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| Providing Home to the 'People of the Forest' |
| Habitat destruction threatens orangutans, humans' closest relative |
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Maria Margaretta Vivijanti (retty67)  |
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Published 2007-06-12 07:24 (KST) |
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Orangutans are probably the closest relatives of human beings, according to British scientists who recently published their study in the journal Science. Living in the lowland forest, these orangutans are becoming homeless as more and more deforestation is wrought by humans. There are two types of orangutan, the Sumatran Orangutan which is classified as critically endangered, and the Bornean Orangutan which is classified as an endangered animal.
According to Animal Info, the orangutan was once found throughout Indo-China and Malaysia and north to China. In historical times it has only been known from Sumatra and Borneo. As Sumatra and most of Borneo island (known to the Indonesians as Kalimantan) are part of the Indonesian Archipelago, it became a special fauna from Indonesia.
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FROM THE SECTION |
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| Next September, the Guinness Book of World Records will cite Indonesia as the country with the fastest rate of deforestation for its 2008 record book, according to an article published by Greenpeace South East Asia. This is not a record to be proud of. Yet, as a Balinese blogger has noted, it is recorded in an era where most other countries do not have large forests any more.
With all the international demand for timber, paper, rattan, and palm oil, the process of deforestation is obviously become faster. It is the simplest way to gain income while providing work for a large number of people. To produce palm oil requires quite a number of workers in the long process of production. Indonesia is even exporting workers to work in plantations and factories that produce palm oil in the neighboring country of Malaysia. It was a long struggle to reverse deforestation into a wiser state of reforestation, and it continues to this day.
The combination of habitat loss and being captured to sell outside the country has driven orangutans closer to extinction. The more human settlements built, the smaller their space for wandering from tree to tree. Julia Roberts came in the late 1990s to Kalimantan to be filmed living in the wild. She came to share the experience of Birute Galdikas, a Canadian expert on orangutans in Borneo. Roberts's intention was to promote the need to keep the jungle for Kusasi (misspelled from the real name Kosasih), the orangutan who also starred in the film, and his fellow orangutans. Yet deforestation continued.
WWF is a nongovernmental organization that has long been promoting action to save endangered animals. "Maximum cards" were produced officially by the WWF Indonesia to fund their work for orangutan about 10 years prior to Julia Roberts's film.
A maximum card is a collectors' item for those who specialize in maximaphily, one branch of philately. It is a picture postcard with the stamp affixed on the picture side, and canceled with a postmark in concordance with the picture or the place.
I bought these cards to donate for the orangutan project. The cancellation postmarks were made in Jakarta, which makes these cards not eligible as maximum cards. Jakarta is the city of the WWF Indonesia's main office. These two postcards depict Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus abelli). It would be best to have the postmark of the nearest post office to the orangutan habitat.
The first postcard shows the concordance of the picture with the stamps' picture. It shows a mother and a baby orangutan. The second picture only shows the baby orangutan while the stamp's picture is the mother and the baby hanging together "walking" from tree to tree. It does not serve the ideal of a maximum card for philatelic exhibition, but it does convey the message from WWF. There are lots of baby orangutans left alone. Some were those who were stolen for sale, some were those orphans because the mothers were killed by a hunter.
The Sumatran Orangutan has already on the list of critically endangered animals. The urban development, the export of timber, and also the palm oil plantations have taken away their habitat in the wild. Sumatra has lost a lot of its rainforests.
These two postcards use stamps with the picture of the Bornean Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus pygmaeus) from Kalimantan. The Bornean Orangutan has different features between the male and the female. The second postcard pictured the male Bornean Orangutan. I think the first picture has the Sumatran Orangutan on the post card.
Kalimantan, once covered with thick rainforests, served as the lungs of the world. But in the last decade it has also become the source of the problem of heavy smoke to neighboring countries. The exploitation of the forest made the degraded forest susceptible to burning, according to a study. If there is no active reforestation then the endangered Bornean orangutan will soon join the list of the critically endangered animals, along with its fellow Sumatran orangutan.
It is clear that helping these orangutans to preserve their home also helps us humans to build a better world to live in. It is something worth noting that in the heavy consumerist life of globalization, when the economic need is really high, that natural resources will not be eternal unless we preserve them. It is a big task for Indonesia to keep preserving its fauna in the wild. It really needs the support from other countries to help preserving and renewing the rainforests.
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©2007 OhmyNews
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