“You can’t wake up a person who’s pretending to sleep. Thus we live on a planet and there’s just one of them, and we've got to wake up to the fact that we don’t have any more of it.”
Jason Clay, WWF (World Wild Life) Vice-President
Wise words from only one of the thousands preservers and caregivers on the face of this planet. Without people like this our Earth would not be the way it is today. The media may portray our worldly environments as a planet with poor ecosystems and dying biodiversities. Evidently with positive human intervention amongst such harsh environments our world is taking little baby steps to sustain our ecosystems.
One of the most remarkable stories of rehabilitation of a habitat can be found within the non-profit foundation known as the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation. The foundation was founded by Willie Smits in 1991 in Balikpapan, Indonesia. This project has a magnificent goal and has immensely contributed to the re-growth of not only the Orangutans in the area but also the economy, health and state of the villagers. This project was a huge success and has restored the rainforest as well as provided a safe conservation area to nurse orangutans back to health.
The village was in poor conditions before Willie Smits arrived. The land of Borneo was almost cleared of its environment to be replaced with Palm-oil factories. One of the main problems Willie paid attention to was the major forest fires which occurred all over Borneo. By 1998 Borneo lost 5.5 million hectares within a matter of 5 months because of underground fires.
This affected the state of the biodiversity tremendously leaving the environment in a disaster. This troubled Willie immensely and this was the first problem he wanted to solve.
He first thought about short and long term solutions. His short term ideas were to involve the local people to fight against the spark which would escalate the massive forest fires. He thought about how he could fight the fires on a long term base and came up with a brilliant idea in which to surround the forest with sugar palms. These sugar palms are fire proof and can also produce sugar water. There are 60 useful resources in which sugar palm trees can be produced into. This created jobs and gave local villagers money by planting and selling sugar palms.
As soon as they had enough money, Willie introduced to the local people to the official office of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation. The small office would turn out to plan and revolutionize the state of Borneo. They educated local villagers and recorded numerous surveys as research. The foundation also set up a nature reserve to take care of over 520 orangutans. In order for this reserve to be financed, BOS set up a system called, “land-purchasing”. Where a donor would be able to buy a part of the forest and would be able to help fund BOS.
BOS is a wonderful Foundation and has helped the biodiversity of Borneo to regain itself back to a stable environment. Although factories are still clear-cutting forests and killing the habitats of the orangutans. BOS will not stop until life in Borneo is safe for all orangutan’s, forests and people.
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