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The Wanariset rehabilitation center opened in 1991, staffed mostly by Dayaks. Soon they were caring for dozens of orangutans, many turned in by sympathetic locals. Smits expanded his mission, pressuring the Indonesian government to crack down on the illegal pet trade and helping officials track down smuggled orangutans. He was eventually named adviser to the minister of forestry.
But he faced monumental resistance as well. Owners of domesticated orangutans—who often give the animals candy and cigarettes and cage them when they grow too big—protested the rescue effort. Some spat at Smits when he arrived with the authorities to confiscate their pets. He received hundreds of anonymous death threats. His house was burned down, his dog killed. His wife fled with their sons to her hometown on the island of Sulawesi, where she was elected deputy mayor. (His wife and oldest son still live there, and Smits sees them as often as his work allows.)
Despite his dedication, Smits's work was doing little to slow the decline in the orangutan population. Illegal logging had increased, the palm oil business was booming, and the two often worked hand in hand. After loggers cleared a swath of jungle, growers would burn the stubble to make way for palm plantations. "Hundreds of orangutans were coming out of the forest, burning alive," Smits recalls.
The deforestation brought flooding and water pollution to many Dayak villages. The carbon dioxide released by the vanishing jungle made Indonesia the world's third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the United States. And as the planet warmed, Borneo's remaining forests sickened. In the past, great flowering cycles took place every four years, spreading a bonanza of seeds. The last one occurred nine years ago.
Smits opened a second rehab center, in southern Borneo, but he realized that saving individual orangutans wasn't enough. So in 2003 he launched his boldest project yet: growing a new rain forest, designed as a refuge for orangutans and a model for a new kind of human community. He chose the wasteland surrounding the town of Samboja, where ground once shaded by jungle was now carpeted with alang-alang—a wild grass that emits cyanide, preventing trees from growing. The wildlife had disappeared, and the few people left were mired in poverty and disease.
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