Compost sees big picture of saving wildlife

Compost sees big picture of saving wildlife

Fritz Kuhlmann, Contributor, Jakarta

The rhino saunters out of the incredibly green jungle. It gives a
long, long look from it's old eyes in a cluster of wrinkles. Then
it turns and slowly walks away.

"The beauty of the moment," said Alain Compost, admiring the
scene on one of the three monitors in his studio. "When an animal
does not flee when I'm filming, it's just as if it would accept
me."

"It's only a dream, of course."

The wind had to blow in the right direction, he explained,
because if the rhino could smell him, it would run away at once.

Alain Compost, 52, is famous for being one of the few people
who has managed to photograph the notoriously shy Javan
rhinoceros, one of the rarest animals in the world with an
estimated 50 or so left in Ujung Kulon National Park on the
western tip of Java.

The bald, short, muscular Frenchman today lives in a house in
the countryside near Bogor with his Indonesian wife and children.
He has been roaming throughout Java, Kalimantan, Sumatra and
other points in the archipelago for almost 30 years, "but people
don't know what I am really doing".

The wildlife photographer has begun to focus on educational
projects. In July he plans to launch phase two of the Wanamedia
Foundation that he started two years ago. It will produce
independently financed films, sponsored by NGOs like the World
Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Starting with the orangutan, each project will focus on one
species and consists of three films. One will be aimed at
children, the second at presenting the ecosystem of the animal
and a third giving the socio-economic context, targeting local
decision-makers. It is a new approach to getting the message
across about wildlife conservation.

Any TV station will be allowed to show the films free of
charge. But it is equally important to Compost that 1,000 VCDs of
each film will distributed to the people in the area where it has
been shot.

"After all, they decide about the survival of an animal,"
Compost said. "It's useless putting pretty pictures in books like
I did for so long, because just a certain kind of people will
look at them."

He is convinced the moving picture has much more power.

Compost is a man full of contradictions. He tries to provide
information to people. He tells how he loves showing his films to
amazed villagers who live near the habitat of the rhino but have
never seen one in their life, because "that's much more rewarding
than to show it to an international public on TV channels like
Animal Planet".

Nonetheless this always smiling man, unpretentious in his
jeans and dark T-shirt, also says: "Humans are a pest".

They are destroying nature that he is desperately trying to
preserve. If he had a choice, he would prefer the company of
animals to that of people, Compost said, no joking.

"I am too extreme, I acknowledge that."

It's out in the forest far from humanity where he feels at
ease. When filming, he goes with his assistant Ali, sleeping in a
simple tent.

"The forest is safe," Compost said. "The water is not
polluted, you just have to watch out not to step on a snake."

It's people that he considers dangerous. One of the few times
he had to fear for his life out in the jungle was when he filmed
in Kerinci Seblat National Park in Jambi, Sumatra, one of the
last strongholds of the Sumatran tiger. A tiger would only attack
"when its life patterns are disturbed because the habitat is
logged, its checkpoints in the forest are bulldozed", Compost
said.

But on this occasion he was filming the forest police
arresting illegal loggers.

"Suddenly the villagers came by the hundreds, waving knives
and sticks," Compost said.

The police fled, so the cameraman just kept on filming. "They
pushed us into our car and wanted to set it on fire."

A local sawmill owner finally rescued the film team and took
them to a police station. Even there, stones continued raining
down on their refuge.

Compost feels comfortable with some people, such as the Orang
Rimba (forest dwellers), also in Jambi, who time and "progress"
have passed by.

"They feel very close to nature, so I feel close to them." He
once showed them a film about the forest people of Papua.

"The Orang Rimba thought they were the only ones living like
that, despised by everybody. So when they discovered they are not
alone -- this was a very emotional moment."

The pictures appeared in the big French magazine Paris Match,
although Compost rarely sells to such media.

"I am just not patient enough to do the necessary lobbying,"
he said.

That is another contradiction, because photographing animals
-- or tribespeople -- takes an enormous amount of patience, just
waiting for the right moment.

Instead of engaging in small talk with editors, Compost sells
via specialized agencies from his stock of 80,000 slides, all
stored in iron cabinets in his house.

In fact, Compost could easily live in Paris and come over to
Indonesia to shoot for a few months every year. "But everything I
have, I owe it to Indonesia," he said. So he chose to stay --
"especially now that everything is getting worse".

The reformasi (reform) movement had some bad side-effects, he
said. "The natural parks are out of control; no one, including
local government representatives, respect them any more."

Compost's love of animals no doubt comes from his previous
profession. He was once a simple zoo keeper; he always wanted to
work with animals, so when he failed to become a veterinarian, he
started working at the Paris Zoo.

"I often had to open cages for photographers, that's how I got
the idea to try that myself."

When taking pictures in the zoo in 1975, a chimpanzee bit him
badly in his right hand, leaving scars still visible today.

"I didn't have any insurance, but the ape had," Compost said.
"That's how I raised the money to come to Indonesia to stay."

He had been here for a short visit before and had fallen in
love with the country's threatened wildlife.

"Still, I don't think that anything I do really makes a
difference. To be a conservationist is to be a loser."

Still, Compost says resigning himself to reality is not an
option. Maybe he is a brother in mind to fellow Frenchman Albert
Camus, who imagined Sysiphos, the mythic figure trying to roll a
heavy stone uphill and destined to forever fail, as a happy
person.

Compost bears a fresh wound on his arm. Another ape, this time
a gibbon, bit him. "It was my mistake, of course, I surprised
him."

He keeps the animal in a huge caged part of his garden. The
wife of an animal catcher brought it to him after her husband ran
away and she was unable to handle things, the animals dying one
after the other.

An NGO will soon help to release the gibbon into a remote area
of Sumatra.

"In the big picture, that one animal doesn't matter at all,"
Compost said. "I just feel it's my responsibility."