Deforestation shrinks animal habitat
TANJUNG PUTING, Central Kalimantan (JP): From the window of the noisy twin-propeller plane, the most striking feature of the land below was not the legendary virgin forests of Kalimantan, but the lack of them.
The Central Kalimantan landscape revealed nearly organized rubber and palm plantations and the scruffy underbrush of forest that had already sacrificed its canopy to the timber industry.
With the loss of these trees disappears the home of the orangutan, Asia's red-haired great ape, and with him much of the biodiversity of one of the largest regions of rain forest in the world.
Tanjung Puting says that the size of orangutan habitat in Indonesia and Malaysia has declined by 80 percent over the last two decades, and that there are one-third to one-half as many orangutans as there were a decade ago.
Overall estimates on deforestation across Kalimantan are hard to find, but no one claims that the rate of cutting for timber or agricultural conversion is slowing.
Although the timber industry logs selectively and only cuts the largest trees, said Willie Smits, director of the Warnariset Forest orangutan rehabilitation center in East Kalimantan, those projects open up the forest to new settlement and increase contact between humans and animals.
Even now, one million hectares of land in Central Kalimantan are being converted by presidential decree for rice cultivation. While this project will feed and employ a new batch of transmigrants, it is expected to displace 3,000 to 5,000 orangutans.
"It's not only orangutans. They're only the acceptable faces of conservation, charismatic metovertebrae," said Ron Lilley, species conservation officer at World Wide Fund for Nature.
Orangutans are a symbol, the lively logo of an endangered species campaign, but their disappearance is also a bellwether of those who live in the forest beneath them.
In the wild, orangutans need a one-half kilometer square to roam and find adequate food sources. If the orangutan dies because that square of land disappears, wildlife biologists assume that other species which need a smaller range to live have disappeared as well.
The rain forest ecosystem is not uniform, so a one-half kilometer area may have been the only home of a species. Depending on how far one goes down the life chain, and based on whether one considers not only mammals, but reptiles, fish, birds, plants, insects and bacteria, the number of disappearing species within the domain of one orangutan could reach millions.
Many of these species have not even been named. Beyond the intrinsic value of a species, humans do not know the role of these species in perpetuating the rain forest ecosystem or their potential medicinal value.
In contrast, if that orangutan and its half kilometer of forest is protected, "you can say that hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of species have been saved," said Lilly. (Becky Mowbray)