 Thank you, Chaplain Elvie. Thank you, Chaplain Elvie. President and First Lady Stoyer, distinguished visiting scholars, faculty, and guests. I have the distinct privilege of introducing our keynote speaker this evening, Dr. Birute Galdikas. Dr. Galdikas received her PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1978. And over the past 25 years, she has become the world authority on orangutans. And I think it's no small irony that a red-haired primate is introducing her. Without any further ado, I think I will just give you Dr. Galdikas. Good evening. I'm delighted to be here at Gustavus Adolphus College, and I hope I pronounced that right, in St. Peter. And first, I would like to thank Chaplain Elvie for organizing this wonderful conference. Thank you. And I would also like to thank President Stoyer and First Lady Stoyer for their gracious hospitality. It was my privilege to spend several days on campus. I am deeply impressed by the beauty and serenity of the college and the goodness that is everywhere here. I would like especially to thank my faculty hosts, Wayne and Colleen Allen, and my student host, Matt Grissing, for their friendship and numerous kindnesses towards me. It is a tribute to their kindness that, after only knowing them three days, tomorrow morning, I'm going to wake up and be lost without them. And I'd also like to acknowledge the presence of a former volunteer, Noel Rowe, who is somewhere in the audience. And it will be some of his photographs that will grace the screens tonight. And so thank you, Noel, and thank you, Abby, wherever you are. And finally, thank you to all the good and gracious people at Gustafus Adolphus College for allowing me to be here and for caring enough about humankind's closest living relatives, the great apes, to make this conference happen. As Dwayne Rumbaugh pointed out this morning at breakfast, 40 years ago, very few people would have come to a conference on the great apes. The pioneering work of Jane Goodall, who established that wild chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, make and use tools, and the studies which established a certain capacity for language in the great apes changed all that. People realized that in some very important sense, we are not alone, and that there is intelligent life on this planet aside from ourselves. The fascination with citations, whales and dolphins, also stems from a similar kind of perception. As I listened and learned at this conference, I was reminded of James Stockdale, who was Ross Perot's running mate in the previous election. At the vice presidential debates, Admiral Stockdale said, why am I here? He meant it to be an ironic comment, but it was commonly taken as an information of senility and confusion. So I'm making the same comment, why am I here? I am 50 years old, so I'm not too seen now, and I do often get confused. It's true, but the reason that I'm asking this question is because the great ape that I have spent the last 25 years observing in the wild is the orangutan. And you will notice that orangutans were barely discussed at this conference. Orangutans provide almost a mirror image for human kinds and the gorillas and the chimpanzees and the bonobos sociality. In that, orangutans are semi-solitary in the wild. In fact, some people would insist that they are solitary. Rather than living in groups, stable or otherwise, in the forest, orangutans seemingly engage in very elaborate dances of avoidance. But it's wrong to call them anti-social. They are simply asocial. Their ancestors probably separated from the line leading to humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos at least 10 to 15 million years ago. If gorillas and chimpanzees are considered conservative, then orangutans are even more so. For the faces of Shibapithecus and Ramapithecus, which emerge from the Myocene ground and the swallow kills of Pakistan and the sites such as Fort Ternan in Africa as early as 10 or 12 million years ago are clearly orangutan-like and ancestral to the orangutans. This morning, Richard Rangham spoke of chimpanzees and the probable ancestor, common ancestor of humankind after the great Pongid, or Panid now, commented Split. And he talked to them as being thin, enameled, loud-voiced, black-haired, knuckle-walking creatures. Well, orangutans are thick enameled, essentially silent, orange-haired, fist-walking creatures, totally different. The males have been characterized as one of the demonic male species. But in reality, an adult male orangutan is among the most benign of creatures on this planet, as long as you don't get in the way of him having access to his female. In other words, don't get in between him and his girlfriend. Or as long as you don't surround him with 100 strange people he's never seen in his life and will never see again, as once happened in Khampliki when we had a conference there. And I'd like to start with the slides. We just put some slides there. And could we have a lowering of the lights, please? Now, orangutans mediate conflict. This is an orangutan. This side of the great dining hall, there's an orangutan. And orangutans mediate conflict primarily by avoidance, not by excitable aggression or sexuality. Could we lower the lights? Is that possible? It's not possible? OK. In the wild, coalition or alliance building is rare. And when it does occur, it involves adolescent or sub-adult animals. It does not involve adults. When I first went into the field 25 years ago, we knew virtually nothing about orangutans, except for the accounts of 19th century naturalists and explorers. During my first years in the field, John McKinnon and David Aggie published their accounts of wild orangutans, which were stark in their acknowledgment of orangutans as solitary. And I'd just like to say at this point that if orangutans did not exist, we would not invent them. This should remind us that there are many varieties of hominids and hominoids in the paleoanthropological or paleontological record and that some of the extinct social systems that these creatures once possessed are probably not reflected among species who survived or evolved, such as humans and the surviving great apes. Chimpanzees, demonic males. I have to say the reason that I was struck by this picture is because when I was in England about a year and a half ago, there was a very similar picture on the front page of the Manchester Guardian. But the individuals in the picture were not chimpanzees from Gombe. They were soccer fans at a so-called football riot at a so-called friendly match between an Irish team and a British team or an English team. And I include this picture just so we can all remember that there are great apes and there are lesser apes. And the lesser apes are called such because they're smaller by a factor of 10 than the great apes. And this is a picture of my son Binti when he was one year of age. The Gibbon was an adolescent. My son is now 19. He disavows all knowledge of that picture. But I like it. So I included it. Orengotans are also unique in that they are not currently found in Africa but survive as relic species on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. Orengotans, like hominids, probably, again, probably also evolved and emerged out of Africa. While they are currently found across a wide swath of Borneo, Orengotans are found only in the northern part of Sumatra. My study area is on the south coast of Borneo in a province called Kalimantantenga. Kalimantantenga is probably the Orengotan capital of the world. It is covered by dense forest. And until very recently, it was a part of Borneo that was almost cut off from the outside world. Kumai is the port from which I travel to my camp. Camp Likib begins. Indonesia has one of the largest commercially viable fleet of sailing ships in the world. You'll notice one of those ships there in the picture of Kumai. Indonesia is also the world's largest mauslem nation. You'll notice that the mosque is very prominent in the landscape. In my study of Orengotans, I was privileged to discover that Orengotans are not solitary but semi-solitary. Only the adult male is truly solitary in that outside of consort ship or the occasional brief association with potential or former consorts, he is alone. But he is not lonely. That's the difference between us and them. Wild Orengotans do not actively seek company. I have also documented an opportunistic diet that consists of over 400 food types with the predominant category being fruit. Let me just whiz through some of these slides so we'll get to the fruit. And Borneo is occupied by Aboriginal people who are called the Diyaks. The Diyaks are like the native people of North America. They're many different groups, many different linguistic categories. And the changes that have overcome Borneo during the last 20 years are reflected in this slide where the young Diyak man is still using the traditional weapon of choice, the blowgun with the poisoned dart. But he's wearing a Casio watch and is dressed in Levi's. And as we go up the Secorna River, just focus this, we experience the tropical rainforest in the mist-soaked island of Borneo. OK, good. But adult females and young do occasionally travel together sometimes for weeks at a time, but more likely for just a few days or a few hours. Over 80% of the time an adult female is alone with her dependent offspring. When adult females travel together, their day ranges are further, and their nest to nest periods of diurnal activity are longer. This suggests that there is a cost to travel associations imposed by orangutan ecology. Orangutans are deep forest and peat swamp dwellers. They depend on the ancient rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, some of which are the great cathedral forests described by Alfred Russell Wallace. Although males locomote occasionally on the ground sometimes for long distances, and although orangutans are versatile and intelligent foragers, sometimes raiding gardens, plantations, and sometimes even village garbage dumps for food where their forest habitats have been destroyed, orangutans depend on lowland rainforests and swamps with the mature trees which produce the fleshy fruits, nuts, and acorns essential for orangutan existence. At times, I'm going to whiz to the fruits here, and then I'll whiz back. And this is the famous durian, again, featured in Alfred Russell Wallace's description, original description of orangutans in the 19th century. And he spoke of orangutans eating in the moonlight, eating this thick-skinned fruit that has been described as tasting like heaven, but smelling like hell. And in fact, more recently, it has been described as eating and dinner's over, so I can say this, as eating custard in a lavatory. But in reality, the durian fruit, which is a very large one, is a complex mixture of flavors that are reminiscent of not only custard, but garlic, brie cheese, fine wine, all sort of put together in a very nice bouquet of smell. And in the forest, sometimes you can smell the wild durians for maybe half a kilometer away. At times, however, orangutans can be insectivorous. They can be young leaf eaters or even pith eaters. But basically, an orangutan is a fruit eater. And as I mentioned, among the best-known fruits popularized by Alfred Russell is the durian. Orangutans also consume vast quantities of bark when there is very little fruit. And sometimes, even in the tropical rainforest that is not disturbed, very, very occasionally, but it happens they starve to death. Now I'm going to switch back and just apologize. I had to put two slides, two sets of slides together, and the fruits jumped out of sequence. I have documented the fact that at least in the Pete Swamp forests of Tanjongputing, orangutans have an average birth interval of eight to 10 years. And the most intense mother-offspring relationship known among all mammals with the possible exception of humans. Infant orangutans suckle their mothers until they are no longer infants, until they are sometimes six or seven years of age. And orangutan females do not give birth in the wild to their first offspring until they are sometimes as old as 15, 16, or even 17 years of age. And the slide is of a wild-born orangutan infant. Infant orangutans are characterized by the white snouts, the white patches on their eyes, and sort of white spots on their bodies. And as this infant grows up, eventually, by the time that she reaches adulthood, her entire face and her entire body would be almost totally black. And she will also get more hair, hopefully. And this is a three-year-old infant on top of his mother, sort of riding her head like an Easter bonnet. And it isn't until the fourth or fifth year of life that an orangutan infant will actually begin in the wild to travel behind his mother or her mother as she moves through the trees. Well, what does this extremely long birth interval mean for orangutans? What it means is that orangutan populations are extremely vulnerable to extinction. If you decimate orangutan populations, those populations are not going to bounce back in a few years. It is going to take generations during the bounce back period. During this time, populations are going to be particularly vulnerable to random events that could bring them to extinction almost accidentally. Although I stress that orangutans are semi-solitary, nonetheless, on a day-to-day basis, sometimes the solitariness of an orangutan's existence for the human observer is almost overwhelming. Adolescents, however, and sub-adult males go through a gregarious stage where over 50% of their time may be spent with other orangutans. And we have a picture here that illustrates the stage. These are ex-captive, wild-born orangutans, and all of whom eventually return to the wild. And you'll also notice that the sub-adult male has adopted a juvenile female who sits above him in the chair. I have followed wild orangutan females every day for a month and only observed the meeting with other orangutans briefly for maybe four or five of those days. That is how overwhelmingly solitary the orangutan can be. But when you follow adolescents, you find a pattern that is very similar to what has been described for the chimpanzee. And that, as you know, you'll find two orangutans traveling together for a couple of days. And the third one shows up. And one of the original two leaves. And the day later, he or she shows up. And that's a pattern that is followed among adult females until they give birth to their second or third offspring. And then they become truly solitary. But I would like to stress very much a point. And that is how learning processes are very much embedded in social relationships among orangutans just as they are in the other pangids and harmonids. My former student and now colleague, Dr. Gary Shapiro, taught sign language to several free-ranging, ex-captive, wild-born orangutans in the forest. His star pupil and adopted daughter was named Princess. And in fact, it's Princess sitting there. She learned to sign approximately 30 signs in Amazon, which is the American Sign Language of the Deaf. And she occasionally joined these signs together in short phrases and sometimes short sentences. Well, with colleagues, we have been involved in several imitation studies. Much learning, even among humans, takes place through the process of imitation. And in this conference, somebody mentioned that humans are dedicated teachers and that this dedication was especially evident here at this college. But with the orangutans, it's been very clear that teaching does not take place. And there's been considerable controversy as to whether imitation or emulation actually takes place. And a little experiment was sort of designed to sort out the answers. But that's not the important point. So one of our imitation studies involved an experimental protocol where ex-captive orangutans, who were totally unrestrained, that could come and go exactly as they pleased, were showed how to open one of three artificial metal fruits. And these metal fruits basically were big metal boxes, in one case, and a metal cylinder in another case, and in the third case kind of a hybrid box cylinder artifact. The procedure required that after the opening of the fruit was demonstrated, and it required a number of different steps to open, that each orangutan was given a minute to open the fruit himself or herself. My Scottish colleague, who was hopeful to the last, was most disappointed in the results of this experiment. Because what happened is orangutans hit him with the metal box. They threw it at him. They climbed away into the trees. They flung the box into the forest. They tried to run off with the box and eventually broke one of the metal contraptions so that he was no longer able to use it. Out of the 20 or so orangutans who were systematically tested, only two orangutans, and both were adult females, actually even opened one of these artificial fruits. And only one opened the fruit, it was really a metal box, within the allotted minute. She was also the only one who imitated. And that was Princess. And I say Princess for the last because I knew, I knew that of all the ex-captive wild-born orangutans in camp, the one that I could count on to imitate was Princess. And why is this? Well, because I understood the relationship and relationships that Princess had with human beings. After all, Princess's mother was a North American male graduate student. That was Gary Shapiro. Then after I demonstrated the opening of a second metal fruit, which is a cylinder, and presented it to her, Princess reached over. She took my hand, put it on the cylinder, looked deeply into my eyes, and then briskly turned and walked away. And basically what she was saying is, you do it. I may be fooling myself, but Princess did that one imitation, not because she wanted the tiny bit of food in the metal box, but I believe because she was making clear her affiliation with a small group of humans resident in Camp Leakey. She was basically saying, I can do what you can do. I'm just as good as you are. And I'll give you another example. And this example wasn't in the context of an experiment. And I used the word experiment very carefully because the orangutans could have left at any moment. They were under no constraint. They basically sat and watched because of their relationships with us. And a number of years ago, there was an orangutan who has successfully gone back to the forest. And her name was Sapina. And when Sapina first came to us, she was a little bit different from most orangutans. And if Sapina, it was almost as though Sapina should have been wearing a little pink ribbon in her hair. It was very clear that she had been somebody's very cherished pet before she was confiscated from the Indonesian family who kept her by the forestry department. And Sapina was probably one of the smartest orangutans who has ever been at Camp Leakey. She tried to start fires. In fact, now in retrospect, I think she probably did start them, but we didn't know about it. I mean, her skills became legendary among the local people. Well, Sapina attached herself very much to me and to the three graduate students who were women, three North American graduate and undergraduate students who had camped at the time. And it was very clear that Sapina wanted to spend time with us. She wanted to be with us. She would put on articles of human clothing. But the clincher came one night when the three students who stayed together in a room came back from town. When they returned to their room, they discovered, and please remember it was nightfall, it was night, they discovered that somebody had broken into their room, had taken all the makeup under their various little makeup cases, had put all kinds of makeup on her own face and was lying in one of their beds with a blanket on her. And that was Sapina. So what I'm trying to say here is even though orangutans are solitary, even though people have suggested that perhaps a orangutan, I disagree with this, have the social systems of lemurs in their cognitive abilities, in their affiliative desires, they're just great apes like every other great ape. Learning even among the semi solitary orangutan is a social process. And there's another thing that I'd like to mention. I'd like to talk a little bit about the nature of male male competition among orangutans. And orangutans are unique because apparently, according to people who have done literature searches and who know about these things, have researched these things quite extensively, orangutans are among the two species of mammals that have definitely been shown to forcibly copulate. And rape is common among humans and has all kinds of aggressive and other connotations. So when John McKinnon many years ago, observed the fact that orangutan males forcibly copulated with females, this became news that reached newspapers. And it was remarkable for me to even read a column by Anne Landers. She was asked whether any animals other than humans rape and she replied, orangutans do. And in fact, I once read Freudian psychologist who claimed that orangutans rape females because of the very forceful way that they have been rejected by their mothers. And there is some truth to this ironically because if we look at the life histories of male and female orangutans, there is a great divergence that occurs after the juvenile is weaned and after the juvenile or young adolescent begins to set up his or her home range. Orangutan females stay with their mothers. And orangutan female, even though she will play this very, dance this very elaborate dance of avoidance, even with her mother will essentially stay in her natal range and she will expand it a little bit. But she will die probably only a few kilometers from where her own mother was born. The life histories of males are very different. And one of the difficulties that orangutan researchers have had is because orangutan males travel so widely, disperse so widely, it's very difficult to follow one wild male throughout the course of his life. So basically our observations on males are cross-sectional. You know, we see, we run into a juvenile male, we follow him until he leaves the study area, which is approximately 40 square kilometers in size. And then we pick up an adolescent male that wanders into the study area. So the males are not resident, but the sub-adult males are the class of orangutan, age sex of orangutan that forcibly copulate with females. Over 90% of copulations by sub-adult males all are forced. And then something happens. Sometime in his late teens or early 20s, at least in Tanjung Puting, it's almost as if nature gives the male orangutan a shot of steroids. Suddenly the male balloons out. This can happen in a matter of a few months. It's almost as if he pumped himself up at the gym. He suddenly gains muscles, he gains muscle mass, he gains power, and he gains cheek pads, a throat pouch, and suddenly he becomes a very different creature than what he was before, only a few months earlier. And the process can really take only a few months. It's the most remarkable thing to actually witness. And there are studies that indicate that the development of cheek pads, the sudden surge in this muscle mass is correlated, at least in captivity, with an increase in testosterone. Well, adult male orangutans rarely forcibly copulate. Rather, what they do is they go through the forest cruising. And somewhat similar to sort of young adult males in our own society, every once in a while, they'll rev up their motors. And revving up their motors consists of giving the long call. And this long call, I'm not going to attempt to duplicate it, is one of the most intimidating and awesome sounds to be heard in the rainforest. It begins with the male clearing his throat, almost like an opera singer. And then he begins a series of bellows that sound like a drunken elephant, or a rampaging lion, and then gradually the sound drops to a series of sighs that may last several minutes. And the local people say that the adult male orangutan is sighing because his bride left him on his wedding night. And there's a certain melancholy to the sound, and there's a certain truth to it because in the orangutan species, it is almost invariably the female who ends the consort ship. When I first went into the field, people refused to believe that the extreme sexual dimorphism found among orangutans was a result of male-male competition, because basically people had not seen wild orangutan males fight one another. And if you're cognizant or have a relationship with these incredibly benign passive creatures who sit in the top of the tropical rainforest canopy eating fruit all day, at least 60% of the day on average, it's hard to witness the transformation that takes place when two adult male orangutans begin their combats. And these combats are one-on-one and probably account to some extent for the cheek pads because what the males will do is they will circle each other, usually on the ground. They will stare into each other's faces and it's almost like boxers or wrestlers. The first one to blink loses. You know, suddenly they grapple each other and as I mentioned, these combats can last for several hours and at the end, both victor and loser can resemble walking wounded. Every single, and I showed you a little bit of blood, there was one combat that I was fortunate enough to witness which lasted for several hours and after the males ran off into the deep swamp where I was not able to follow, I went back to the area where this combat had taken place and I found places such as this where the leaf litter was covered in blood and the blood had trickled all the way down through the leaf litter to the bare ground below. And you know, speaking of devil or angel, this transformation is one of the most amazing things to be seen when you study wild orangutans. Now another thing, when you think about it, you think about this long birth interval, the fact that an adult female orangutan only wishes to mate once every eight to 10 years. You know, she's like a very ripe fruit dangling sort of in the forest on a low branch. It's not surprising that adult male orangutans are quite grumpy. In fact, in the case of adult male orangutans, probably one shouldn't call them a demonic species, one should call them a grumpy species. And so these are some of the highlights of my work. I certainly have not gone over it in tremendous detail, but I hope that this gives you a picture of what the species is all about. Well, 25 years ago when I went to Borneo, the orangutan was already an endangered species, but Borneo was still a relatively undefiled Eden. Indonesian Borneo or Kalimantan did look like a successfully completed jigsaw puzzle when you saw a map of it with each piece a logging concession. But in the 70s and the early 80s, even as mechanized logging spread across the misty island of Borneo and even as logging roads spread their tentacles into pristine wilderness, there still was forest because the Indonesian forestry department only sanctioned selective logging. So the loggers initially went in for the first cut, they took out the largest, the most profitable trees. And then they went in for the second cut and then they went in for the third cut. And even at the end of the third cut, there was still maybe 50 or 40% of the forest still standing. Then in the late 1980s, the minister changed, the man who had been minister for the previous 30, 40 years, changed and the society changed. What was once an almost futile, very civilized and rarefied traditional society, which was a Muslim society, was still based very much on a sort of a Hindu substrate, characterized by the reciprocal obligations of the divine king and the divine commoners was changed by the advent of a global economy in which Indonesia, now the fourth largest nation on the planet became increasingly a major regional player. Indonesia with its 17,000 islands and economic growth rate of 7% annually and expanded manufacturing base, tremendous resources such as oil, gold, coal, diamonds and the second largest area of tropical rainforest in the world decided to enter the race for real. Indonesia over the next 10 years became the world's largest plywood producer and exporter in the world. Indonesia now has plans to become the world's largest producer and exporter of pulp and paper. With this increase in exploitation of the timber resources, illegal logging soared as well as local people who were denied political access from actually possessing a logging concession started exploiting the forest on their own and this particularly caused problems for national parks and reserves which because they did not have logging concessions already given to large corporate entities were totally without protection and such was the situation in my case where the national park where I work, Tanjung Puting where my study area is located was given away as a logging concession. Well, at the time we thought that this was the worst that there possibly could be after about five years of struggle to eliminate this logging concession within national park the whole world changed when the powers that be decided to follow the Malaysian example of turning tropical rainforest into palm oil plantations and industrial timber estates. Malaysia is now one of the world's largest exporter of palm oil. There's a burgeoning market opening up in mainland China and India. Palm oil is no longer a major export to the United States because it consists of saturated fat but in the East and in South Asia that is not a concern. In Indonesia palm oil has replaced coconut oil as the commercially produced cooking oil only small mom and pop operations produce coconut based cooking oil. 50% of the province where I work, Kalimantan Tengah is scheduled for conversion to plantations within the next 10 years which means basically that most of the orangutan habitat in central Indonesian Borneo will be gone and in Africa a similar process is taking place as logging companies enter what was once pristine rain forest. And you know, I have a friend who is a real estate broker and she was a very successful real estate broker. We were talking about how one makes money in real estate and she told me that there are only three rules in real estate and those three rules are location, location, location. Well, in conservation there are only three rules and those three rules are habitat, habitat, habitat. You know, in my line of work and volunteer activity I frequently come into contact with people who are animal rights activists. I frequently come, not frequently, I occasionally come into contact with people who may or may not belong to organizations if they may exist such as the Animal Liberation Front and I'm in deep sympathy with the viewpoints of those people but I'd like to say that the most basic wild animal right is a right to habitat, a right to a place in the wild and in the case of the orangutans what we are witnessing is something akin to the Holocaust. We are watching the trains go to Auschwitz and this has nothing to do with people's attitudes or what people think they are doing in the habitat countries. It simply has to do with what has taken place in terms of the global economy. What is the ultimate source of tropical rainforest destruction? Basically it's human greed and the globalization of the world economy. Recently there have been articles and books explicating about the excessive greed in Hollywood about what's happening for instance in the telecommunications and the media industries where somebody like junk bond King Milken can get $50 million for facilitating a merger between two large companies. Well one doesn't have to go to Hollywood to know that unlike nature, unlike any resource in nature human capacity for greed is a virtually inexhaustible commodity. In the olden days and the olden days were actually only 20 years ago in Kalimantan the expression of human greed was unlimited to localized areas. Now it can be expressed globally. The second important thing to remember is the traditional cultures frequently had built in curbs on human greed but these curbs are increasingly going the way of those societies and that is to oblivion. I'll give you an example. In the Mantawhi Islands off the coast of West Sumatra there's still found an ancient culture with longhouses, shamans, ancient rainforests. People are still tattooed. Men still wear loincloths and the occasional woman still walks bare-breasted. Traditionally before a large tree could be cut down a pig had to be sacrificed to appease the spirit of the tree and these people are barely horticulturalists, barely. So accumulating enough wealth to buy a pig is a tremendous problem for them. Since pigs constituted wealth people had to accumulate wealth before they cut down a tree and it would be very similar to what would happen in our own society if each time the logger cut down a tree say on the Northwest Pacific coast he or she would have to cut a brand new Rolls Royce in half and you know what they say about Rolls Royces, right? The Cadillac of Cars. That would certainly slow down the logging and I'd like to talk a little bit about the concomitance of this wide-scale tropical rainforest deforestation in Kalimantan. As the timber boats left Kalimantan, the island of Borneo loaded with timber they also took with them orangutans and in the early 1990s this exodus was of tremendous proportions. The orangutan foundation in Taiwan which was established at that time senses that there were at least 700 captive orangutans on the island nation of Taiwan and that the population density of captive orangutans in the capital city of Taipei probably exceeded the population density of wild orangutans in Borneo of which we estimate they're probably only about 30,000 left. In Sumatra the best estimates are about 5,000 wild orangutans left. In fact I met a Dutch primatologist who told me that he would stake his life on the fact that there were no more than 10,000 wild orangutans left in Sumatra and his observations in the forest correspond to what we see in a place like Taiwan in the early 1990s when this trade was first documented and brought to the attention of the world for every single Sumatran orangutan in the trade there were about 30 wild Borneo orangutans. So that means not that people weren't taking Sumatran orangutans but there were very few Sumatran orangutans left to take and these are some scenes from Taiwan, Taipei where orangutans are used as shills in bars especially in the notorious blood alley where you can go, you know, have a snake slit open or tortoise or turtle have its neck cut or lizard and then the snake or the lizard will be squeezed, the blood poured into a glass mixed with say lemon juice and then drunk as a cocktail to increase what is euphemistically called male strength. And fortunately during the last two or three years this trade has come to a, not a halt, not a roaring halt but has decreased as a result of international pressure and also the Taiwan government enacting and beginning to enforce laws prohibiting the import of primates into Taiwan but the point that I'm trying to make here is that this extraordinary fluorescence of the orangutan illegal pet trade internationally was a secondary consequence of the incredible deforestation of Borneo and Sumatra that began in the late 1980s that accompanied the conversion of a forest primary rainforest to these palm oil plantations and industrial timber estates. Well, in a book called The Natural Alien Neil Erendon points out that in any discussion of environmental issues we must begin with the recognition that the source of the environmental crisis lies not without but within not an industrial pollution but an assumption so casually held as to be virtually invisible. He continues, environmentalism in the deepest sense is not about the environment. It is not about beings but about being. Not about world but the inseparability of self and circumstance. As traditional values and traditional morals and social codes and systems of religion or mystical experience erode those values are replaced by an emptiness an inner core of spiritual nothingness. This is the world that you sometimes glimpse for a fleeting second. This is where you start meeting on the world news as you watch television you start meeting with the Bosnian serve and the Somali mechanical. Robert Kaplan in a very interesting article articulated this beautifully when he spoke about his vision of the future. And I quote directly, outside the stretch limo will be a rundown crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju warriors influenced by the worst refuge of Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds and battling over scraps of overused earth and guerrilla conflicts that ripple across continents and intersect and know discernible pattern. I remember one or two years ago sitting in Camp Leakey trying to explain to a group of tourists that if we truly wanted to save orangutans and tropical rainforests we also had to think about the street kids of Brazil. But if we wanted to save orangutans and their embattled relatives such as the mountain gorilla we also had to think about the homeless in Chicago the homeless in New York and in Los Angeles. Because the street kids of Rio de Janeiro and the homeless of Los Angeles are an expression of what starts unraveling once humans become removed from the constraints of nature and social mores. Once their connections to their communities and to the universe are severed and they are cast adrift only to be caught in the global nets which are cast thousands of miles away. And those global nets are of course what resonate in the global economy. Well, for me saving orangutans and their tropical rainforest home promoting a tread lightly kind of ecotourism which we've brought to Camp Leakey convincing local people and officials that it is in their long-term economic interest to preserve orangutans and forests is not just about conservation per se but a spiritual quest in the same way that John Muir over 100 years ago termed Yosemite which was the first national park in the world created by Congress and President Lincoln in 1864 the Lord's House, the Lord's Mountain House and worked to preserve it as such. When we strive to protect the world's wild places simply for their long-term economic value we will usually lose the battle. Short-term economic gain, immediate cash in the pocket is almost always most easily served by immediate exploitation of the resource whether it's gold in the ground, diamonds in the ground or marketable species of timber in the forest. Conservation of the tropical rainforest which is the orangutans only home is ultimately of an ordinate long-term benefit to the world. Protection of biodiversity must be a major developmental goal and sustainable over the long term. A series of scholars from the most prestigious institutions of learning on this planet have been pushing this very important message for the last 10 years and virtually every single media outlet available. But what I would like to stress and in this I only echo those like John Muir who have said it before and who have said it much better that human beings are not just flesh, brain and bone. Human beings need nourishment for the soul just as much as they need nourishment for the flesh and the bone. Wilderness is where humans find this nourishment. It is not surprising that in our synagogues, in our temples, in our churches and in our mosques we recreate the calm, the twilight and the dawn semi-darkness that is so characteristic of our own original home, the Garden of Eden. It is not a surprise that 19th century naturalists commented on the cathedral-like qualities of the great tropical rainforest which they discovered and documented for Western science. But the 19th century naturalists got it all wrong. The forest does not imitate the cathedral. It is the cathedral that imitates the forest for it is within the forest that God gave us our soul and it is in the forest that our close cousin, the orangutan, survives even now. Save the tropical rainforest and all else follows. Allow the forest to be destroyed and not only will orangutans whose eyes mirror our own. If you remember that picture that I first showed you with the white surrounding, the iris of the orangutan, I. Not only will orangutans whose eyes mirror our own go extinct, but also we too, the human species will ultimately follow down. That's slippery slope to extinction. First the orangutans, then us. Well, what can we do? How can we reach people? Well, we can reach people rationally. We can reach people by logical arguments. We can reach people by arguing cause and effect. But you'll notice that the advertising industry does not work that way. The advertising industry which has to persuade people to buy certain products and on which enormous commercial empires are built doesn't operate through logic. It operates through emotion. And a psychologist, his name is Tony Rosen who is a colleague of mine, proposed the existence of significant interspecies events. And he related them as being an intensity, as strong as what are those events, near death experiences. And he got this idea of the existence of significant interspecies events from listening to primatologists such as myself in just ordinary conversations. And a significant interspecies event is a transformational event that occurs when a human being reaches out and crosses the barrier that separates species to become one with the other. And I think the doors in the 60s very well in a popular song when they talked about crossing through to the other side. And in this significant interspecies event you achieve transcendence. I would argue that the power of this panel of the people that you heard yesterday and today is not just in the rigor of their scientific thinking, although some of them may pride themselves on that. But also on the fact that each and every single one of them has been transformed by their individual experiences with the great apes. And that is why all of us came to listen to them speak. Well, people frequently ask me, they say you've been in the tropical rainforest for 25 years, it's not a comfortable environment, there are snakes, there are leeches. You know, certainly until recently you couldn't get any kind of food except rice and sardines. What keeps you there? And I think one of the things that keeps me there is simply scientific curiosity. I have been following orangutans now until the third and fourth generation. I see the grandchildren of females that I first met 25 years ago. And the kind of study that I am doing, the likelihood of the kind of study that I am doing decreases each year with the destruction of the tropical rainforest. So scientific curiosity is one. But another very powerful thing that keeps me there in addition to having experiences that very few people will have with the great apes is the ability to do good. And it's not just with humans. Borneo is still relatively isolated, medical care is still difficult to obtain, local people still go to the closest shaman, who is very good when it comes to sort of what do we call those ailments, the kind that Western doctors have a problem with, psychosomatic ailments. But when a Dyak shaman is confronted by a person whose guts are torn open in a chainsaw accident or as I've been involved with a burst appendix, the Dyak shaman really does not have any herbs that will heal the damage in a short enough time for the person to survive. So there have been knocks on my door at midnight when people came to me and said, my husband has a stomach ache, can you do something? I took the person to the doctor, I woke her up and because of some Muslim society that meant that her husband also had to be woken up, went to the hospital and then discovered that the person had appendicitis, acute appendicitis. The doctor operated, the person survived. But many people in Kalimantan die from acute appendicitis. And it's not just me, it's also the people who work with us, the North American and European volunteers as well. Well, my work has given me the opportunity to help orangutans, not just the species, but also individuals. And in Kalimantan, I have met hundreds of captive orangutans. I've been privileged to confiscate or have volunteered to me over 200 ex-captive wild born orangutans which we have returned to the wild at a series of release sites. We do not release orangutans at Camp Leakey. We have not done so actually for many, many years. And of course, the problem that I face is the absence of the wild. This is a tremendous problem. But orangutans in captivity simply do not survive. I have never met an adult orangutan in captivity outside of an Indonesian zoo, say in Jakarta or Surabaya, big city. And you rarely meet juveniles and virtually never do you meet adolescents. So that means that for wild orangutan, captivity in Borneo is a death sentence. So every time we rescue an orangutan in captivity, at least in Borneo, we save that animal from a certain death. And I'd like to tell you a little story. I'd like to tell you about one orangutan that I was able to save. And her name is Unyuk. And when I first met her, she was given to me, I was approached actually by a diac fisherman. And he had a great deal of affection for Unyuk. He had kept her for several years and she was already a juvenile. And she was very different from most of the other orangutans which I had received up to that time. She was almost chimpanzee-like in her excitability in the fact that she ran rather than sedately walked like most orangutans do. She was an inveterate tool user. There's a slide of her stealing one of our canoes in order to take it across the river. She never paddled with the paddle. She'd throw the paddles overboard but she'd take a piece of wood that served as a seed or she'd grab a stick or she'd grab the dipper and paddle downstream. And then, when she was finished with her joy ride, she'd sink the ironwood canoe to the bottom of the river. So increasingly, we started tying our canoes to the dock with ever-complex knots. Eventually, the knots were about this big and took about 15 minutes to unwind. Well, Unyuk, given enough time, could undo any of them. So what happened is we now sink our canoes to the bottom and if we need to get them, we'll bring them up. Well, Unyuk was also a very emotional orangutan and she is the only orangutan that I have ever French kissed with. And I'm sure that had its bonding qualities as well. Well, after a few years, Unyuk became an adolescent and one day the Indonesian Forestry Department brought an infant orangutan to our camp. Suddenly, without any warning, Unyuk adopted the infant. This infant was not related to her. She'd never seen him before. And the infant adopted her as well. And if you didn't know that this was not a mother and her biological offspring, there's no way that you would have guessed from Unyuk's or Dart's behavior. Unyuk shared her night nest with Dart. She shared her food with him. She allowed him to suckle her nipple. And in fact, in human adoptive mothers, there's a phenomena called induced lactation and I'm absolutely convinced that milk came out of Unyuk's breast. Well, Unyuk raised Dart in the typical orangutan fashion. A number of years, she neared the age of 14 or 15, she started consorting with adult males. And this was, again, a very phenomenal sight to see because the wild adult males who came into camp to consort with Unyuk were twice or three times the size of Unyuk. But Unyuk became pregnant shortly after these consort ships began and then she dropped Dart like a hot potato. And with the orangutans, we're very fortunate because we can tell pregnancy by the fact that within days of conception, their labia began to swell and turn white. And by the end of the pregnancy, the female genitalia are so large, at least among wild orangutans, they resemble large testes, just sort of hanging down below the female orangutans' legs. Well, unfortunately, even though the infant that Unyuk gave birth to was husky and seemed healthy enough, initially, he started hiccuping. He hiccuped straight for five days. At the end of the five days, he died. And I've spoken to medical practitioners, medical professionals, and they tell me that either the hiccuping was symptomatic of some underlying condition that killed the unnamed infant, or the hiccuping itself drained so much energy that it drained the infant of life. Well, Unyuk immediately re-adopted Dart. But she didn't allow him to suckle. She shared food, she shared her nightnest, but she didn't allow him to suckle any longer. And within a year, Unyuk gave birth again. And it was very interesting because in the second birth, which I was fortunate enough to witness part of, she behaved very differently than she had during the first birth. And one of the differences was that she took very extensive and elaborate care of the placenta. In fact, she took the infant, whom we named Uranus, tucked him under her arm like a football, and then carried the placenta as though it was some national or personal treasure. She groomed the placenta, she mouthed it, she kept the flies away from it. And for a while, we didn't know whether she would raise the placenta or whether she would raise her infant. But she seemed to pay more attention to the placenta. But after three days, the umbilical cord dried up and she left the placenta in an egg nest when she emerged the next morning. Well, Unyuk was a very good mother. She'd already practiced her skills with dart. Or she might have been a good mother anyways. And when Uranus, who was a very healthy and vigorous infant, very similar in personality and character to his mother, with several years of age, but still an infant still being carried by his mother, Unyuk went back to the wild for two years. And during that time, I was very concerned, not about Unyuk, because she was an adult, but about the effect of Uranus, because Unyuk was a lactating mother. And up to that point, she had been very consistent about being in the vicinity of camp and attending our feeding sessions where we gave food to the ex-captive orangutans once a day. Well, Unyuk came back almost two years to the day after she left. And when Uranus was about seven years of age, she gave birth to a new infant whom we named Udik. And Udik is pictured here. And he is very similar both in personality, both to Uranus and to his mother, Unyuk. And just before I left Camp Leakey, a couple of weeks ago, I was in the forest. We have not seen Uranus for some time because he's beginning the typical wild orangutan pattern of leaving his mother's home range and beginning to wander into the forest beyond. But I counted him in the forest and when he stood up on his hind legs, he was about this tall and he had feet this long. And had he been a human, I'm sure he would have been wearing like size 15 shoes. And it's not just Unyuk that we've been able to help. We've also helped an infant named Somalia. We confiscated him from the owners. You can see one of them sort of behind us and happy about this event. But had we not confiscated him, Somalia would have died in a matter of days. We've medicated him. We used oatmeal in this particular instance. This note is a good remedy for skin disorders. And within a matter of weeks, we had Somalia looking very well indeed. And these are two North American volunteers helping with not only Somalia, but another infant who arrived at about the same time named Montana. And Montana came to us with a stiff wing-like arm that he could barely move. And when we touched him, we discovered that there were things all underneath his skin. They were lead pellets. And in fact, virtually every single ex-captive orangutan that we have received in the last few years is peppered with lead pellets. Because increasingly, the local people, especially the newcomers, the immigrants to Kalimantan, are not using blowguns, but are switching to homemade shotguns and airguns. Well, the local Indonesian doctor took many of the lead pellets out from Montana, and Montana is doing much better. In fact, he's quadrupled in weight during the last few, last year and a half. Now, I mentioned habitat, habitat, habitat, habitat, habitat, habitat, also goes along with education, education, education. And one of the things that we have been absolutely ruthless as an organization, as a program, as a group is trying to reach not only the local people and the officials, but reaching the local children. We have set up a program in Kalimantan, Tengah, in the vicinity of Tanjung Puting National Park, where Indonesian biologists, some of my former students, go into the schools regularly, and not just into the elementary schools, but into the nursery schools, into the preschools, and into the kindergartens. We're absolutely shameless in our pursuit of youth. We distribute coloring books that have orangutan stories in them, and we also distribute free of charge notebooks that are used by Indonesian school children in school. Well, when I began my talk, I opened with a comment by a vice presidential candidate. I would like to close with a comment by a vice president. And I spend most of my time in Indonesia. I have become an Indonesian citizen, and I'm very proud of the Republic of Indonesia, which I believe will, in the next century, become a superpower after China. As I mentioned, it's the fourth largest nation on the planet, and eventually it will overtake the United States as the third largest nation in the planet. Well, although I spend much of my time in Indonesia, when I come to North America, I teach in Canada, but my home base here is in Los Angeles. My parents live there, and a small organization that I co-founded, the orangutan foundation international with chapters in Australia, Great Britain, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Canada is headquartered there. Well, about two or three years ago, I was very fortunate to be invited to a ceremony, an award event in Los Angeles, which was held by the entertainment industry. And the entertainment industry has numerous awards that I've never heard of. I've heard of the Academy Awards, heard of the Emmy Awards, but these were the EMA Awards, and the EMA Awards are given to stars, to producers, to writers, to scriptwriters, to anybody in the entertainment industry who has brought environmental issues to the attention of the public through their work in the movies, television, magazine articles, so on and so forth. Well, there was a dinner. There were about 1,000 people present, and the keynote speaker that night was a conservationist that we all know very well, and that is the Vice President of the United States, Al Gore. And it was 11 o'clock this night, as I mentioned, and Al Gore had just flown in from Washington, D.C. So for him, it was 2 a.m. And maybe his body was in Los Angeles, but his mind was clearly somewhere over Kansas. And his face was ashen, and he looked puffy, I've been there, sort of done that, been there, kind of thing. It was very clear that he hadn't had his nutrition for the day, he hadn't had his vitamins. He probably hadn't exercised, his secret agent, whatever, person had given him a hamburger somewhere on the road after he got off the plane. And as he began his talk, he didn't use notes, and the talk wasn't particularly dynamic or talk, but he talked about the things that conservationists normally talk about. He talked about ocean pollution, he talked about the destruction of the tropical rainforest, he talked about the ozone layer, depletion, the ozone layer, and he talked about global warming. And people were drinking their coffee and kind of clinking their cups, but it was the Vice President of the United States that they were listening. Well, I'm one of these people who tries to listen very hard to what people are actually saying when they give speeches. So I was listening as hard as I could. I had my notebook open, but I hadn't yet taken one single note. And then suddenly Vice President Gore said something that will stay with me until the day I die. And like in most things, it wasn't anything complicated, but it was something that put everything in such stark relief that the world suddenly became clear. And what he said was, he said the environmental crisis is a spiritual crisis. If we wish to save the great apes, each of us has to look within ourselves and see what it is that we must do. God bless the great apes, God bless you.