Word: forester
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Every day Carel Van Schaik heard the chain saws as gangs of illegal loggers cut through the trees across the river from his orangutans' forest habitat. And every day the fighting between Acehnese rebels and the army moved closer; mutilated bodies sometimes were found dumped in these very forests. Indonesia was literally falling apart, village by village, tree by tree, and that meant extinction was nigh for myriad species, among them Van Schaik's orangutans. Environmentalists once said the apes might be extinct in a matter of decades; their increasingly frantic warnings now spoke of just years. Orangutans need virgin...
...disappear from the wild. Perhaps 5,000-6,000 survive on Sumatra, half the number that existed as recently as 1998. There are 10,000-15,000 on Borneo, a decline of one-third in the same period. "Orangutan survival totally depends on the survival of the tropical forest," says Birute Galdikas. "It's as simple as that." Galdikas has been studying orangutans since the late 1960s, when she was dispatched to Indonesia by Louis Leakey, the world-renowned anthropologist who, along with his wife Mary, laid the foundation for modern theories of human origins. Leakey's two other "angels...
...there are thousands of chimpanzees in zoos in the U.S. alone, whereas orangutans barely exceed 100. But there is also a practical problem: chimps and gorillas are both essentially ground-dwelling group animals. Orangutans are solitary and spend most of their time in the high canopy of the rain forest, making even short-term tracking virtually impossible...
...voluble Smits, a former high school wrestler, ticks off a list of new findings just beginning to reveal what we will lose if wild orangutans become extinct. Often dubbed the world's best field botanists, orangutans are also talented pharmacists, treating their illnesses with forest plants. Because of their similarity to humans, the benefits are obvious. Plagued by a splitting headache while walking in the forest, Smits remembered seeing a slumped female orangutan clutching her head and groaning, only to make what seemed to be a complete recovery after eating some flowers from a nearby bush. "I immediately went...
...Birute Galdikas is also trying to protect a larger area of forest in central Borneo, the much-abused Tanjung Puting National Park, the area she has been using for her research since the 1970s. In the past, Galdikas has often exploited her considerable fame to lobby Presidents and Prime Ministers. But with the collapse of authority in Jakarta, her focus has narrowed down to the communities living in and around what is left of the national park. They are both the source and solution to the problem. "These days it is impossible to distinguish the local community from illegal loggers...