For over twenty years Smits has worked for the survival of this threatened species of ape, during which time his work has also broadened out into the related areas of sustainable farming, reforestation and remote monitoring of forests. He travels widely, raising awareness of the issues surrounding deforestation in Borneo and the plight of the orangutan, also showing how it has been possible on a relatively small scale to reverse the great damage that is being done to the orangutan and its environment.
He became a senior advisor to the Ministry of Forests in Indonesia and has been knighted in the Netherlands. Training In , Willie Smits received his doctorate in tropical forestry and soil science at the Wageningen University in The Netherlands, based upon his research in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan, Indonesia on the symbiosis between mycorrhizas and the roots of Dipterocarpaceae tropical rainforest trees.
In the early s he was team leader of the Tropenbos Kalimantan Project Indonesia, an international partnership between the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry and Tropenbos Foundation.
Two years before, Smits had had his first encounter with an orangutan in the market. It was a life-changing event and Smits often retells the story:. Looking out between the slats were the very, very sad eyes of a baby orangutan. That evening I went back after the market closed. Walking around in the dark, I heard a horrible gasping sound. The baby in its crate was on the garbage dump, dying. I picked her up. He nursed her back to health and named her Uce for the laboured sound she made while gasping for breath.
A few weeks later he was given another sick orangutan to look after, which he named Dodoy. With the help of thousands of schoolchildren in Balikpapan contributing small amounts of money, Smits was able to set up what became the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation to rehabilitate orphaned and misused orangutans and return them to a safe place in the wild. Wanariset became home to hundreds of confiscated orangutans, rescued from illegal animal smuggling, kept as pets or exploited in other ways.
The Dutch orangutan-scientist Herman Rijksen recalls Smits creating the facility: "In no time he set up the most fantastic oversized quarantine facility, better than any hospital in the whole area, because that's typical of Willie. He wants to do it very, very good.
The activities of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation expanded from rescuing, rehabiliting and releasing orangutans to monitoring, conserving and rebuilding rainforest, along with the social engagement that made this sustainable. Smits is the founder and chairman of the Masarang Foundation in Indonesia which protects and restores nature together with the local people.
At Masarang International Willie is honorary board member and founding father. Needless to say is that all the efforts of Masarang International are to support Willie and his pioneering work on reforestation and sustainability.
In his forestry work Willie has seen how logging and palm oil plantations destroy the rainforest. Rainforest which is indispensable for the survival of many valuable plants and animals and very important to support human life.
This has motivated him to fight for the rainforest and work on solutions that expand the forest and benefit human beings. Your donation is key to restore the rainforests of Indonesia, preserve the habitat for endangered animals, and help local communities to live in balance with nature. Smits combines satellite imagery and GIS to show changes both on forests and on humans. It is used to challenge the hypothesis that Borneo can indefinitely continue to support oil palm plantations; show the profit and cost factors of these sites and their proximity to transportation and shipping; assess the precision farming factors of soil, elevation, and climate and their relationship to and infringements on local communities; and disclose property ownership disparities.
In Sumatra, he deployed SPOT imagery at one- by one-kilometer resolution to show how forests are receding and ground cover is changing from trees to shrubs and weeds. It is also used to reveal corruption by showing where companies say they are cultivating palm oil but are, in fact, clear-cutting high-quality rain forest.
Some images reveal conspiracy between timber and oil palm businesses running covert timber operations. Flyovers above suspect areas provide aerial images that pinpoint logging equipment in areas where it should not be. The eye-of-satellite imagery and the analytic ability of GIS reveal these schemes and force the hand of law enforcers to take action.
Moreover, imagery and GIS are proven tools for convincing various governments of the world that palm oil consumption is indeed destroying these precious forests. They are located in areas where other highly profitable timber grows. GIS is extremely important for visually relaying this information. I am not in a position to judge the veracity of other statements in Dr.
This is important because it allows us to better judge how realistic the purported win-win-win solution for people, the environment, and orangutan rehabilitation of Samboja is, and thus whether it is a cost effective conservation solution. This is a crucial issue in conservation, where funding is always scarce and real progress equally rare. I am also concerned about Dr. Smits tries to tell a good and compelling story, and we need spokespeople like that who can motivate the public to support conservation.
But there is a significant risk associated with over-embellishing or making up facts to substantiate a story. We have seen how the public pounced on the global climate science community for some relatively minor scientific transgressions and several damaging email communications, and this seems to have significantly undermined the public belief in the veracity of global climate change see this article about Climategate 1.
As a conservation scientist, I try to stick to scientific evidence as much as I can. One way to do this is to go through a process of scientific peer-review. At least then there are some checks and balances that force us to carefully distinguish between what we hope and what we can prove to be true. It would therefore be helpful if Dr. Smits and his team could publish more information about their findings. Smits mentions in his TED talk that "literally hundreds of research studies on biodiversity, carbon, climate, costs etc.
However, a careful literature search by me resulted in only a handful of publicly available reports written after the establishment of Samboja, with none encountered in the scientific literature. Conservation is hard enough to achieve as it is, and we completely depend on the trust and buy-in from the public to make progress. TED's devotion to Ideas Worth Spreading is an inspirational approach to building up trust and informing and inspiring the public, but it would be good if TED speakers could stick to the facts and thus not risk undermining that trust.
Thank you for informing me about the letter from Dr. Erik Meijaard. I would like to contribute the following comments:.
John van der Linden, informed me about the point decline in IQ in the area.
0コメント