We’re going back to the trees now. We’re going back with chain saws. A few years ago all I knew about orangutans was that they were the sad ones sitting with a piece of cardboard on their heads down at the duller end of the primate house. Then, in one of the early books of the Discworld series, I created a librarian who was an orangutan. I did it because I thought it would be mildly amusing. As a piece of creativity it took me all of fifteen seconds. Sorry, but it really did. There was no lifelong fascination, no point to make. It was just a joke. On a different day, the Librarian would have been an aardvark.
The series became inexplicably popular, the Librarian caught the imagination of the readers, one librarian praised me for “raising the status of the profession,” and various organizations started paying me money to go and talk to them. This embarrassed me somewhat, until I heard about the Orangutan Foundation.
I rang them up. I said, “I seem to be getting all this money, would you like it?” A cautious voice said, “Yes?”
Then it got serious. I became a Trustee. I sit in at meetings in London in a state either of despair or anger. Sometimes what I hear makes me want to slit my wrists, but often it makes me long to slit someone else’s.
The foundation is a support organization for the work of Dr. Biruté Galdikas at Camp Leakey in Tanjung Puting. She has spent thirty years studying orangutans in the wild, but increasingly she has had to work to ensure that there are any left to study. When I visited her at the camp six years ago, to do a short film, there was still some optimism, some feeling of bridges built, contacts made, some hope that with goodwill all round there was a way that apes and men could coexist.
I have an affliction peculiar to lifelong journalists. In some circumstances I get detached and go into a sort of “Record” mode. Then I go and write things down, and the mental film is developed, as if writing things down makes them real.
I remember every detail of my visit like a jewel. I’m damn sure I wouldn’t have felt the same about aardvarks. I remember that the eyes of orangutans are the eyes of people, in a way that the eyes of dogs and cats are not, and how the orangutans would pinch the soap and go and wash themselves in the river, and how the camp’s motorboat had to be anchored in midstream because one young male was taking too intelligent an interest in how to start the engine. I remember the gentle feel of a hand that could have crushed every bone in mine.
And I remember that when I left Borneo there were also long, long rafts of logs floating down the Sekonyer River, and a smell of smoke in the air.
Things have got worse, not better. The orangutans are dying out because the rain forests of Indonesia are being killed.
More than half the timber coming out of Borneo and Sumatra is illegally logged. Even national parks are not safe. A few weeks ago illegal loggers trashed the headquarters at Tanjung Puting National Park. When you’re big enough, and powerful enough, and pay the right people, you can do what you like. Greed and corruption are calling the shots.
As they say in Borneo: “It’s illegal—but it’s official.”
Oh, there have been successes. They have been achieved by careful and patient negotiation, like tap-dancing on quicksand, and I take off my hat to the people who have done it.
But since my visit and despite all the efforts, the orangutans are still losing. It was hoped that the new Indonesian government could reverse the trend, but nothing in Indonesia is ever straightforward. People like me, who aren’t patient, wonder what good a national park is as a refuge when it is just another source of timber.
The foundation is even sponsoring additional patrols of local people to support the understaffed park rangers. It is the sort of initiative that was never envisaged when it was set up. It has taken some very delicate negotiation. They cannot be seen to be interfering with the internal affairs of a sovereign country. So no weapons will be involved. In truth, the park is not as uncivilized as, say, some parts of Los Angeles, so not even the bad guys are using guns. But the illegal loggers have quite big machetes and a certain insouciance. The rangers have … er … well, they have right on their side. Presumably, in a tight corner, they can use harsh language.
This is hardly ideal, but it may help impress on local people that the orangutans are themselves a resource. It is the “ecotourism” argument. How much would you pay to see orangutans in the wild, especially if you knew the money was helping to preserve their forest? Currently it’s about 12p, the cost of a day ticket into the park, and they throw in the birds and trees for free. There’s a bit of scope there, I think.
Unfortunately, what looms is something worse than logging. There has always been logging, legal and illegal. Loggers come and go. The forest can heal, in time.
It’s plantations that are now the big and growing problem. Vast tracts of former forest are taken over for agribusiness with the help of foreign investment. They grow palms for palm oil, and a species of acacia to feed new wood pulp mills. This is a profitable business, but it means that the forest can’t return. There is nothing for the apes in these barren tree factories.
We benefit, even if we don’t realize it. The pulp makes paper, the trees make everything from chipboard to your nice hardwood doors. We can try to shop conscientiously, but that is getting harder to do.
We live in a global economy now and, increasingly, the apes don’t. They are being pushed to the edges, and they’re running out of edges. I can’t crack a joke about that.
We made a big fuss over the possibility of microbes on Mars. If orangutans were Martians we’d cherish them, we’d be so amazed at how they’re like us but not like us, they’d be invited to tea and cigars at the White House.
But they’re apes, sad in zoos, funny in movies, useful in advertisements and in fantasy books, I’m almost ashamed to say, but at least the Discworld’s Librarian has done his bit for the species and caused more than a few bob to flow their way. But the problem, unfortunately, is not money. The problem is lots of money.
A million years ago the orangutans watched Java man walk into Indonesia. Perhaps there are only a few years left now before we watch the last orangutans ushered into their domes or cages or enclosed parks to live out their lives in a simulacrum of the real world. They will be ghosts, because an orangutan needs the forest like a fish needs the sea.
All this for cheap paper and exotic doors.
Unless, of course, you believe in miracles.
THE NHS IS SERIOUSLY INJURED
News of the World, 17 August 2008, headlined “I’m disgusted. I can get Viagra on NHS, but not a drug to help my Alzheimer’s”