holding onto her fur in the same way as a baby orangutan hangs on to his or her mother. Furthermore, Bonita could also be seen hugging Randang in the same way as a mother orangutan protects her child.

Interestingly, Bonita is only six years old and obviously hasn’t had any of her own children, but now she looks after Randang the same way as an orangutan mother would. Randang acts the same way any baby orangutan would with his or her mother: She often hangs from Bonita. When you see Randang suckle from Bonita, Bonita just sits quietly as though suckling her own child.

To see two orangutans who love each other so much is a very heart-warming scene. According to Dr. Siska, it will be very difficult to separate the two now– especially when Bonita (who is still undergoing her treatment) must be separated from Randang to have her medicine.

It is not just Randang who hangs on to Bonita; often, if Randang is far away, Bonita will try to come closer.

Once Bonita is healthy again the two will be separated because Bonita must return to the transitional forest island, Pallas II (Orangutan Island). But for now, Bonita & Randang are still together in the playground clinic at BOS Nyaru Menteng.

Translated by Kylie Montgomery
Edited by Martyn Dalby & Mich Rangitutia & Richard Zimmerman

Source: Readers Digest

Dr Willie Smits is on a mission to save the endangered orangutan. It’s a straight vine from its survival to ours.

By Kenneth Miller
Photos by Jay Ullal from Thinkers of the Jungle, published by H. F. Ullmann

The seaside marketplace was crowded with women in sarongs and headcloths, haggling over piles of tropical fruit and dried fish. But a much rarer commodity caught Willie Smits’s attention one humid day on the island of Borneo. “Good morning, mister,” a vendor called out, thrusting a wooden cage into the biologist’s face.

“In between the slats, I saw these horribly sad eyes,” Smits recalls. They belonged to a young orangutan, her body emaciated and her features slack with misery. Though Smits ran a forestry research station on the island’s east coast, he had never come face-to-face with one of the creatures. As he moved on, he couldn’t shake the feeling that a red-haired child, ill and abused, needed his help.

Baby orangutan, Jay Ullal from Thinkers of the Jungle

“If you look into the eyes of an orangutan,” says Smits, “you are looking into the soul of a person.”
That night, he returned to look for her. He found the little orangutan dying of dehydration on a garbage heap, where the vendor had tossed her after failing to find a buyer. Back home, he spent 24 hours feeding her diluted milk and cradling her in his lap. When she was out of danger, Smits named her Uce (pronounced “oo-cheh”), for the gasping sounds she’d been making when he rescued her.

Two decades later, Smits, 51, has saved more than 1,600 orangutans, gentle and highly intelligent great apes now classified as an endangered species. They’re threatened by smugglers who capture them for the black-market pet trade in Indonesia and abroad, by diners who consider orangutan meat a delicacy, by shopkeepers who sell the animals’ skulls as souvenirs, and by loggers who are decimating their jungle habitat. Smits’s organization, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS), takes in orphaned or displaced animals and resettles them in protected rain forests. This month he will release 96 orangutans—his biggest graduating class yet.

One thing Smits’s work has taught him is that our fate is inextricably tied to the orangutans’. Certain varieties of wood sold at American lumberyards are illegally harvested from the animals’ home turf; the vegetable oil in many processed foods comes from palm trees planted where jungle once grew. The razing of the forests, in turn, contributes to global warming and thus to droughts, floods, and other disasters from Alaska to Australia.

“Protecting orangutans,” Smits tells anyone who will listen, “is the same as protecting people.”

Orangutans are our closest evolutionary cousins after bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas, sharing 97 percent of their DNA with humans, and they’re like us in many other ways. They make tools, using sticks to crack open fruits. They can be taught to understand hundreds of human words. Children live with their mothers for eight years, learning to navigate the jungle and distinguish between harmful and useful plants. Babies like to be tickled, reacting with silent laughter.

But orangutans are far less adaptable than humans. The largest of all arboreal mammals, they need vast, unbroken stretches of forest to survive in the wild. An orangutan spends its days foraging in the branches for food. When the trees go, so do the tree dwellers.

Once found throughout Southeast Asia, orangutans are now confined to isolated areas of Borneo (whose land mass is divided between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei) and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. A century ago, their estimated population was 315,000; today, 50,000 remain.

The son of a farm laborer from the Netherlands, Smits showed an affinity for animals early on. “I ran away from home when I was one and a half, and they found me sleeping on the belly of the meanest guard dog in the neighborhood,” he says from Washington, D.C., where he’s visiting from Borneo to lobby the World Bank for funds. He planned to study veterinary medicine in college but found the classes dull. Wandering into a lecture on tropical forestry, he was hooked.

Smits went on to earn a doctorate in the subject. He traveled to Indonesia for graduate work in 1980 and soon settled there, marrying a princess from a tribe in Sulawesi; he and his wife have three sons. He also established a reputation as a brilliant ecologist, developing highly regarded rain forest conservation techniques.

Then the orangutans came calling.

In the fall of 1989, two weeks after Smits saved Uce, he got a message from an employee of the Indonesian forest ministry. The man had heard about the rescue and wondered if Smits would take in another ailing orangutan—a young male who’d been found in the jungle after his mother was killed. Forestry workers had named him Dodoy. Smits nursed him back to health, intending to send both orphans to a rehabilitation center.

But such programs, Smits learned, had problems. Most of them released rescued apes as soon as possible. The animals often clashed over territory with their wild counterparts, infected them with human diseases, or simply starved. Some experts called for a new strategy: Quarantine the rescuees and treat them for contagious illnesses, teach them the skills they need to survive in the wild, and release them in a patch of protected jungle with no existing orangutan population.

Smits with his charges at one of his rehab centers, Jay Ullal from Thinkers of the Jungle

Orange crush: Smits with his charges at one of his rehab centers.
Using those principles, Smits decided to start his own rehab center. After numerous corporations, nonprofits, and the Dutch and Indonesian governments turned him down for funding, he brought Uce and Dodoy to an assembly at the international school his children attended. The faculty and students embraced Smits’s vision—”Willie could sell salt to the sea,” says Peter Karsono, an Indonesian teacher who later helped run BOS-and launched a fund-raising campaign. The students collected $5,000 through bake sales, sponsored walks, and appeals to their often wealthy parents. After an oil executive matched that sum, Smits had the seed money he needed.

Next he had to convince local villagers, most of whom belonged to Borneo’s Dayak tribe, that protecting orangutans was better than killing them for their meat and skulls.

Smits traveled deep into Borneo’s backcountry, where rivers were the only roads. Entering one tribal longhouse, he found a baby orangutan cowering near the half-eaten carcass of its mother. “How can you do this?” Smits shouted in the local dialect.

As the warriors reached for their blowpipes, Smits realized he’d made a potentially dangerous blunder. He switched tactics.

“Do you like lahung?” he asked, referring to a jungle fruit.

The Dayaks nodded. He listed several other indigenous fruits and asked if he could buy seedlings.

“They’re very rare,” a tribesman said, explaining—as Smits knew—that the seeds of many native plants would sprout only after passing through an orangutan’s digestive tract.

“So do you think your children will be able to keep eating these good things,” Smits asked, “if you kill all the orangutans?”

There was a pause. “I stopped hunting them,” one man suddenly declared, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I shot at one and thought I’d missed. When she came down, I thought she was going to attack me. Instead she laid her baby at my feet and fell dead. After that, I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Others chimed in with stories of encounters with friendly orangutans. Smits shook hands with his new allies. Then he climbed into his motorboat and took his sales pitch to the next town.

The Wanariset rehabilitation center opened in 1991, staffed mostly by Dayaks. Soon they were caring for dozens of orangutans, many turned in by sympathetic locals. Smits expanded his mission, pressuring the Indonesian government to crack down on the illegal pet trade and helping officials track down smuggled orangutans. He was eventually named adviser to the minister of forestry.

But he faced monumental resistance as well. Owners of domesticated orangutans—who often give the animals candy and cigarettes and cage them when they grow too big—protested the rescue effort. Some spat at Smits when he arrived with the authorities to confiscate their pets. He received hundreds of anonymous death threats. His house was burned down, his dog killed. His wife fled with their sons to her hometown on the island of Sulawesi, where she was elected deputy mayor. (His wife and oldest son still live there, and Smits sees them as often as his work allows.)

Orangutans being retrained for the wild, Jay Ullal from Thinkers of the Jungle

Survival strategy: As part of their retraining for the wild, orangutans are taught to eat high above the ground to avoid predators.
Despite his dedication, Smits’s work was doing little to slow the decline in the orangutan population. Illegal logging had increased, the palm oil business was booming, and the two often worked hand in hand. After loggers cleared a swath of jungle, growers would burn the stubble to make way for palm plantations. “Hundreds of orangutans were coming out of the forest, burning alive,” Smits recalls.

The deforestation brought flooding and water pollution to many Dayak villages. The carbon dioxide released by the vanishing jungle made Indonesia the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the United States. And as the planet warmed, Borneo’s remaining forests sickened. In the past, great flowering cycles took place every four years, spreading a bonanza of seeds. The last one occurred nine years ago.

Smits opened a second rehab center, in southern Borneo, but he realized that saving individual orangutans wasn’t enough. So in 2003 he launched his boldest project yet: growing a new rain forest, designed as a refuge for orangutans and a model for a new kind of human community. He chose the wasteland surrounding the town of Samboja, where ground once shaded by jungle was now carpeted with alang-alang—a wild grass that emits cyanide, preventing trees from growing. The wildlife had disappeared, and the few people left were mired in poverty and disease.

BOS bought 5,000 acres and hired local workers to clear away the grass and plant a million trees. Samboja Lestari—”Samboja Forever,” in the local dialect—was designed as concentric circles. In the middle is a nearly mature forest, home to a growing number of rescued orangutans. On the periphery are plots where 650 human families can grow fruit and sugar palms, the sap of which will be sold for use in sweeteners and bio-fuels. (Unlike oil palms, sugar palms thrive alongside native plants.) Samboja Lestari is also the site of a lodge for ecotourists and a satellite transponder station serving the European Space Agency, both of which help pay the project’s expenses.

Residents of the area earn wages doing reforestation work, send their children to a BOS-run school, and get free building materials if they choose to live on their plots. In return, they’re responsible for policing themselves: If anyone is caught harming an orangutan or a tree, his neighbors must decide the penalty. So far, there have been no transgressions.

Outside the perimeter, “we’re working very hard,” Smits says, “but we’re not solving the problem.”

When he grows weary, it helps to hike into the forest where he released Uce in 1992. She lives there with her youngest male offspring, Matahari, whose father is Dodoy, Smits’s second rescuee. (An older male, Bintang, has grown up and left the nest.) When Smits calls Uce’s name, she clambers down from the treetops. “She hands me her baby and hugs me,” he says.

Smits recently shot a video of mother and child playing on the forest floor. Though orangutans can’t speak, they communicate eloquently by other means. In the film, Uce stops for a moment and looks up at her human friend. Her smile is broad and warm, and that tells Smits everything he needs to know.

LEARN MORE

-Borneo has 45,000 orangutans, down from 60,000 in 1996. Sumatra has 5,000, half the ‘96 number.

-Borneo’s 287,000 square miles were once almost entirely rain forest; now half are.

-For every orangutan captured for the pet trade, five die in the process.

-The population shrinks by 6,000 per year, and the animals could be extinct by 2020.

Michelle Desilets was a huge inspiration in my decision to found Orangutan Outreach. She is living proof that if you put your mind to it you really can make a difference in the fight to save orangutans! Thank you for everything, Michelle! ~ Rich

Source: Daily Mail UK

My orangutans sensed I’d had cancer – they were so gentle with me when I was weak

By Amanda Riley-jones

Michelle Desilets wasn’t surprised she was exhausted. The founder of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation UK had just returned from a hard, three-month business trip to Indonesia, Australia and America in 2006.

Once back at home in Ambrosden, Oxfordshire, Michelle noticed her feet were itching all the time. The itching soon spread to her entire body and was so bad that within three months she found herself red raw all over.

‘I couldn’t sleep and was having five cold baths a day,’ says Michelle. ‘Nothing the GP prescribed worked and he finally referred me to a tropical diseases expert at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital, but their treatment didn’t help either.’

Finally, in May last year, Michelle, then 40, was sent to a dermatologist who suggested she be tested for lymphoma – cancer of the lymphatic system.

Rapport: Michelle with her beloved orangutans in Borneo

‘I was given an urgent CAT scan but I was sure I’d picked up something in Borneo,’ says Michelle.

However, the results were devastating. She did indeed have a kind of lymphoma known as Hodgkin’s disease, and further tests were required to determine whether the cancer was confined to one area or had spread.

‘I had the results on my 41st birthday. I felt like I’d been punched in the face,’ says Michelle, who instead of going out to celebrate, curled up in bed, petrified she would never see her beloved orangutans again.

Her work with orangutans had begun in 1994 when Michelle, a former teacher, met air hostess Lone Droscher-Nielsen on a volunteering holiday in Borneo working with the animals. Five years later, they had opened their own sanctuary there – the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Project, which featured in the BBC One series Orangutan Diary in 2006.

It is home to more than 650 orangutans and 200 staff help rehabilitate the orphans until they are ready to be released into the wild.

The intense care given to them imitates the nurturing given by their mothers for the first eight years of life.

And it was her charges that Michelle considered first when she realised she was dangerously ill. ‘I felt annoyed to have cancer, but not sorry for myself,’ she says.

‘No one had inflicted this on me. I just thought of the 5,000 orangutans who die each year because of human activities.

‘The rainforest is being destroyed to make way for miles of palm trees, and workers are paid to kill orangutans who wander on to the plantations. Adults are beaten, hacked to death or set on fire, and babies are sold on as pets.’

Michelle kept thinking of one particular orangutan – Lomon – which had been kept chained in a box for five years.

‘He came in to us emaciated and just crawled under a towel,’ she recalls. ‘But I got him eating and used to hold his hand until he went to sleep. If I tried to slip away, he’d pull my hand back.

‘I longed to see Lomon again. That’s why I had to get well.’

However, two biopsies revealed that Michelle had early-stage tumours behind her sternum and in her neck.

Her consultant explained that six months of chemotherapy should see her free of the disease and that she had an 85 to 90 per cent chance of survival beyond five years.

‘He explained the side effects: exhaustion, hair loss, aching joints, and infertility,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t upset about that; I’m single, with no plans to have children.

‘What threw me was that I’d have zero immunity. I couldn’t use a bus, let alone hop on a plane and care for the orangutans.’

Only a year earlier Michelle had worked on the BBC documentary.

‘One day I’d sludged through a swamp for an hour, balancing on slippery logs, carrying camera gear, one orangutan on my back, another hanging on to my ankle.

‘I can remember thinking, “I’m pretty good for 40!” And then suddenly I felt breathless just going upstairs.’

Tireless: Michelle, left, with TV presenter Nick Knowles and Lone, at a fundraiser before she was diagnosed with cancer

By January of this year Michelle’s thick hair started coming out in fistfuls.

‘I didn’t recognise myself in the mirror. I had no eyelashes or eyebrows and my skin was sallow and lined. I’d put on 20lb with the steroids. At 5ft 3in, it really showed.

‘But how could I give in to self-pity when those orphan orangutans go through so much and come out strong?

‘I’ve seen infants with missing hands learn to climb. I remembered one called Chen Chen waiting calmly to have his injured eye removed.

‘Another orangutan, Beethoven, had more than a hundred infected lacerations, but when I tickled him, he’d still laugh and laugh.’

Later that month, a CAT scan came back clear, but Michelle had to continue chemo until March. But when a subsequent scan confirmed she was all clear, there was only one thing she wanted to do – return to Borneo.

Her consultant reluctantly gave permission for her to attend a business conference in Borneo’s city of Kota Kinabalu, providing she stayed in a clean, modern hotel.

‘He warned me to be careful about food, water and cleanliness. If I felt ill I had to get to Singapore at once. And he warned me it would be at least a year before I felt myself again – I’d have aches and tiredness for a long time.

‘I was desperate to see Lomon but wondered how I’d cope with the orangutans’ rough and tumble – once, an orangutan named Dancow had flipped my hammock so hard that I fell on the ground. An adolescent is four times stronger than an adult male.’

Ten days after her treatment finished, Michelle flew to Palangka Raya in Borneo where Lone drove her 30 miles back to the project.

‘It was like going home, being with old friends I hadn’t been sure I was going to see again,’ she says.

The chemo had left Michelle with pain in her back, neck, hips and knees.

‘I could manage only the easy jobs, like taking a film crew, Animal Planet this time, out to meet the young orangutans in trees, hammocks or in the arms of their “babysitters”,’ she says.

‘Despite my physical agony I felt gratitude to be there. Apart from the fact that some orangutans had doubled in size and I had new names to learn, it felt like I’d never left.’

Perhaps the most surprising revelation for Michelle was how gently the orangutans treated her – as if they sensed how physically fragile she had become.

‘Before, there would always be tearaways biting me mercilessly around the knees and ankles, and they loved to pull my hair over my face and try to hang from it,’ she says. ‘But this time they treated me as if I might break.

‘Not one of them tried to pull my hair, nip me or pull me into their usual games. I am sure they understood that I wasn’t well.’

Many of the young orangutans would congregate on a lawn before bedtime. Seeing Michelle resting there, one orangutan, Marwas, held on to her back and rested his head on her shoulder. ‘He gently stroked my thinning hair, smoothed it down and examined my bald patches,’ says Michelle.

‘Then one called Melvin crept on to my lap and sat quietly, just gazing at me, for about half an hour. It was so soothing, sitting with orangutans draped over me.’

And one morning Michelle remembers she was feeling particularly unwell when a little female, Ruby, pushed both hands up the back of her shirt and started to gently rub her back.

‘She carried on comforting me like that for about 20 minutes, every so often patting my back with both hands.’

But the orangutan she was most desperate to see was Lomon. ‘With hundreds of orangutans spread over a square mile, you never know who you’ll see. Or who will see you.

‘Sometimes there can be 150 orangutans on the lawn and one will recognise me and make a beeline,’ she says.

‘One day Lomon found me and appeared, making little baby squeaks and reaching up to be cuddled.

‘He’s seven now, but he’s still a bit too soft,’ she says. ‘If he could get a manicure, he probably would. But of all the orangutans, it was Lomon that kept me going through the dark times,’ she says.

When back at home, Michelle will now need a blood test only every four months to check that she is cancer free.

‘I feel I am a person who had cancer. Past tense. For me, I had to beat the cancer to continue with my work.

‘We desperately need money to buy land where we can release our rehabilitated orangutans to live out their lives in peace. I am more focused than ever.

‘My biggest goal is to get the forests protected so orangutans have a permanent, safe home and people like me are no longer needed.’

The following images recently appeared in the UK’s Daily Mail.

Thank you so much for your support…. OO

Source: Daily Mail

View our new slideshow presentation:

At BOS, the ultimate goal is the release of healthy orangutans back into the wild – so it’s always gratifying to be able to provide good news about just such an event – the first translocation program of 2008. BOS transported 25 orangutans to freedom in an area of protected forest in Central Kalimantan. These orangutans were not part of the regular rehabilitation program at Nyaru Menteng.

They were wild orangutans who had been rescued from areas of rainforest that had been devastated by the establishment oil-palm plantations, forcing them to go in search of food wherever it could be found.

They had been brought into Nyaru Menteng at various stages during the past year. On arrival their condition was assessed and they were medically checked to ensure that they were fit enough to be relocated to their natural habitat at the earliest opportunity. The area in which the release was to take place had to be carefully chosen. The one finally chosen, a large valley, about 70,000 hectares in size, is in the interior of Central Kalimantan, along the Banana River – an appropriate name for the release of a group of orangutans, although it was not, we believe, actually named after the fruit!

It’s an area which is safe from hunting due to its inaccessibility. The rivers are full of big rocks, making it impossible for the local people to use boats, and the few landings visible at the mouth of the river look as though they had been deserted years ago. No large settlements are evident along the river banks, and there are no villages close by. It is also within the boundaries of the “Heart of Borneo”, which would offer an increased opportunity for conservation management. Since these orangutans had not been part of our rehabilitation program, it wasn’t necessary for the area in which they were released to be free of a wild population.

This part of Central Kalimantan has always been considered to be well within the historical range of orangutans, and although there are still a few of them in the forests here, there are no substantial breeding populations.

It’s estimated that one orangutan per square kilometre, maybe even more, could easily be supported here, since the lowland forests along the Banana River would be likely to provide a fair amount of food, and the network of small rivers indicates the existence of a number of fruiting trees.

The group of orangutans who left Nyaru Menteng on that morning in June consisted of 14 males – nine adults and five sub-adults, and 15 females, one of whom was Pika, a baby of two-and-a-half years, with her mother, Mama Pika. They were accompanied by Lone Droscher Nielsen, a paramedic, two orangutan caretakers, a communications officer, a doctor, two members of a BBC camera crew and two representatives of the BKSDA (Indonesian Agency for Conservation of Natural Resources).

For the first leg of their journey, the orangutans were settled into their individual cages and flown by Cessna, eight at a time, from the nearby Palangka Raya airport to a transit point – the operation taking two days to complete. Here they were put into large individual holding cages, similar to the ones in which they had been kept at the Center. They seemed to have taken their first flight well – despite being awake during the entire 50-minute trip – and spent the next day resting, while the translocation team members were taken to the release site via helicopter to co-ordinate activities in the field.

On the following day, the first five orangutans were transferred to their transit cages for the 30-minute helicopter flight to the release site. Any change in weather, such as strong winds or rain, could result in disruption to the schedule, and some low, dense, ground fog did indeed delay their departure. At around 11:00 am, however, the helicopter finally took off– four cages of precious cargo suspended beneath it. Mama Pika and her baby were amongst this group, which also included Otong, Yoyon and Ardi.

The second group – Keray, Nelly, Mustapa and Difta – also had their departure delayed, this time by a heavy downpour, and had to wait until 3:00 pm for their flight.

“It must have been slightly petrifying for these wild animals to wake up hanging under a helicopter, high over the canopy of their new home,” says Lone.

“Though they are in transit cages and cannot see much, they certainly must feel the movement and hear the noise of the helicopter. However, when the cage is opened, they rush out as if nothing has happened, and quickly climb into the nearest tree. Some of them are still slightly drugged, and might stagger around a bit before disappearing into the forest, but one thing is for sure – all of them will turn around, once in safety, and have a look at us, as if they want to thank us for giving them this second chance in life.”

Good weather the following day meant that Devsing, Chelsea, Arimbi, Chris, Jimmy and Pangit were able to leave on schedule, at around 9:00 am, followed at noon by Senny, Dion, Siwi, Bojeng and Leli.

On the final day, the weather turned again, but by 11:00 am, the final four orangutans, Mapak, Yanti, Odah and Gromik, also found themselves on their way to freedom.

At a future date, field researchers and primatologists will carry out a nest survey, which will provide information on how widely the newly released orangutans have spread out, living as nature intended, and making their valuable contribution to both the ecosystem of the rainforests and the survival of their species.

“Everyone at Nyaru Menteng is so very happy to be able to give these orangutans another chance in life,” Lone says, “and you can be sure that we’ll continue to save the lives of orangutans as long as we are able to.”

By Nancy Simmons

“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. Someone sleeping under a table woke up and chased me, ‘Hey Sir. Mr. Money. Mr. Money.’ I didn’t stop.”

Willie Smits
Founder, Borneo Orangutan
Survival Foundation (BOS)

In 1989, Willie Smits came across a sick baby orangutan in a vegetable market. He nursed her back to health and named her Uce for the labored sound she made while gasping for breath. More orangutan rescues followed. With small amounts of money contributed by thousands of schoolchildren in Indonesia, Smits began what became the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS) to rehabilitate orphaned and misused orangutans and return them to a safe place in the wild. He confiscated orangutans people kept as pets, exploited as prostitutes, used in medical research, and trained to perform in shows, like the orangutan boxing matches that are staged in Thailand.

In June 2008, Willie Smits came to the United States to promote the release of his new book Thinkers of the Jungle (h.f. ullmann, 2007). Written with investigative journalist Gerd Schuster, and featuring images by photographer Jay Ullal, the book created a sensation when it was published in Germany. In New York City, Senior Editor Nancy Simmons talked with Smits about his hopes for the orangutans’ future.

Uce was the beginning. Two weeks later, someone from the Ministry of Forestry gave me another sick orangutan baby—a male we named Dodoy. We pulled him through, too. At the time, my wife and I had two human babies at home, and she was pregnant with our third son. This was the basis of my understanding of orangutans. Any mother can see when her baby is hungry, or sleepy, or has a stomachache. She knows it without words. And it’s the same thing with orangutans. They are so much like us.

No one can dispute that, once they look at the pictures in the book—how orangutans fish, how they swim, how they make art. These are beings that can feel, and they know what dangers they are facing.

One orangutan mother put her baby on the road alongside a burning forest. She knew her baby would die if she didn’t. Only when she saw a truck driver stop and pick up her baby, did she turn around and go back into the smoke. This is like the story of Solomon—a mother not wanting her child to be split in two would rather give up that child.

Smits believes that protecting orangutans in their habitat not only benefits our shaggy cousins but also the environment and biological diversity, the poorest of the poor in Borneo, and all the world’s people.

On Borneo, the peat swamp forests are one of the few remaining refuges for orangutans. Now, that habitat is disappearing at a tremendous rate, due mainly to the spread of oil palm plantations.

Oil palm jobs are dirty, dangerous, and low paying. In some areas, the local people lose all the rights to their land, and they lose the forest. Not only that, the peat swamp forests turn into CO2 volcanoes when they are drained and burned to plant oil palms. They emit so much greenhouse gas that Indonesia has become the world’s third largest producer of CO2.

So orangutans have to be the ambassadors for the wake-up call to the world. Consumption patterns in the West help fuel the orangutans’ extinction in the East. More than 10 percent of the products in Western supermarkets contain palm oil, from cookies to cosmetics. Labels often just say vegetable oil. We need to push manufacturers to use only palm oil that comes from sustainable plantations. New oil palm plantations should be planted only on degraded land. No more of the peat forests should be cut. This can be verified by satellite radar monitoring.

If the current trend continues, there will not be a forest big enough to support 1,000 orangutans, the minimum needed for the population to survive in the long term. There will be orangutans in remote places, but no longer living as a species with all of its culture intact—the know-how of what plants to use for medicine, how to make tools, the knowledge of generations. The fact that we have 1,000 orangutans in our care means we have to work harder to save their habitat.

My hope is that people will read this book and get angry. And they will say, “We can’t let this happen.”

Smits has not given up. BOS is helping to regenerate lost forests.

It is not all doom and gloom. There is hope.

Samboja Lestari [“Samboja forever and ever,” an area razed for timber] was grass desert with no wildlife at all. We are working with the local people to replant the area. Already, air temperatures have fallen 3 to 5 degrees centigrade, cloud cover has increased by 12 percent and rainfall by 25 percent. One hundred thirty-seven species of birds are found here. Other animals bring in seeds from far away to further enrich the biodiversity of the more than 1,000 plants we brought in to start the restoration. At the same time we’ve created jobs for local men and women—in the tree nursery, the compost plant, as fire watchers and fighters, road and dam construction workers, and a lot more. Families use the land between the trees to plant their crops, and they will be able to tap the sugar palms that are growing as a source of income. These people have access to schools and fresh drinking water. And they have become the protectors of the rainforest.

They are planting a fence of thorny palms as a border between the orangutan’s sanctuary area and humans. Some 200 rescued orangutans are living there, and there will be more when the fence is complete. Besides healthy orangutans, this will be a place for those most in need: orangutans that have hepatitis B, hepatitis C, or Down syndrome. The blind orangutans that were shot in the eyes. The ones with their hands cut off for eating a palm shoot. The victims. There will be mothers with their infants, but this is not a place where visitors can hug cute babies.

How can people help?

At Samboja Lestari, we have built our eco-lodge—mostly from natural materials. It’s a haven in the middle of the growing jungle. Visitors come here to work with the scientists, helping in the tree nursery, so they can start to understand the complexity of rebuilding a rainforest on the poorest soils.

It’s not too late. Come and plant some trees. Adopt an orangutan. Support us in saving rainforests. Become involved in promoting the use of sustainably obtained palm oil.

When Thinkers of the Jungle came out in Germany, the country had many electricity-generating plants using palm oil. The parliamentarians who read the book and visited Samboja Lestari have proposed new laws to prevent using this fuel until it is proven that the plants are running on palm oil that has not been grown on newly cleared rainforests. And Germany is pushing the European Union for new regulations. The book already has done an enormous amount of good, and I hope we can achieve something similar here in America.

What happened to Uce?

She was reintroduced to a forest area near Balikpapan. I see her about every two years. Dodoy is the father of Uce’s second son, Matahari. I have a video made a few weeks ago showing Dodoy with Uce and Matahari playing together. So the first and second orangutans that I rescued have had a baby together. Uce is most likely pregnant with her third child. Her first son, Bintang, is living independently, the first free-born, wild orangutan from orphaned, reintroduced orangutans to do so without the presence of wild orangutans living there.

Orangutan mothers nurture their babies for many years. When Jay Ullal photographed Uce holding seven-month-old Matahari in 2003 for a story in Stern magazine, she was very leery of him getting too close—until he snapped Polaroids and showed them to her.

Yes, Uce was pleased with those photos. I have been told that she has come to the guards’ hut in the forest seven times to visit the BOS ranger, Misry, to look at them again.

Download the article as a PDF

Source: http://www.wcs.org/magazine/orangutan-rescue