National Park not destroyed!

We wish to clarify, in response to your Jan. 9, 2002 article "Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan destroyed, that Gunung Palung is still there! The reporting is based on excellent field research by a Harvard University-affiliated team of foresters, and contains important points concerning the tragic economics of illegal logging at this beleaguered Park.

However, the article makes its point too strongly in saying that Gunung Palung is "destroyed". This sort of statement is dangerous -- for if it had actually been destroyed, if truly "it is hard to find an orangutan in the park now," why should we care anymore?

For the past several years we have been conducting ecological research, including an orangutan population census, at Gunung Palung National Park. The situation is indeed grim. However, the Park is not yet a wasteland. Although it is true that roughly two-thirds of Gunung Palung has been degraded by illegal logging, it has not been utterly clear-cut: These disturbed patches still have high conservation value.

Gunung Palung National Park remains a vitally important sanctuary for wildlife, and, provided that it is protected from further disturbance, will continue to support one of the few remaining viable orangutan populations in the world. Logging has not rendered Gunung Palung worthless. It is a final "postage stamp" of Kalimantan's once vast and unbelievably diverse lowland rainforest -- a forest that elsewhere has mostly been converted into a sea of oil palm and human development. This National Park is one of the last places that can and does support a full complement of native Kalimantan fauna, and as such it still deserves our strongest conservation efforts.

Let's not write off Gunung Palung, and the rest of this country's forests, as "destroyed". Let's not convince the public that there are no orangutans left, when the fact is there still are and, if Indonesia acts now, there always will be.

ANDREA E. JOHNSON

and ANDREW J.MARSHALL

Department of Anthropology

Harvard University

Boston, Massachusetts

USA