#bornea

Save Borneo rain-forest from mining.

Orangutans that had lived at a rescue shelter were recently set free on Salat Island in Indonesia. CreditUlet Ifansasti for The New York Times.

Excerpt:

As Borneo’s rain forests are rapidly destroyed by development, nonprofit organizations have struggled to find new habitat to relocate the rescued animals that are ready to return to the wild. The Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation called Salat [Island] a “major breakthrough” in helping to save the species.

For the last decade, the foundation has eyed the island as a potential orangutan haven: fertile with fruit trees, guarded from poachers by rivers and with no indigenous orangutan population to compete with for territory. But acquiring it seemed like a pipe dream: The sums involved were immense, and getting the local government’s buy-in presented a major bureaucratic challenge.

Until early last year, when a major Indonesian palm oil company, PT Sawit Sumbermas Sarana, swooped in and purchased part of the island for orangutan rehabilitation. The company even agreed to pay some of the foundation’s costs for monitoring and maintaining the island.

“We believe we could coexist,” the company’s chief executive, Vallauthan Subraminam, said in an interview as orangutans swung past overhead after being released.

But the foundation’s partnership with a palm oil company worries some environmentalists, who are concerned that it provides a flawed company an easy cloak of respectability. The huge expansion of palm oil plantations is widely acknowledged to be a key driver of rain-forest destruction in Indonesia, which deprives the orangutans of habitat.

“Isolated acts of kindness by bad actors like PT S.S.S. don’t erase that history and current pattern of destructive behavior, and they won’t save the Borneo orangutan from destruction,” said Gemma Tillack, the agribusiness campaign director at the Rainforest Action Network, an environmental organization, referring to the palm oil company by its initials. If the company was serious about protecting the species, she added, it would make a binding commitment to end deforestation on its plantations.