of Sumatra and Borneo, primarily work to relocate or reintroduce the great apes to protected habitats when they are captured or injured by humans. Direct human conflicts with orangutans have increased over the past several decades as their forest homes have been decimated to create room for palm oil plantations. When the orangutans swing into the plantations, they are shot; when they look for food in villages, they are met with violence; and, when a mother is with her baby, people will try to kill her to capture the infant who can be sold on the black market for upward of $20,000.
Wild orangutans live only on these two islands, where they are now critically endangered. The Wildlife Conservation Society describes them as “the rarest of the rare.” One species of orangutan in Sumatra, the Tapanuli orangutan, is the most endangered great ape species in the world, with only 800 individuals existing. There are only an estimated 13,800 individual Sumatran orangutans remaining. Both of these populations are in steep decline. On Borneo, it is estimated that the population will be down to 47,000 individuals by 2025. Because a mother orangutan stays with her child for six to nine years, steep population decline is particularly difficult to reverse.
The lush rainforests, home to tens of thousands of species, including the largest carnivorous plants, the largest moths, sun bears, clouded leopards, tigers, gibbons, elephants, and orangutans, are being destroyed at an alarming rate. As Mel White wrote for National Geographic in 2008, “considering the island’s unsurpassed biodiversity – from orangutans and rhinoceroses to tiny mosses and beetles not yet discovered – and the rate at which its forests are being lost, Borneo’s future may well be the most critical conservation issue on our planet.” By 2015, the Borneo rhinoceros was considered extinct in the wild. The orangutans on both Borneo and Sumatra may not be far behind.
Three acres of native forests are cut every minute to make room for palm oil monocrop plantations. Forests the size of Connecticut are converted every two years to keep up with the world’s insatiable demand for palm oil products. Palm oil is in almost everything, from breakfast items to vegan fare, soaps, cosmetics, shampoo, candies, and snack food. If you look at the ingredients in your cookies, or crackers, or margarine, or peanut butter in your pantry or refrigerator, you will find it listed as palm oil or palm kernel, and most glycerin is from palm oil. Borneo and Sumatra provide 86 percent of the world’s supply. In 2019, global consumption was almost 72 million tons, or roughly 20 pounds of palm oil per person. Even those actively seeking to avoid using palm oil find it challenging, as it is ubiquitous and often disguised (Orangutan Alliance).
In order to grow palm trees that produce the large fruits from which palm oil is extracted, native rainforests are bulldozed and then burned. From 2000 to 2015, 150,000 orangutans on Borneo died as their forest homes were destroyed and they became exposed to humans. And orangutans aren’t the only creatures to suffer from this massive destruction. In 2015, the fires used to clear the forests burned out of control releasing smoke and ash, severely impacting air quality. Researchers from Columbia and Harvard estimate that this led to 100,000 premature human deaths. The process of cutting down forests, burning what remains, and growing palm trees creates greenhouse gasses, which is ironic given that palm oil is used as a supposedly earth-friendly biofuel. One researcher noted that biofuel production wasn’t going to be better for the climate, “instead, it would create nearly double the greenhouse-gas emissions of conventional fuels” (Lustgartner 2018).
With such destructive impact, why would the people of Borneo and Sumatra welcome palm oil plantations to their ecological diverse islands? This question can be partially answered by looking at the history of exploitation of the islands by outsiders. Extraction of wood, animals, and gold by Chinese and Portuguese traders, then British and Dutch colonists, and, more recently, oil drilling by US and European corporations created vast inequalities between native people and multinational corporations and their shareholders. The desire for more direct control and the promise of development has led many local people to join forces with the palm oil industries. But this hasn’t always worked out that well. As one report notes:
To create a legal basis for development, the Indonesian government established a commercial land-share system in the 1980s. In theory, the system let villages sign over development rights in return for some part of the profit. But in practice, many villagers said, companies often secured the permits they needed through some combination of intense lobbying, bribery and strong-arming, and the result was broken promises and missing payments. (Rosner 2018)
Many impoverished villagers view the large orange apes as frightening pests rather than as fellow creatures worth protecting or as indicators of impending environmental collapse. The parents of the young boy who almost killed Hope and caused her infant’s death, were resentful that people seemed to care more about the orangutan than their son’s future (Beech 2019). But the choice isn’t a binary one, nor is it an easy one.
A narrow focus on the desperate straits of orangutans on Sumatra and Borneo – a focus leaving out key features of the larger economic and political context – may very well lead to counterproductive responses and make it seem that consumer boycotts of palm oil are enough to solve the problem. But much more is needed, including a wider critical focus on the destructive logics behind extractive industries to fill out the particular tragedies that befall individuals in their profit-pursuing wake. Multinational corporations have already begun “green-washing” their extractive practices, producing allegedly “sustainable” palm oil, which hasn’t helped local people or native animals. We can, and should, care about the orangutans and the villagers who haven’t gotten what they envisioned from the corporations that are exploiting land, labor, and animals around them. Sadly, as long as palm oil plantations continue to wreak havoc on Borneo and Sumatra, furthering global inequality, the future of the boy who shot at Hope and her baby, the future of other native children, and the future of the orangutans and other species look bleak.
The Rapidly Expanding Problem
The environmental destruction that is harming the island inhabitants, human and nonhuman, on Borneo and Sumatra represents just a fraction of the unfolding catastrophe around the globe. Human activities are polluting and destroying animal habitats on land and sea at such an astonishing rate that we are confronting a “sixth mass extinction” (Kolbert 2014). Pollution is heating the seas and leaving them strewn with plastic detritus that degrades – as of this writing – nearly 90 percent of the ecosystems of the world’s oceans (Jones et al. 2018), while the size and number of fertilizer-laden, run-off-triggered, hypoxic aquatic “dead zones” continue to grow.
The destruction of land-based ecosystems has reached a similar scale and is intensifying. Just as on Borneo and Sumatra, so too the rate of animal-killing forest clearing for agriculture and other human purposes continues to increase in many parts of the world. And animals are being killed at ever higher rates by cataclysms brought on by anthropogenic climate change. It is estimated, for instance, that a billion animals were killed by the fires that scorched Australian landscapes during the first few weeks of the hot season 2019–20 (Rueb and Zaveri 2020). And the fires and unusually high temperatures in the US during the summer of 2021 killed many humans and animals, too, including more than a billion sea creatures (Cecco 2021).
Pollution and human-generated cataclysms haven’t spared animals who frequent the skies. Billions of birds have vanished in nearly all areas of North America since the 1970s – a 30 percent loss in overall numbers (Axelson 2019). This silencing of birdsong effectively augurs the “strange stillness” that Rachel Carson ominously and presciently foretold (1962: 110).
The upshot of these interrelated forms of natural devastation is the progressive destruction of life on earth, or ecocide. As environmental reporter Brooke Jarvis (2018) observes:
What we’re losing is not just the diversity part of biodiversity, but the bio part: life in sheer quantity … the world’s largest king penguin colony shrank by 88 percent in 35 years, more than 97 percent of the bluefin tuna that once lived in the ocean are gone. The number of Sophie the Giraffe toys sold in France in a single year is nine times the number of all the giraffes that still live in Africa.
Anthropogenic animal destruction also includes