People of the Forest
Monday, April 6th, 2009Photographer Jason Houston and writer William deBuys are on the long trip home from the island of Borneo after two weeks exploring the social, environmental, and economic components of one of the world’s most iconic conservation stories: deforestation and orangutans in Indonesia.
After returning to Pangkalan Bun in central Kalimantan, and cleaning up and charging batteries (electricity was only available in Tempayung for a few hours in the evenings), we made plans to spend our last full day in Borneo at Tanjung Puting and Camp Leaky, the heart of orangutan conservation and a place where there are still examples of somewhat pristine forests.
Tanjung Puting is one of Indonesia’s great treasures and an environmental success story. Yet like so much of the other forested areas in Borneo, Indonesia, and throughout the developing tropics, it remains critically threatened by legal and illegal extractive industries. The river into the park should be blackwater, naturally stained by the tannins leaching from the peat forests, but it flows light chocolate brown, polluted from gold and zircon mining upstream. And illegal logging continues in the more remote areas of the park, threatening some of Borneo’s last stands of primary forest.
Rare Pride campaign manager Eddy Santoso draws with children during a school visit.
In the coming year Yayorin will combine their existing skills and experience in education and community outreach with Rare’s Pride methodology to more strategically target the conservation needs of the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve. The forests of Lamandau are the focus of the European Union supported project “Promoting the conservation and sustainable management of the lowland forests of south Central Kalimantan” and it is currently the target of Yayorin’s Pride campaign.
Lamandau and the neighboring area that Yayorin, the Orangutan Foundation, Rare, and other partners hope to protect, with the help of a fast-developing international carbon trading market, are not pristine like Tanjung Puting. But the forest still stands in large enough pieces to be made viable for effective biodiversity conservation, and that leaves room for hope. The campaign will protect the forest that remains by rehabilitating adjacent areas where possible, and empowering the local communities to become beneficiaries of their own good stewardship of the forests they rely on. Yayorin and Rare believe that enough can be preserved and maintained to support the needs of both people of the forest and the orangutans.
Eddy talks with fellow Yayorin staff at a training as they prepare to survey a dozen target communities and six control communities around the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve. Their work, a fundamental step in a Rare Pride campaign, will establish a baseline of behaviors and values upon which to build the final campaign plan.