Man’s Impact Eased : Indonesians Move to Save Rare Wildlife

The boys laid out the food on a rough-planked platform 20 feet above ground amid the trees and vines, reached by ladder from the jungle floor. Then, higher still, branches rattled and leaves shook. The orangutans were coming.

This day there would be three for the afternoon feeding at the Bohorok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center. They represented a small victory for the animals in the clash between man and wildlife on the big Indonesian island of Sumatra.

Two years ago, each of the three had been a household pet. Having one of the languid, lovable, red-haired apes shambling around the living room, or caged on the patio, was a status symbol. Overlooked was the death of their mothers, invariably killed by the poachers who took the young for profit.

Weaned Back to the Wild

Now on a ridge just two hours from the big port city of Medan, the young orangutans were being weaned back to the wild, fed milk and bananas twice a day, then left in the trees to fill out their diet with natural forage.

It takes three or four years to break their dependence on the feedings, but it took environmentalists at least that long to convince urban Indonesians that keeping apes as pets represented depredation of a rare treasure, the wildlife of one of the world’s great rain forests.

“It was already a few minutes before midnight when we started,” said Fred Hehuwat, a founder of the Green Indonesia Foundation, a private environmental group formed in the late 1970s to raise the alarm on the threat to Indonesia’s incredible plant and animal life.

For some species, it is now past midnight.

“Five, I think, just four or five,” said Linus Simanjuntak, a fellow founder, describing the population of the Javan tiger on Indonesia’s central and most populous island. “At those numbers, it’s gone.”

The last Bali tiger was killed in the early 1960s. Simanjuntak estimates the population of the Sumatran tiger at a thousand. If it is lost, and some experts fear that possibility, the tiger will be gone from Indonesia.

“The fauna is being flattened,” said David Heckman, an American living in Medan and developing white-water rafting on a wild Sumatran river.

Still, Indonesia, an archipelago of 13,677 volcanic islands nearly two-thirds covered by forest and jungle, remains one of the world’s few “factories” of wildlife, along with equatorial Brazil and Zaire. Heckman, who has worked in the Brazilian rain forest, said he thinks that Indonesia’s is “more exotic, . . . more condensed.”

The world’s largest flower grows here, a parasite named rafflesia, whose bloom can measure more than a yard in diameter and weigh 20 pounds. So does the world’s largest lizard, the famous monitor of Komodo Island, a 10-footer.

In Kalimantan, the Indonesian province on the island of Borneo, there are more than 3,000 species of trees. More than 500 mammals are found in the islands, most of them on mountainous Sumatra, the size of California--tigers, elephants, orangutans, gibbons.

And there may be species unknown to scientists. Heckman, who represents Sobek Expeditions of Angels Camp, Calif., related the story of a New Zealander who sets up automatic cameras in the jungle to record the wildlife.

“He had one picture--I saw it--of something that had the body of a mammal and the legs of a bird,” Heckman said, shaking his head. “It’s impossible,” he insisted, but he could not explain the photo.

As elsewhere in the world, the greatest danger to this abundance of wildlife is man. Not man the hunter, although he is probably most responsible for reducing the numbers of the Javan and Sumatran rhinoceroses to the point of probable extinction. It is man the farmer who poses the more certain threat.

“The biggest danger is land hunger,” Hehuwat, the incoming chairman of Green Indonesia, said at the foundation’s offices outside Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital. He said agricultural expansion is a far greater threat to the forest and its inhabitants than logging or mining, two other forms of man’s incursions.

Specifically, environmentalists mention the government’s long-term program of transmigration, which was started before World War II by the Dutch colonialists to relieve the pressure on overpopulated Java by transporting people to the outer islands, including Sumatra. The inescapable result is to intrude on the realm of the wild animals.

Tribal Indonesians and other upcountry inhabitants have lived successfully with the animals for eons--”in harmony,” says environmentalist Simanjuntak, whose family belongs to the Batak people of northern Sumatra.

“Now this is true,” he said at his home beside the Jakarta zoo. “In Batak country, if a durian (a delicious but revoltingly malodorous fruit) falls on the forest floor, whichever comes along first, man or tiger, will eat half and leave half for the other.”

A transplanted Javanese farmer usually does not share that mutual respect, Sumatrans say. Furthermore, the land provided to transmigrants sometimes inadvertently causes a clash.

Farmland in the southern Sumatran province of Lampung, for instance, has been developed across the trail of the elephant, a path he follows on a cyclical pattern. Two months ago, a bull and two females went on a rampage through a village that lay in their accustomed path. Press reports said 14 homes were damaged and a boy was killed.

The Indonesian government has imported trained elephants and their mahouts from Thailand to teach Indonesians how to domesticate the Sumatran elephant. The rampaging elephants of Lampung have been captured and sent to the Thai training school.

The clash of man and beast in Indonesia has been accentuated in the last two years by the decline of oil prices. Petroleum is Indonesia’s principal export earner. To make up for the loss in oil income, the government has pressured producers for increased exports of lumber and plywood, which increases activity in the forests.

At the same time, a government program to increase the size of national parks, nature reserves and protected forests, already more than 6% of the land area, remains on the books. But officials, even environmentalists, say the untouched integrity of the rain forests will have to give way to national development projects.

Forestry Minister Soedjarwo, in a recently published interview, said that “full forest exploitation” should benefit people both with improved environment and jobs. But he emphasized the economic benefit, predicting that by the year 2000, Indonesia could make $4 billion a year from timber sales.

Emil Falim, minister of population and environment, said Indonesia needs the revenue from its logging industry but is equally aware of the world’s desire to protect the rain forests. “But who can put a price on genetics?” he said.

He suggested that the industrialized countries join Indonesia and other developing countries that have rain forests in establishing a trust fund to protect them.

“Why should Indonesia do it alone?” the minister asked.

Green Indonesia’s Hehuwat also called for compromise.

“We’re not for putting the environment behind glass,” he said. “We cannot freeze it, but there are limits and there are methods. There should be interaction” between development planners and environmentalists.

If not, he warned, Sumatra could become another Java, its wildlife largely depleted.

“I remember as a boy in East Java, I could go into the forest and see panthers and pythons,” said Suryo Prawiroatmodjo, 29, a Green Indonesia official. “Not now.”

It is not the passage of man through the forest that alters the ecosystem. It is the changes that he makes.

The change can be as simple as a road. A road does not take that much space, but it can sever the range of a tiger, restricting its movement and ultimately diminishing the tiger population.

Logging has a similar effect. New trees and other vegetation will grow, but never in the variety of the rain forest. Animals that lived in the original system may not survive in the altered one.

Here at the Bohorok orangutan center, the emphasis is on education, on raising consciousness. Sometimes it gets emotional

“Who gave us the right to kill off the orangutan?” blurted Joost Foppes, a Dutch worker for the World Wildlife Fund, at the end of a discussion of the problem.

Heckman, the rafter, was sometimes understated about his concern for the wildlife.

“Causes are hard to come by,” he noted dryly. “Maybe we can save a few animals.”

Future Garden for Mankind

But he went on to describe a trip down Sumatra’s Alas River: “All along the banks . . . pig-tail macaques, gibbons, hog-badgers, dholes (wild dogs). . . . If we can save it, that’s a garden for mankind in the future.”

As the afternoon feeding neared its end at the Bohorok center, a great hornbill passed overhead, the beating of its heavy wings sounding like someone sawing a log.

Then another noise, a cracking sound. One of the boys whispered excitedly.

“He said one of the wild ones is coming,” a guide told three foreigners who had climbed several hundred feet up the ridge to see the feeding, picking their way through slippery orange monsoon mud, past bamboo thickets, roots and vines.

The guide pointed. Twenty feet away and 30 feet up, an adult orangutan sat in the crotch of a tall tree and watched the proceedings. It was a male, about 140 pounds, more than three times the size of the young erstwhile pets at the feeding platform, the guide estimated.

After about 10 minutes, he reached out a long arm for a limber branch, held on with a hand and a foot, and swung to the next tree. Then to another, moving remarkably quickly. And free.