News of a close relative

Orangutans are one of the most intelligent species on earth. They live in the trees and eat fruit. They teach their young ones how to make tools, can make leaf hats to protect themselves from the rain and laugh when tickled. And they may soon be gone for ever. Their story is an object lesson in the mass extinction that humans are now causing throughout the earth.

Orangutans survive in Borneo and Sumatra. They have been there for millions of years, but their numbers have been decreasing dramatically through the last century and especially through the last few decades. Some are saying that the next five years will decide their fate. The reasons why this is happening are very clear, but the answers are less obvious.
They are:

The human population of Indonesia has increased from 10 million to over 200 million in the last century.

The rainforests are being cut down at a prodigious rate - 61% of Sumatra’s forest disappeared between 1985 and 1997.

Many humans benefit from this.

The loggers sell the wood - around 80% of this logging is illegal.

Subsistence farmers then use cleared land to grow rice.

Or wealthy landowners grow palm oil or rubber trees.

The palm oil goes to make cosmetics, cooking, or in the latest disastrous trend, is put to make biodiesel.

As the forests are destroyed the animals move to the edge of the forest where they conflict with humans, some of whom are unemployed and eking out a living for themselves by trading in orangutan meat or selling baby orangutans in the market.

For me this story is an example of the big issues about human interaction with other creatures. We may sense the priority of the welfare of people. So we might have sympathy for the subsistence farmers who need to grow rice and at least understand the self-interest of otherwise unemployed city traders, but the whole situation is a disaster for this wonderful species of animal. Are we just going to let this happen?

To end on a positive note: one guy Willie Smits saw a baby orangutan being sold in the market. He couldn’t get it out of his mind and returned to the market that evening to find the baby had grown weak and its owners had thrown it away as garbage. He grabbed the cage. The owners saw and pursued him for money, but he got away. That moment changed his career. Formerly a forester he now runs an organisation rehabilitating captive orangutans and returning them to the wild.

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Suggested Task: If you had to describe the root cause of this problem - what would you say it was?

Take some time to reflect on the ways that humans are behaving in relation to the orangutan and its well-being. Feel the complexity of this from the perspective of a poor person trying to make a living as well as the rich landowner. Is there a root cause here?

Your comments.