Results tagged “Borneo” from Intelligent Travel Blog

With the weekend looming on the horizon, we cannot let another day go by without informing you that this is Orangutan Awareness Week (November 10 to Sunday, November 16), brought to you by the Orangutan Foundation at WildlifeDirect. We just found out about it through one of our blog brethren, the NatGeo Great Apes blog, which has been highlighting orangutan events around the world all week, like this video postcard of solidarity from the Art for Gorillas team at Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda.

The idea behind the week is to spotlight the tenuous situation of orangutans in Borneo, the only place besides Sumatra where orangs live in the wild, and where their rain forest habitat is being systematically destroyed week after week by logging, mining,  and to make room for vast oil palm plantations. Palm oil is used in things like shampoo, cookies and biodiesel.  National Geographic's November issue contains a feature article by Mel White on the situation in Borneo, one of the most biologically rich regions on Earth, and one of the most threatened. When loggers cut down the rain forest the orangutans can still flourish, but when the logged forest is later burned to the ground in order to plant oil palms, the orangs have no place to go, and often end up as orphans. Smuggling is also a problem.  Six-year-old Mugi in the photo above by Mattias Klum was one of a group of orangutans that were smuggled out of Borneo and ended up in cages and for sale in Thailand, and is presently one of 500 orphans at the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rescue Center in the Indonesian part of Borneo.