Word: leakey
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...left to cope with a habitat that is shrinking daily, as agribusiness firms continue their relentless drive to turn Kalimantan's forests into palm-oil plantations. "I cannot convey the horror of it," says Canadian primatologist Birute Galdikas, a protégé of the late naturalist Louis Leakey and the world's leading authority on orangutans...
...Galdikas set up the Camp Leakey rehabilitation center in southern Borneo's Tanjung Putting National Park. To date, the camp has rehabilitated more than 350 orangutans, helping orphaned former pets successfully return to the wild. It also continues to care for another 300 juveniles. To help raise money for its work - and for the charity over which Galdikas presides, Orangutan Foundation International, www.orangutan.org - Camp Leakey is open to visitors, who are encouraged to "adopt" a young orangutan by contributing towards its keep. (See 10 things to do in Washington, D.C.: National...
...Potential adoptees often greet visitors as they arrive, which is magical. This is no arm's-length orangutan encounter, with the shadows of great apes ambling through trees glimpsed through a long camera lens. At Camp Leakey, you can pat, hug and hold hands with the animals. Even getting to the camp is an enchantment: you putter up river for hours on a local kelotok boat, and weave through rain forest. "We need to have more tourists visit in order to provide a livelihood for people," says Ferry Candra, a national-park guide. "Without them, locals will just go back...
...years if more is not done to preserve their habitat. In the battle to save the orangutan, the camp is at once the front line and a sanctuary. And as a bright-eyed baby climbs into your lap, you cannot help but wonder, with some sadness, if Camp Leakey is also the orangutan's last stand...
...diplomats are venturing into a country with a power vacuum. "I think Kibaki is getting very poor advice. He's showing no personal leadership in this crisis; I'm not quite sure who around him is making the decisions," says Richard Leakey, the world famous paleontologist and chairman of WildlifeDirect.org, who is active in Kenyan politics as an anti-corruption campaigner. "I think that's a large part of the problem - the country feels at sea without a captain. But ODM has made some pretty outrageous statements too. Everybody is playing bad guy on this and nobody is trying...