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The seaside marketplace was crowded with women in sarongs and headcloths, haggling over piles of tropical fruit and dried fish. But a much rarer commodity caught Willie Smits's attention one humid day on the island of Borneo. "Good morning, mister," a vendor called out, thrusting a wooden cage into the biologist's face.
"In between the slats, I saw these horribly sad eyes," Smits recalls. They belonged to a young orangutan, her body emaciated and her features slack with misery. Though Smits ran a forestry research station on the island's east coast, he had never come face-to-face with one of the creatures. As he moved on, he couldn't shake the feeling that a red-haired child, ill and abused, needed his help.
That night, he returned to look for her. He found the little orangutan dying of dehydration on a garbage heap, where the vendor had tossed her after failing to find a buyer. Back home, he spent 24 hours feeding her diluted milk and cradling her in his lap. When she was out of danger, Smits named her Uce (pronounced "oo-cheh"), for the gasping sounds she'd been making when he rescued her.
Two decades later, Smits, 51, has saved more than 1,600 orangutans, gentle and highly intelligent great apes now classified as an endangered species. They're threatened by smugglers who capture them for the black-market pet trade in Indonesia and abroad, by diners who consider orangutan meat a delicacy, by shopkeepers who sell the animals' skulls as souvenirs, and by loggers who are decimating their jungle habitat. Smits's organization, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS), takes in orphaned or displaced animals and resettles them in protected rain forests. This month he will release 96 orangutans—his biggest graduating class yet.
One thing Smits's work has taught him is that our fate is inextricably tied to the orangutans'. Certain varieties of wood sold at American lumberyards are illegally harvested from the animals' home turf; the vegetable oil in many processed foods comes from palm trees planted where jungle once grew. The razing of the forests, in turn, contributes to global warming and thus to droughts, floods, and other disasters from Alaska to Australia.
"Protecting orangutans," Smits tells anyone who will listen, "is the same as protecting people."
Orangutans are our closest evolutionary cousins after bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas, sharing 97 percent of their DNA with humans, and they're like us in many other ways. They make tools, using sticks to crack open fruits. They can be taught to understand hundreds of human words. Children live with their mothers for eight years, learning to navigate the jungle and distinguish between harmful and useful plants. Babies like to be tickled, reacting with silent laughter.
But orangutans are far less adaptable than humans. The largest of all arboreal mammals, they need vast, unbroken stretches of forest to survive in the wild. An orangutan spends its days foraging in the branches for food. When the trees go, so do the tree dwellers.
Once found throughout Southeast Asia, orangutans are now confined to isolated areas of Borneo (whose land mass is divided between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei) and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. A century ago, their estimated population was 315,000; today, 50,000 remain.
The son of a farm laborer from the Netherlands, Smits showed an affinity for animals early on. "I ran away from home when I was one and a half, and they found me sleeping on the belly of the meanest guard dog in the neighborhood," he says from Washington, D.C., where he's visiting from Borneo to lobby the World Bank for funds. He planned to study veterinary medicine in college but found the classes dull. Wandering into a lecture on tropical forestry, he was hooked.
Smits went on to earn a doctorate in the subject. He traveled to Indonesia for graduate work in 1980 and soon settled there, marrying a princess from a tribe in Sulawesi; he and his wife have three sons. He also established a reputation as a brilliant ecologist, developing highly regarded rain forest conservation techniques.
Then the orangutans came calling.
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