Samboja Lestari

The small town of Samboja was founded about a century ago in what was then rainforest when oil was discovered in the area. The first drilling began in 1897 near Balikpapan Bay.[8] Dutch oil workers moved into the area to work for a company that was later taken over by Royal Dutch Shell and later still by the national Indonesian oil company Pertamina. The oil company began cutting wood in the 1950s and as people came flooding into the booming oil town of Balikpapan they cleared the surrounding forest.[9] With the pronounced El Niño of 1982 and 1983 there were fires in the area, destroying the pockets of forest that remained.[10]

According to Smits' 2009 TED talk Samboja in 2002 was the poorest district of East Kalimantan, with 50% of the population unemployed and a high crime rate. Almost a quarter of average income went on buying drinking water. The land was covered with alang-alang grass (Imperata cylindrica). There were many nutrition and hygiene related health problems and life expectancy was low, with high infant and maternal mortality.[2]

In 2001 BOS began purchasing land near Samboja. It insured that the purchase of each plot of land was in accordance with regulations and documented by letter, official seal and security copy.[11]

Conditions were not favourable: aside from the land degradation, the soil itself was not promising - predominantly clay, with hard plinthite clods. Not far beneath the surface there were coal seams that in the dry periods opened up to the air and caught fire. Land prices were rising and there was not enough funding available to buy enough normal rainforest land. Forestry experts are sceptical, once the primary rainforest is cut and burned down, it will take centuries to return.[5][12]

Amory Lovins, chief scientist at Colorado's Rocky Mountain Institute claimed Samboja Lestari was possibly "the finest example of ecological and economic restoration in the tropics".[5]

Smits has not presented Samboja Lestari for scientific review, no one has independently confirmed his claims of what he has achieved. The costs of the project is enormous, compared to the cost of protecting existing rainforest; for comparison, the Nature Conservancy together with the Indonesian government in partnerships with timber companies have been able to protect vastly more forest and many more orangutans at a fraction of the cost in the same period. Erik Meijaard, conservation scientist and ecologist at the Nature Conservancy who once worked for Smits,[5][16] says that it remains unclear whether Samboja Lestari is a good idea, and that the success will ultimately depend on the extent to which it can improve community livelihoods and achieve long-term financial stability and sustainability: "that question remains unanswered, and will remain so for a few years, because that is the kind of time such projects need to be evaluated". Meijaard also says, like others, that it is better to concentrate on projects that attempt to protect those remaining areas of forest rather than trying to create new ones from scratch.[16]

Smits claims a population of 1000 can be supported instead of the normal 60 orangutans on the land by planting 50 times as much fruit trees such as wild figs per hectare than occurs in a natural forest, this is contentious. The orang-utans in the park are not truly wild, but rely on additional feeding.[16]

• Masarang Foundation
• Borneo Orangutan Survival
• Willie Smits
• Lone Drøscher Nielsen

• Schuster, Gerd; Willie Smits; Jay Ullal (2008). Thinkers of the Jungle: The Orangutan Report. H.F.Ullmann. p. 320. ISBN 978-3-8331-4623-7.
• Thompson, Shawn (2010). The Intimate Ape: Orangutans and the Secret Life of a Vanishing Species. Citadel Press. pp. 292. ISBN 978-0-8065-3133-5.