“Of all the great apes, the orangutan is perhaps the smartest,” says Debra Erickson ’79. “Give a screwdriver to a chimpanzee, he’ll stab you with it. Give it to a gorilla, he’ll scratch himself with it. But give it to an orangutan, and he’ll unscrew the door to your refrigerator.”
An apt description for a clever and intelligent species, and part of the reason Erickson was first drawn to working with orangutans three years ago. Another, perhaps more compelling reason, is that the orangutan is in trouble.
“We are in the eleventh hour for the survival of the orangutan in the wild,” says Erickson. “We have maybe five to ten years to save them, max.”
Those are alarming numbers, and Erickson must cope with them every day in her position as conservation director for Orangutan Foundation International (OFI). A nonprofit organization dedicated to the protection of orangutans and their rainforest habitat in Indonesia and Malaysia, OFI was founded in 1986 by scientist Dr. Birute Mary Galdikas and her former doctoral student Dr. Gary Shapiro. Erickson is responsible for implementing a conservation program for the endangered ape that covers the Tanjung Putting National Park in Central Borneo, Indonesia, and that’s no small task. While the vast acreage of swamps, wetlands, and tropical heath forests of the National Park are the only wildlife protected areas in Southeast Asia, this homeland for the orangutan is under constant threat of human degradation. Recent estimates suggest that almost half of the park has been heavily impacted by illegal logging and mining, as well as agricultural encroachment.
“Orangutans need plenty of forested land for their habitat,” Erickson explains. “They are frugivores, and they forage for their food. If there’s no forest, they can’t forage, and they can’t survive.”
Many would find the challenges of preserving a species in the wilds of a third world country too daunting. When Erickson is in the field, sloughing in stifling summer heat through a swamp water wilderness in search of timber poachers, her work is physically exhausting. It can be dangerous, too. The discovery of a palm oil plantation in the jungle heart of the park meant confronting the illegal workers and demanding they shut down their operations. Seeing the devastation to the orangutan population can also be trying emotionally. A result of the loss of habitat for the orangutan is that for every one adult ape, there are nine orphans. That’s a difficult fact to face every day.
The challenges, however, aren’t too great for this Scripps alumna, who majored in biology through the Joint Science Department. She loves her “very tough job,” and she’s proud of the organization’s accomplishments. Through the financial grants Erickson manages from United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Foundation has been able to work with the local community and protect nearly 300,000 acres (30%) of the park. Almost 80% of the USAID money has been put to work on the ground.
The money has gone towards a variety of projects. It’s helped to pay for a series of guard posts in which locally trained staff monitor their area for illegal loggers. A computer database to keep track of the orangutan population was recently implemented with OFI funds. To prevent illegal loggers and miners from degrading the park, OFI has supported patrols comprised of local forest police called Jagawana. Some of the money has also gone to support the Orangutan Care Center and Quarantine Facility, which OFI built and opened in 1998. Staff at the Center nurture and train orphans for reintroduction into suitable habitats when the animals reach five or six years old.
“This job means a lot to me because I can actually see change,” Erickson says. When she toured the park in Borneo three years ago, the rivers in the park were clogged with harvested logs. On her latest visit to Tanjung Putting this year? No logs in any rivers.
“I’ve seen the benefits of my hard work,” Erickson says. “And that’s immensely rewarding.”