Human impact on the Indonesian rainforest (including fires) poses a mortal danger to one of its closest species, orangutans.
Just last July the Bornean orangutan was placed on the list of species in serious danger of extinction together with the Sumatran orangutan.
The cause is not a pandemic, nor climate change. There is no predator, there are no causes of sterility. We are. It's our fault, 100%.
The Bornean orangutan lives in Indonesian forests that have been brutally replaced by commercial oil palm plantations since 1994. To be clear, to date an area as large as the whole of Germany (31 million hectares) has been stolen from the forest.
If you're wondering how a country can be so desperate to eliminate its only natural resources on its own, the answer lies in the palm oil industry. A lucrative industry like few others, because palm oil is practically everywhere: from biscuits to bread, from pizza to spreads.
And despite the "virtuous" companies that are excluding it from products, we are also starting to see it in toothpaste, shampoo, even biodiesel.
Major brands such as Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo and Colgate-Palmolive are still in the dock for complete indifference to the results of deforestation.
But is palm oil really that cheap? Are the costs on the planet included in the calculation? And those on biodiversity? From an environmental perspective, the use of this raw material makes no logical sense.
Yet logic has no space in Indonesia as in Brazilgiven the fact that most of the fires in their forests have malicious origin for profit. “If destruction continues at this rate, there is no hope for wild orangutans. At most we have 9 years before their total extinction,” environmental associations explain.
Danger looms
What makes the extinction of orangutans certain is their characteristic as a "slow-growing" species. They are able to give birth to children only every 8 years, after 10 months of gestation, and take years to grow and make young specimens independent. Loss of lives occurs at crazy speed compared to the possibility of repopulating.
Their habitat disappears. They literally burn in their home, or have to escape by coming into contact with other species, forced to compete in a habitat that does not belong to them. For this reason, "encounters" are multiplying even in areas populated by humans and orangutans are chased away, hit, often attacked and deliberately killed.
This is why I am not surprised by the announcement of the inclusion of the Bornean orangutan among the species in danger of extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Clearly, time is running out.
Orangutans are one of the 4 species of great apes together with gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, and the only one present in Asia. The only one among the 4 capable of providing evidence on the origins of spoken language: some captive specimens show the ability to mimic rhythms and timbres of the human voice.
Unique, incredible creatures, so close to us in the family tree of evolution. And they're about to vanish into thin air, into another animal holocaust. A tragedy difficult to avoid, but still avoidable.
