Agency Fails to Confiscate Baby Orangutan Kept as Pet
October 29, 2010
MEDAN: The North Sumatra office of the Natural Resource Conservation has been criticized for failing to confiscate a baby orangutan kept as a pet in a luxury home.
Orangutan Information Center (OIC) founder Panut Hadisiswoyo said that the agency should have acted firmly and seized the legally protected endangered animal.
“The agency has no commitment to saving the Sumatran orangutan from extinction as evident from its reluctance to take legal action against the orangutan’s owner,” Panut said as quoted by Antara on Thursday.
Agency officers went home empty-handed Tuesday night after the baby orangutan owner refused to surrender the animal.
The owner, who reportedly bought the animal for Rp 2 million (US$200), said he was not aware it was illegal to keep the animal as a pet. — JP
Source: The Jakarta Post
Orangutan Numbers Shrinking
April 23, 2010
MEDAN, North Sumatra : The population of protected orangutans in the Leuser Park in Aceh and North Sumatra is dwindling, with current levels estimated at about 5,000.
The orangutan research center at Ketambe village, Southeast Aceh regency reported that the number has continued to decrease by about 1,000 per year since 1994, mainly as a result of destruction to their habitat.
Asril, a research assistant at the center, told Antara in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, that rampant illegal logging in the Mount Leuser National Park in Aceh posed the most serious threat to the lives of orangutans in the area.
The influx of hundreds of refugees from the restive areas in Aceh province into Langkat regency inside the Mount Leuser National Park has also contributed to the decline.(emf)
Source: The Jakarta Post
An Interview About Orangutan Conservation and the Complexities of Palm Oil
September 28, 2009
Rhett A. Butler
Palm oil both a leading threat to orangutans and a key source of jobs in Sumatra by Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com
An interview about orangutan conservation and the complexities of palm oil by Rhett A. Butler with Panut Hadisiswoyo and David Dellatore of the Orangutan Information Centre and Helen Buckland of the Sumatran Orangutan Society.
Of the world’s two species of orangutan, a great ape that shares 96 percent of man’s genetic makeup, the Sumatran orangutan is considerably more endangered than its cousin in Borneo. Today there are believed to be fewer than 7,000 Sumatran orangutans in the wild, a consequence of the wildlife trade, hunting, and accelerating destruction of their native forest habitat by loggers, small-scale farmers, and agribusiness.
Gunung Leuser National Park in North Sumatra is one of the last strongholds for the species, serving as a refuge among paper pulp concessions and rubber and oil palm plantations. While orangutans are relatively well protected in areas around tourist centers, they are affected by poorly regulated interactions with tourists, which have increased the risk of disease and resulted in high mortality rates among infants near tourist centers like Bukit Lawang. Further, orangutans that range outside the park or live in remote areas or on its margins face conflicts with developers, including loggers, who may or may not know about the existence of the park, and plantation workers, who may kill any orangutans they encounter in the fields.
Working to improve the fate of orangutans that find their way into plantations and unprotected community areas is the Orangutan Information Centre (OIC), a local NGO that collaborates with the Sumatran Orangutan Society (SOS). Founded by Panut Hadisiswoyo, OIC runs outreach and education programs to help local people better co-exist with orangutans and the park. Its “OrangUvan,” a bus equipped with a library and a mobile cinema, regularly visits villages to make children and adults aware of conservation efforts and the importance of protecting forests. OIC also operates tree nurseries and replanting programs to help restore livelihoods where unsustainable logging and environmental degradation have pushed villagers to illegally cut timber from the national park. Further, OIC is preparing the next generation of conservationists and ecotourism guides, running how-to workshops on surveying forest conditions and orangutan density, boat handling, nature photography, composting and organic farming, and responsible nature guiding (that doesn’t harm orangutans or the environment). In conjunction with the Orang Utan Republik Foundation, OIC runs a scholarship program for Indonesian University students that aims to help enable them become key members of the conservation movement in Sumatra and inspire others to care for nature and their environment.
OIC is also working to engage the palm oil industry, a challenge since oil palm expansion is both a leading driver of deforestation and an important source of jobs in the region. While many large palm oil companies are eager to shed the perception that they are a threat to orangutans, plantation developers continue to drive destruction of important orangutan habitat, especially in unprotected areas. Deforestation, as well as drainage of carbon-dense peatlands, is also a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions, undermining claims that palm oil is necessarily a “green” source of fuel and vegetable oil. Indeed, palm oil produced on newly deforested lands is actually the opposite—a larger source of carbon dioxide than conventional fossil fuels. But demonizing all palm oil is neither productive nor fair. Oil palm is the world’s highest yielding oilseed, generating substantially more vegetable oil per unit of land than soy, rapeseed/canola, or corn. Further, the crop has become an important source of income in much of rural Sumatra, while serving as an inexpensive foodstuff for local people and the world.
Is there a way to balance palm oil production and environmental aims? Some environment groups are advocating a ban on all palm oil, but given rising demand for edible oils, especially in China and India, this is an unlikely solution. Other groups, including SOS and OIC, are hopeful that the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a multi-stakeholder body devising a certification standard that aims to improve the environmental performance of palm oil production, could be the path forward, provided the scheme is credible. But credibility is elusive when RSPO members (whom are not necessarily certified palm oil producers; they are only required to pay a membership fee to be part of RSPO) are found to be attempting to game the system, breaking rules and refusing third-party compliance monitoring. Such practices risk turning RSPO into little more than another greenwashing initiative, a concern that has already turned away some potential supporters, including a few major buyers of palm oil who are now seeking other vegetable oil options. Still, OIC believes that in the end a credible RSPO will be better for orangutans and better for business than the alternative—continued destruction of tropical forests and peatlands.
In a series of interviews conducted in Medan and Bukit Lawang (Sumatra) and via e-mail, Panut Hadisiswoyo and David Dellatore of OIC, and Helen Buckland, UK Director of the Sumatran Orangutan Society, talked about their efforts to save the world’s rarest orangutan species as well as the “palm oil paradox.”
You can read the complete interview on mongabay.com website:
Palm oil both a leading threat to orangutans and a key source of jobs in Sumatra
*** Mongabay.com is the effort of Rhett A. Butler and unless noted otherwise (usually at the top or bottom of a page), all content and pictures on mongabay have been written or produced by Rhett. Rhett can be contacted via email here. Further background on Rhett is available at the FAQs/Interview page.
With more than one million unique visitors per month, Mongabay.com is one of the world’s most popular environmental science and conservation news sites. The news and rainforests sections of the site are widely cited for information on tropical forests, conservation, and wildlife.
Lucy Wisdom: Her Own Jungle Story
June 22, 2009
An ongoing battle with cancer following a partial mastectomy was the catalyst that sent UK-born Lucy Wisdom winging her way into orangutan protection and conservation back in 1994.
“I started volunteering with orangutans in 1994. It was due to the cancer. With cancer I decided to change my life; I changed my boyfriend, my job, my country, even my underpants,” laughs Lucy, a petite 52-year-old with a voracious appetite for life and the energy to go with it, so that even her hair bounces with vitality as she walks.
She explains the changes she made in her life were based on an all-encompassing response to cancer.
“Changing what you are doing is the holistic approach. Cancer suggests you are doing something that is not in line with your life.”
It was not, she adds, that there was really anything wrong with her life. She was then working with the Mutoid Waste Company, a theatrical organization.
“This Mad Max type group [was] doing recycled theatrical works – we were a big group – 35 of us. I drove a fish car for years and later a crocodile car that had teeth. And it was a hard physical life – we were using chainsaws and grinders and I was not just working, but living that job. It was very metallic – not a healing place,” explains Lucy of her earlier life; a far cry from Sumatra so rich in “all those [Rudyard Kipling’s] Jungle Book animals” – including the orangutans that in 1994 became Lucy’s reason for living.
She ended up in Sumatra by accident during a trip Down Under to the beaches of Byron Bay in Australia, to “test out my new breast – the two thirds that were left [post-mastectomy]. Everyone goes topless at Byron, so I went to Australia,” says Lucy of her humorous and deeply courageous face-off with adversity.
During stopovers in Bali on the way to Australia and to Sumatra on her return, the torch of forest conservation and orangutan protection slipped into her hands; she has held onto it ever since.
“I had found that I could work as a volunteer at the Bohorok Orangutan Rehabilitation station in Gunung Leuser National Park in Sumatra, if I applied through Jakarta. I was feeling fit and well recovered from the operation and believed the cancer was a thing of the past.”
Bohorok is today no longer a rehabilitation center, but rather an orangutan eco-viewing area.
Over the next few years Lucy’s circus flying trapeze skills came in useful; she spent five years swinging through the trees teaching young orangutans the forest skills they had never had the chance to learn from their parents – most had been victims of kidnap and sale.
“By the third time I went back to Sumatra, in 1996, I was on a mission. That’s the year I started the Sumatran Orangutan Society, SOS. I don’t know how I did it. Slowly I learned. I read and studied – I am self-taught,” says Lucy, an archaeologist by profession. She worked through the early days of SOS, a foundation that is today recognized internationally for the valuable conservation work being undertaken in the Gunung Leuser National Park.
Raising the profile of Sumatran orangutans became even more critical in 2000, says Lucy, when it was confirmed that Sumatran and Borneo orangutans are two separate species. Once the Sumatran orangutans are lost they are lost forever.
“When I first went to Gunung Leuser there were believed to be around 25,000 orangutans. Today there are [about] 6,700. Especially now, I feel time is running out for me and for the Sumatran orangutans.”
The cancer came back throughout her body in 1999. Regular chemotherapy and her intense faith in her conservation work has, she says, been the difference between succumbing to the disease and battling for orangutan protection and habitat.
“I believe the passion I have for protecting them has kept me alive. Since 1999 I’ve had secondaries [cancers] everywhere; bones, liver, lungs. So the message is even if you are faced with a severe diagnosis, don’t give up – find a passion. I didn’t go looking for the orangutans. They found me,” says Lucy adding, “and wheatgrass. I really believe that works. It’s about what you believe.”
Her passion landed her the UK’s Women in Ethical Business Award in 2008 and saw her appear in the hero of the month pages of magazine Marie Claire.
These awards reflect the valuable work undertaken by SOS, which employs 15 full-time staff in Medan, North Sumatra, to oversee SOS’s many on-the-ground projects. These include orangutan guide training, community tree planting, community education, tree nurseries, rehabilitation of degraded forest zones, conservation scholarships, palm oil plantation tours into lands that were once prime forests and information dissemination on the plight of orangutans to the global community.
Fund raising is a nonstop activity and recognized organizations, such as Unesco and The National Geographic Society, have come on board, along with private donations. SOS achieved registered charity status in the UK some years ago
“On just one fundraising night in the UK we raised 24,000 pounds – that is serious money for projects in Sumatra,” she says.
This week SOS added to its fundraising efforts by opening The Jungle Shop in Ubud. The Jungle Shop is a thrift or charity shop that sells donated clothing, SOS merchandise and other items. Thrift shops are common in many Western countries, raising substantial funds for charity.
Lucy points out that she is not “an orangutan cuddler. I am working for the forests, not orangutans. Orangutans are the ambassadors for the forests. These are the only jungles where many of the animals from The Jungle Book still live together in harmony. There are tigers and elephants, rhinoceros, pythons, sun bears. It’s an ecosystem – without, say one ant species, then the whole lot collapses.
“White people have chopped down all our forests. We didn’t know any better. Now it is our responsibility to help others protect their forests and support sustainable communities.
“We are losing things we don’t even know existed. You never know, the cure for my cancer might be in those forests.”
Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/05/28/lucy-wisdom-her-own-jungle-story.html
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