Endangered Species:
Biofuel push a culprit in orangutans' plight

PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia -- Illegal logging and the clearing of tropical forests for palm plantations are driving orangutans toward extinction.

The ape -- whose name is derived from the Malaysian and Indonesian phrase orang hutan, "person of the forest" -- lives in Indonesia's rainforests, which are being destroyed at an astonishing rate. A forest the size of Maryland vanishes every year, experts say.

"This is not a good time to be an orangutan," said Mary Biruté Galdikas, a primatologist who has been studying the ape since 1971 near this village in southern Borneo.

United Nations negotiators working toward a global climate treaty made a point of noticing the deforestation rate during a U.N. conference in Bali, Indonesia, last December. The logging releases so many heat-trapping greenhouse gases that Indonesia ranks behind only China and the United States as a global warming polluter.

But it's one thing to acknowledge the problem, it's another to control it.

Nearly three-quarters of the deforestation comes at the hands of illegal loggers, including crime syndicates spread out across Southeast Asia. And while enforcement is getting stronger, the Indonesian judicial system remains in turmoil.

Even efforts to protect pristine habitat for orangutans and other endangered species have not stopped deforestation. Evidence of illegal logging has been found in 37 of this country's 41 national parks.

Palm oil

Indonesia's booming palm oil industry is a major culprit in the orangutan's plight, experts say. Both the national and local governments put major stock in the profitable fruit tree that yields a berry rich in oil.

Palm oil is used in food and cosmetics and increasingly as a biofuel. With demand for alternative fuels soaring in Europe and the United States, Indonesia is on its way to overcoming Malaysia as the top palm oil producer in the world.

Orangutans are losing to palm oil as government officials issue permits for palm oil operations. Some companies use their permits to cut down pristine forests and sell the wood for a profit and never plant palms.

"There's just no reason to site any new palm oil concessions on forest land or on peat land," said Suzanne Billharz, an environmental specialist for the U.S. Agency for International Development at the American embassy in Jakarta.

"You can grow the palm oil industry in Indonesia perfectly fine on already degraded lands," Billharz said. "The fact that another company already logged it means that the company who wants to plant palm oil doesn't get a huge windfall profit from timber. If they are serious about planting palm oil, they ought to just plant the palm oil."

As their habitat vanishes, orangutans are often forced onto private land where they are killed or captured for sale on the black market.

In Indonesia, an orangutan can sell for U.S. $500. On the international black market, a juvenile ape can go for U.S. $50,000. The babies are worth the most. Often, poachers will kill a mother to take the infant -- another step in the species decline, since an orangutan mother can give birth once every five to seven years.

Orangutans are a big part of a much larger black-market wildlife trade that generates about 9 trillion Indonesian Rupiah ($900 million U.S.) a year.

Presidential plans

Indonesia is the only place on the planet where orangutans live in the wild.

All told, scientists say between 45,000 and 69,000 wild orangutans live on Borneo, with another 7,000 across the Java Sea on Sumatra. Researchers a few years ago counted a far smaller number of orangutans in Indonesia -- between 20,000 and 30,000 -- but they changed their figure after completing a more thorough search for the elusive creatures.

Despite the larger population numbers, the Borneo species of orangutans is now "highly endangered," according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Its Sumatran cousins are labeled "critically endangered." Both are listed as "critically endangered" under the international treaty that seeks to halt the trade of endangered plants and animals. Researchers say the species could go extinct in 10 to 20 years.

"The survival of the species is really at risk right now," Billharz said. "That's what is in the balance. If deforestation continues at the pace it is now, it'll be very hard for many viable populations to survive."

At the United Nations' climate conference last December in Bali, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono outlined an orangutan conservation plan that he said will help save the species from extinction.

Greenwire senior reporter Darren Samuelsohn visited Borneo last December after the United Nations climate conference in Bali. He spent three days with Orangutan Foundation International employees and volunteers, including the group's founder, Birute Mary Galdikas.

"I can think of no reason to ignore such compelling evidence of the importance of saving our forests," the president said.

The Indonesian proposal, which came with financial support from the U.S. government, would stabilize orangutan habitat and the population through 2017.

Erik Meijaard, a senior ecologist for the Nature Conservancy in Indonesia, said the Indonesian government's plan should put the orangutan habitat first. "You're trying to influence every land-use decision," he said.

Ultimately, the goal is also to release some 7,000 orangutans now in rehabilitation centers back into the wild by 2015. That is seen as a stretch, given that some of the former captives may have battled diseases that could be spread to wild animals or have never lived in the wild.

"These are screwed-up orangutans," said Meijaard, who also serves as the Kalimantan coordinator for the USAID-funded Orangutan Conservation Services Program.

-- Darren Samuelsohn

 

Finally, just before last Christmas, Galdikas led the four surviving apes through the Indonesian airport with little fanfare.

"A lot of orangutans come home and it's wonderful, it's ecstatic," she said. "There's also a feeling, a certain negativeness, that they left in the first place."

'Leakey's angels'

Primatologist Biruté Galdikas holds an orangutan she rescued last December from Thailand, where it once performed in kickboxing matches. It now lives among more than 330 orangutans at Galdikas' clinic in central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Photo by Darren Samuelsohn.

Galdikas came to Indonesia in 1971 to study wild orangutans at the encouragement of the famous Kenyan anthropologist and naturalist Louis Leakey.

Leakey encouraged Galdikas the same way he fostered Dian Fossey's research on gorillas and Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees. To this day, Galdikas calls herself one of "Leakey's angels."

In her first years in Borneo, Galdikas trudged through malarial swamps and sidestepped poisonous snakes in search of the elusive apes. She lived in a hut with no electricity, mail service or running water.

But she managed to write a comprehensive first-hand account of the creatures, carefully noting their favorite fruits, mating habits and movements.

Galdikas' work contrasted with that of her predecessors, who would often end their research by killing the orangutans they had followed. And Galdikas was in for the long haul, establishing Camp Leakey at the epicenter of her research in the often soggy lowlands of Tanjung Puting National Park.

In 1975 and 1980, Galdikas' work was acknowledged in National Geographic magazine cover stories.

In addition to her research, she also took on a second job of caring for orphaned apes. Some of those orangutans were once held as pets. Others needed shelter after forests were logged or cleared for planting a palm oil plantation.

Eventually, so many orangutans came her way that she opened up the rehabilitation center just outside the village of Pangkalan Bun. Over the years, she said she has rehabilitated and released between 300 and 400 orangutans.

The privately funded care center is now home to about 330 apes, including the four former kickboxers.

Galdikas' facility is something of a cross between a zoo, a veterinary hospital and a nursery school.

Animals stretch their long arms and legs from their cages as visitors pass in the hope of panhandling a piece of fruit. Veterinarians work in examining and operating rooms, with laboratories equipped to do blood tests.

Volunteers and employees guide younger orangutans into adjacent forests to reacquaint them with tree climbing and nest building (wild apes sleep high in the trees). The animals sometimes walk next to their caretakers, holding hands. The smallest ones are often carried.

Down a narrow wood-plank trail, about a mile from the main camp, live both wild and recently released orangutans. They emerge after a few loud calls from the local staff. The animals don't engage the guests; instead, they ruffle the leaves about 10 to 20 feet up in the trees.

A housing development is starting to encroach on the property. Its residents sometimes feed the orangutans fried bananas.

A species in trouble

Borneo is the largest of Indonesia's more than 17,500 islands. The Indonesian name for Borneo is Kalimantan. It's home to 11.2 million people and up to 69,000 orangutans.

Orangutans are found in the wild only in Indonesia, but their habitat here is quickly being destroyed by illegal logging and the palm oil plantations that provide feedstock for biofuels. The species is in trouble -- some estimates say orangutans could be extinct in 10 to 20 years.

"You're getting more and more fragmented pockets of them separated from each other, and it makes it harder and harder for these pockets to survive," said Suzanne Billharz, an environment specialist for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Jakarta. "If the species is going to survive, there's going to need to be a very strong effort to really maintain habitat."

Galdikas has been widely praised for her work on behalf of orangutans, but she has also been criticized for focusing too much on saving individual apes.

There are concerns that freed orangutans spread diseases to the wild populations. At Camp Leakey, there are daily feedings for the wild and former captive orangutans that often also draw tourists. Some of the orangutans have attacked guests and staff.

To some critics, rehabilitation of ex-captives is a waste of money and energy that might otherwise be used to address larger issues of habitat loss.

Erik Meijaard, a Borneo-based senior ecologist at the Nature Conservancy, said the orphaned orangutans that Galdikas has done so much to help are a "a symptom of a much bigger problem."

"By focusing on that symptom," he said, "you play around with symbolism without getting to the core of the issue."

But Galdikas insists she has done much to save orangutan habitat by fighting logging and zircon mining efforts in Tanjung Puting National Park.

About 15 years ago, she said she was kidnapped and beaten for such work to protect the park. Galdikas' protests are widely hailed as critical to keeping the Tanjung orangutan population large. At about 6,000, the park has one of the biggest groups of orangutans on Earth.

Among those who appreciate Galdikas' efforts is Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who has used his position on the Senate Appropriations Committee to direct more than $10 million toward orangutan conservation since the mid-1990s. Officials in Indonesia say the U.S. money has helped build 14 permanent forest ranger stations along the Sekonyer River, which serves as the main route to the giant trees in Tanjung.

"My part is relatively easy to do from here, trying to get the money," Leahy said in a recent interview. "She's out there with the others, sometimes in danger, and certainly not in any great area of comfort in doing this."

Galdikas is certainly not comforted when she sees her beloved orangutans' continuing troubles. The orangutan kickboxing fights at Safari World recently resumed. And global demand continues to push for more palm oil plantations. "There doesn't seem to be any progress," she said.