In old
Dutch books the orangutan was often referred to as the Orang-Outang, or person
with a debt, i.e., a debtor. I can’t think of a single reason why colonial-era
writers would consider orangutans as owing anything to anyone — orangutans
neither had credit cards nor did they take out loans for business investments.
Presumably “outang,” debt, was an honest misspelling of “hutan,” or forest.
There is
more to this debt issue though. In fact, it seems to me that it is not the
orangutan that has a debt to us, but it is us who owe the orangutan. Or
even more, we owe something to ourselves.
Let me explain.
As we speak,
the Bornean orangutan is being declared Critically Endangered by the
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Basically that means
that we expect it to go extinct in the wild in the near future unless something
radical is done to prevent that. There is only one species who can do that
radical thing, and that is us, Homo sapiens.
But why
should we prevent the extinction of the orangutan, or any other threatened
species for that matter? Why bother?
Often people
use the argument that orangutans are our close evolutionary relatives, sharing
98 percent of our genes. It’s an interesting idea but also slightly irrelevant
considering that flatworms share 50 percent of our genes, and there
are very few societies for the preservation of flatworms.
Furthermore,
in deeply religious societies like Indonesia and Malaysia, there may not be
that many who would willingly accept that orangutans and humans share the same
evolutionary ancestor. Surely there have to be better reasons to prevent orangutans
from going extinct.
People will
tell you that orangutans are highly intelligent and show deep emotions, which
is why we have to take care of them. Orangutans also eat fruits and poop seeds
that maintain the diversity of the forest — without orangutans the forest would
be so much less, aaah, forest-like. And, yes, orangutans are also legally
protected; the law says they cannot be killed, so they need to be protected.
There are
even financial reasons. I don’t know the value of orangutans, but to give
another example, the near-extinction of vultures in India was estimated to have
caused $34 billion in health costs.
Vulture numbers crashed by more than 99.9 percent in some places. The reason
for their decline starts with a veterinary drug called diclofenac, an
anti-inflammatory drug routinely given to holy cows with stiff shoulders.
Vultures feeding on cow carcasses don’t take well to the drug and die.
Untouched carcasses attract vermin, ultimately leading to large disease
outbreaks and major financial costs.
See, don’t
mess with nature.
And although
we don’t know yet the full costs of orangutans going extinct, we do see the
impacts when we mess up their house. Places like Borneo and Sumatra incur
massive societal and economic costs resulting from badly planned deforestation.
That includes the costs of flooding, temperature increases, disease outbreaks,
and disappearance of freshwater fish, to name a few. The politicians in Jakarta
and Kuala Lumpur do not really know or count the costs, but that doesn’t mean
these costs don’t exist.
So, if we
fail to protect the forests that orangutans need to survive, we will ultimately
undermine the fundamental living conditions for ourselves. And that is not
scaremongering, it is real. Because, after all, it is obvious that we are not
doing particularly well looking after our own house. The climate is all out of
kilter. There are holes in the ozone layer. There is suffocating air pollution
in Beijng, Delhi and anywhere downwind from Indonesia. And don’t even think of
drinking from a river. We can just about live in that mess, but for how much
longer? And more importantly, why would we choose to?
So, in the
end, the most convincing argument to me for conserving the orangutan and its
forest habitat is that if we can look after the orangutan’s house and stop
killing them, it means we can also look responsibly after ourselves.
The extinction risk of Homo sapiens by the
way has also been assessed by the IUCN. So far we are considered to be of Least
Concern. Now let’s make sure that Least Concern does not mean unconcerned.
Because to be unconcerned about the world we are living in and the other
creatures we share it with, would be real dumb.
Erik
Meijaard coordinates the Borneo Futures initiative
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