TANJUNG PUTING NATIONAL PARK, Indonesia — Hoping to unravel the mysteries of human origin, anthropologist Louis Leakey sent three young women to Africa and Asia to study our closest relatives: It was chimpanzees for Jane Goodall in 1958, mountain gorillas for Dian Fossey in 1967 and the elusive, solitary orangutans for Birute Mary Galdikas in 1971.
Nearly four decades later, 62-year-old Galdikas, the least famous of his “angels,” is the only one still at it. The red apes she studies in Indonesia are on the verge of extinction because forests are being clear-cut and burned to make way for lucrative palm-oil plantations.
“I try not to get depressed. I try not to get burned out,” said the Canadian scientist, pulling a wide-rimmed jungle hat over her shoulder-length gray hair. She picked up a tiny orangutan, orphaned when his mother was caught raiding crops.
“But when you get up in the air, you start gasping in horror,” she said. “There’s nothing but palm oil in an area that used to be plush rain forest.”
The demand for palm oil is rising in the U.S. and Europe because it is touted as a “clean” alternative to fuel.
But palm-oil plantations devastate the forest and create a monoculture on the land in which orangutans cannot survive. Over the years, Galdikas has fought off loggers, poachers and miners, but nothing has posed as great a threat to her “babies” as palm oil.
There are only an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans left in the wild, 90 percent of them in Indonesia, said Serge Wich, a scientist at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa.
Tanjung Puting National Park, which has 1,600 square miles, clings to the southern tip of Borneo island. Its 6,000 orangutans are less vulnerable to diseases and fires. That has allowed them, to a degree, to live as they have for millions of years.
“I am not an alarmist,” Galdikas said. “But I would say, if nothing is done, orangutan populations outside of national parks have less than 10 years left.”
One of her main projects today is her rehabilitation center overflowing with more than 300 animals orphaned when their mothers were killed by palm-oil plantation workers.
“It is getting harder and harder to find good, safe forest in which to free them,” Galdikas said.
