How to restore a rainforest Willie Smits
I was walking on a market one day with
my wife and somebody stuck a cage in my
face and between those slits were the
saddest eyes I’ve ever seen
there was a very sick orangutan baby my
first encounter that evening I came back
to markets in the dark and I heard and
sure enough I found two dying orangutan
baby on a garbage heap of course the
cage was salvaged I took up the little
baby massaged her forced her to drink
until she finally started breathing
normally this is watchin she’s now
living in the jungle of soon a vine and
this is Mata Hari her second son which
by the way is also the son of the second
orangutan I rescued dodo that changed my
life quite dramatically and as of today
I have almost 1,000 orangutan babies in
my two centers which is no no no no
wrong it’s horrible it’s a proof of our
failing to save them in the wild it’s
not good this is merely proof of
everyone failing to do the right thing
having more than all the orangutans and
all the zoos in the world together just
now like victims for every baby six
having disappeared from the forest the
deforestation especially for oil palm to
provide biofuel for the Western
countries is what’s causing these
problems and those are the peat swamp
forests on 20 meters of peat the largest
accumulation of organic material in the
world when you open this for growing oil
palms you’re creating co2 volcanoes that
are emitting so much co2 that my country
is now the third largest emitter of
greenhouse gases in the world after
China and the United States and we don’t
have any industry at all only because of
this deforestation and these are
horrible images I’m not going to talk
too long about it
but there are so many of the family of
ogia which are not so fortunate to live
out there in the forest that still have
to go through that process and I don’t
know anymore where to put them so I
decided I had to come up with a solo
Oshin for her but also a solution that
will benefit the people that are trying
to exploit those forests to get their
hands on the last timber and that are
causing in that way the loss of habitat
and all those victims so I created the
place some bachelors theory and the idea
was if I can do this on the worst
possible place that I can think of there
is really nothing left no one will have
an excuse to say yeah but no everyone
should be able to follow this so we’re
in East Borneo this is the place up
there where I started as you can see
there’s only a yellow train there’s
nothing left just a bit of grass there
in 2002 we had about 50% of the people
jobless there there was a huge amount of
crime people spend so much of their
money on health issues and on drinking
water there was no agricultural
productivity left this was the poorest
district and the whole province and it
was a total extinction of wildlife this
was like a biological desert when I
stood there in the grass it’s hot not
even the sound of insects just this
waving grass still four years later we
have created jobs for about 3,000 people
the climate has changed I will show you
this climate extremes no more flooding
no more fires it’s no longer the poorest
district and there is a huge development
of biodiversity we got over a thousand
three species we have a hundred
thirty-seven bird species as of today we
have 30 species of reptiles so what
happened here and we created a huge
economic value in this forest so
basically the whole process of
destruction had gone a bit slower than
what is happening now with the oil palm
but we saw the same thing at
slash-and-burn agriculture people cannot
afford to fertilizer so they burned the
trees and have the minerals available
there the fires become more frequent and
after a while you’re stuck with an area
of land where there is no fertility left
there’s no trees left still in this
place in this grassland where you see
our very first office there on that hill
four years later there’s this one green
block
on the Earth’s surface and there’s all
these animals and there’s all these
people happy and there’s this economic
value so how’s this possible it was
quite simple if you look at the steps we
bought the land we dealt with a fire and
then only we started doing a
reforestation by combining agriculture
with forestry only then we set up the
infrastructure and management and the
monitoring but we made sure that in
every step of the way
the local people were going to be fully
involved so that no outside forces would
be able to interfere with that that the
people would become the defenders of
that forest so we do the people profit
planet principles but to it in addition
sure legal status because if the forest
belongs to the state people say it
belongs to me it belongs to everyone and
then we apply all these other principles
like transparency professional
management measurable results
scalability replicability etc what we
did was we formulated recipes how to go
from a starting situation where you have
nothing to a target situation and you
formulate a recipe based upon the
factors that you can control whether it
be the skills or a fertilizer or the
plant choice and then you look at the
outputs and you start measuring what is
coming out now in this recipe you have
also the cost you also know how much
labor is needed if you can drop this
recipe on the map on a sandy soil on a
clay soil on a steep slope on a flat
soil you put those different recipes if
you combine them out of that comes a
business plan comes a work plan and you
can optimize it for the amount of labour
that you have available or for the
amount of fertilizer you have and you
can do it this is how I don’t practice
looks like we have this cross that we
want to get rid of it exudes ayyankali
like compounds from the roots but the
kekkaishi tree is a very low value but
we need them to restore a microclimate
to protect the soil and to shade out the
grasses and after eight years they might
actually yield some timber that is if
you can preserve it in a right way which
you can do with the peels of bamboo it’s
an old temple building technique from
Japan but bamboo is very far susceptible
so if we would plant that in the
beginning we would have a very high risk
of losing everything again so we plant
it later along the waterways to filter
the water provide the raw products just
in time when the timber becomes
available so the idea is how to
integrate these flows in space over time
and with the limited means you have so
we plant the trees we plant these
pineapples and beans and gingers in
between to reduce the competition for
the trees the crop fertilizer organic
material is useful for the agricultural
crops for the people but also helps the
trees the farmers have free land the
system yields early income the
orangutans get healthy food and we can
speed up ecosystem regeneration while
even saving some money so beautiful what
a theory but is it really that easy not
really because if you look what happened
in 1998 the fire started this is an area
of about 50 million hectares January
February March April May
we lost 5.5 million hectares in just a
matter of a few months this is because
we have ten thousands of those
underground fires that you also have in
Pennsylvania here in the United States
and once the soil gets dried during a
dry season you get cracks oxygen goes in
flames comes out and a problem starts
all over again so how to break that
cycle fire is the biggest problem this
is what it looked like for three months
for three months the automatic lights
outside did not go off because it was
that dark we lost all the crops no
children gained weight for over a year
they lost 12 IQ points was a disaster
for orangutangs and people so these
fires are really the first thing to work
on that was why I put it as a single
point up there and you need the local
people for that because these grasslands
once they start burning it goes through
it like a windstorm and you lose again
the last bit of Ash and nutrients with
the first rainfall going to the sea
killing off the coral reefs there so you
have to do it with the local people that
is the short term solution but you also
need a long term
solution so what we did this we created
a ring of sugar palms around the area
the sugar palms turn out to be fire
resistant also flood resistant by the
way and they provide a lot of income for
local people this is how it looks like
the people have to tap them twice a day
just a millimeter of slice and the only
thing your harvest is sugar water carbon
dioxide rainfall and a little bit of
sunshine in principle you make those
threes in two biological photovoltaic
cells and you can create so much energy
from this because they produce three
times more energy per hectare per year
because you can tap them on a daily
basis you don’t need to harvest organs
than any other of the crops so this is
the combination where we have all this
genetic potential in the tropics which
is still unexploited and doing it in
combination with technology but also
your legal side needs to be in very good
order so we bought that land and here is
where we started our project in the
middle of nowhere and if you zoom in a
bit you can see that all of this area is
divided into strips that go over
different types of soil and we were
actually monitoring measuring every
single tree in this 2,000 hectares 5000
acres and this forest is quite different
what I really did was I just followed
nature and Nature doesn’t know
monocultures but a natural forest has
multi layers that means that both in the
ground and above the ground can make
better use of the available light that
can store more carbon in the system it
can provide more functions but it’s more
complicated it’s not that simple you
have to work with the people so what we
do is also just like nature we grow
fence planting trees and underneath that
we grow the slower growing primary
rainforest trees of a very high
diversity that can optimally use that
light and then what is just as important
get the right fungi in there that will
grow into those leaves bring back the
nutrients the roots of the trees that
have just dropped that leaf within 24
hours and they become like nutrient
pumps you need the bacteria to fix
nitrogen
and without those microorganisms you
won’t have any performance at all and
then we started planting only a thousand
three is a day we could have planted
many many more but we didn’t want to
because we wanted to keep the number of
jobs stable we didn’t want to lose the
people that are going to work in that
plantation and we do a lot of work here
we use indicator plants to look what
soil types or what vegetables will grow
but what trees will grow here and we
have monitored every single one of those
trees from space this is what it looks
like in real you have this irregular
ring around it with strips of a hundred
meter white with sugar pumps that can
provide income for 648 families it’s
only a small part of the area the
nursery in here is quite different if
you look at the number of three species
we have in Europe for instance from the
URL up to England you know how many 165
in this nursery we are going to grow ten
times more the number of species can you
imagine you do need to know what you are
working with but it’s that diversity
which makes it work that you can go from
this zero situation by planting the
vegetables and the trees or directly the
trees in the lines in that grass they’re
putting up that purpose own producing
your compost and then making sure that
at every stage of that up growing
forests there are crops that can be used
in the beginning may be pineapples and
beans and corn in the second phase that
will be bananas and papayas later on
there will be chocolate and chiles and
then slowly the trees start taking over
bringing in produce from the fruits from
the timber from the fuel wood and
finally the sugar palm forest takes over
and provides the people with permanent
income on the top left underneath those
green stripes you see some white dots
those are actually individual pineapple
plants that you can see from space and
in that area we started growing some
acacia trees that you just saw before so
this is after one year and this is after
two years and that’s green if we look
from the tower
this is when we start attacking the
grass we plant in the seedlings mixed
with the bananas the papayas all the
crops for the local people but the trees
are growing up fast in between as well
and three years later 137 species of
birds live in here
so we lower the air temperature three to
five degrees Celsius the air humidity is
up 10% cloud cover I’m gonna show it to
you is have rain follows up and all
these species and income this eco lodge
that I built there three years before
was a empty yellow field this
transponder we operate with the European
Space Agency that gives us the benefit
that every satellite that comes over to
calibrate itself is taking a picture
those pictures we use to analyze how
much carbon how the forest is developing
and we can monitor every tree using that
satellite images through our cooperation
but we can use this data now to provide
other regions with recipes and the same
technology you actually have it already
with Google Earth if you had you would
use a little bit of your technology to
put tracking devices and trucks and use
Google Earth in combination with that
you could directly tell what palm oil
has been sustainably produced which
company is stealing the timber and you
could save so much more carbon than with
any yeah measure of saving energy here
so this is the sambar Jellison airy area
you measure how the trees grow back but
you can also measure the biodiversity
coming back and biodiversity is an
indicator of how much water can be
balanced how many medicines can be kept
here and finally I made it into the rain
machine because this forest is now
creating its own grain this nearby city
of Balikpapan has a big problem with
water it’s for 80% surrounded by
seawater and we have now a lot of
intrusion there now we looked at the
clouds above this forest so we looked
the reef for a stationary see me open
area an open area and look at these
images I’ve just run them very quickly
through in the tropics raindrops are not
formed from ice crystals like it’s the
case in the temperate zones you need two
trees
with my guests chemicals that come out
of the leaves of the trees that initiate
the raindrops so you create a cool place
where clouds can accumulate and you have
the trees to initiate the rain and look
there’s now 11.2% more clouds that was
already after three years if you look at
the rainfall it was already up 20% at
that time but let’s look at the next
year and you can see that that trend is
continuing where first we had a small
cap of higher rainfall that cap is now
widening and getting higher and if we
look at the rainfall pattern above
somewhat you’re sorry it used to be the
driest place but now you see
consistently a peak of rain forming
there so you can actually change the
climate when there are trait winds of
course the effect disappears but
afterwards soon as the wind stabilizes
you see that again the rainfall Peaks
come back above this area so to say it
is hopeless it’s not the right thing to
do because we actually can make the
difference if you integrate the various
technologies and it’s nice of the
science but it still depends mostly upon
the people on your education we have a
farmer schools but a real success of
course is our band because if a baby is
born we will play so everyone’s a family
and you don’t make trouble with your
family this is how it looks we have this
road going around the area which brings
the people electricity and water from
our own area we have to zone with the
sugar palms and then we have this fence
with very thorny palms to keep the
orangutans that we provide with a place
to live in the middle and the people
apart and inside we have this area for
reforestation as a gene bank to keep all
that material alive because for the last
12 years not a single seedling of the
tropical hardwood trees has grown up
because the climatic triggers have
disappeared all the seeds get eaten so
now we do the monitoring on the inside
from towers satellites ultralights each
of the families that have sold their
land now get a piece of land back and it
has those nice fences of tropical
hardwood trees you have to shade trees
plant the near one then you’re under
planted with the sugar bombs a you plant
is thorny fence and after a few years
you can remove some of those shade trees
the people get that occasi timber which
we have preserved with a bamboo peel and
they can build a house they have some
fuel wood to cook with and they can
start producing from the trees as many
as they like they have enough income for
three families but whatever you do in a
program it has to be fully supported by
the people meaning that you also have to
adjust it to the local cultural values
there is no simple one recipe for one
place you also have to make sure that it
is very difficult to corrupt that it’s
transparent like here in somebody else
nari we divide that ring in groups of
twenty families if one member trespasses
the agreement and does cuts down trees
the other 19 members have to decide
what’s gonna happen to him if the group
doesn’t take action the out of 33 groups
have to decide what is gonna happen to
the group who doesn’t comply with those
great deals that we are offering them in
north Luisi
it is the co-operative to have a
democratic culture there so there you
can use the local justice system to
protect your system so in summary if you
look at it in year one the people can
sell their land they get income but they
get jobs back in a construction in the
reforestation working with the ARIMA
tents they can use the waste food to
make handicraft they also get free land
in between the trees where they can grow
their crops they can now sell part of
those fruits study orangutans project
they get building materials for houses a
contract for selling the sugar so we can
produce huge amounts of ethanol and
energy locally they get all these other
benefit environmentally money to get
education it’s a great deal and
everything is based upon that one thing
make sure that forest remains there so
if we want to help the orangutangs
what I actually set out to do we must
make sure that the local people are the
ones that benefit and I think the real
key to doing it to give a simple answer
integration I hope if you want to know
more you can read