A most special man has left us. A young pastor from the far south of Limburg who subsequently spent almost his entire life in the interior of Borneo with the Dayak tribes he loved. And that love was mutual.

Much has been written and reported about the enormous variety of initiatives he developed, such as his technical skills as a pilot, installer of radio communication systems in the interior, founder of the still active volunteer fire brigade of Sintang, initiator of the cooperative of more than a thousand Dayak women who are making their weaving culture a proud symbol of Indonesia, even worn in clothing by the president. He always looked for ways to raise funds for  the many Dayak women he helped to study. And then we haven’t even talked about his three cultures museum in Sintang or his work for the orangutans, the fight against oil palms, the sugar palms/illipe nuts/medicinal and coloring plants as sustainable income, the Ensaid Panjang longhouse and so on.

I prefer to talk about my friend and his great empathy. As a pastor he was expected to obey and his vibrant energy and many initiatives were often thwarted and attempts were made several times to get rid of this “rebel” in the eyes of his order. However, there were always still friends within the church who protected him. The six-month period in Rome was part of one of those episodes to calm the mood in Sintang. Already in the seminary he was known as the “kloengelaer”, meaning more or less a person that never sits still and does strange things that other people don’t do. He secretly made a small radio that he connected to his fellow brothers via the gutter of the seminary building so that they all could secretly follow the football matches. His activities at the seminary with his tape recorder as a member of a club called the “sound chasers” caused great consternation among the teachers and hilarity among fellow seminarians. His recording of a well-known Christimas song, sung slowly by fellow residents, was played at high speed during the official Christmas celebration and that prank almost cost him his place at the seminary. And how many times have we not heard about what a cuckoo clock repairing pastor was doing with all those women and animals out there in the jungle of Borneo. Inappropriate!

Jacques’ strengths were his sharp intuition and enormous charm combined with a vibrant zest for life and enormous empathy for everything and everyone. Everybody from all walks of life visited him and all guests were always welcomed with open arms. The Chinese people brought him food and helped with other needs. Hendra, doctor Yani, Yosua even tall Andy from the supermarket, they all loved him. The Muslim community helped with all kinds of repairs, construction and expansion activities and often did not want to accept compensation for their services. These muslims also regularly brought food to the Kobus house. The Dayaks were also regulars to his home and he helped their artists by collecting their paintings and sculptures. His whole house is now like a museum full with unique pieces with Dayak themes.

He saw the ancient tools of the Dayaks disappear and collected and saved them. His collection became the basis for the Dayak section in the Sintang museum. When the government started making certificates for the land in the interior, Jacques arranged hundreds of certificates of the land of the Dayaks who initially laughed at him as if anyone would dare to steal their land and their would be a need for such a piece of paper. He prevented companies from the big city from taking over all the land especially along the main roads and kept the certificates in his safe. Years later, when the land had become many times more expensive, he saved many Dayak families that had financial problems who were then able to collect the certificate by “paying” only two bottles of rice wine.

His brother Marcel and many friends from the Netherlands made it possible for him to offer better opportunities to so many Dayak women. He also had many friends in Indonesia, such as Mrs. Utomo who had two longhouses built, one for the women’s cooperative and one for the village of Tembak.

I first heard of Jacques Maessen, or “Pastor Mas” as the local people address him, through a letter from him in 1993. He had heard of the Dutchman who worked at the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry as an advisor to the Minister for reforestation and conservation programs and worked with orangutans too. He had a small orangutan at his house and asked for advice. I wrote back to him that it was illegal to keep orangutans and that he should surrender it to a rehabilitation project, after which he wrote me an angry letter, saying “who do you think you are and that the Dayaks manage their own affairs and did not need Jakarta to tell them what to do with their orangutans”. I then sent my forestry police to confiscate the orangutan from him. This was not taken in gratitude and led to our hostile relationship. Brother Martien Dol, a Dutch brother who founded and managed a large printing company in Jakarta, knew both me and Jacques and, without our knowledge, arranged for us both to be invited to a dinner at Jacob Vredenbregt’s mansion in Jakarta and arranged for us to sit opposite each other at the dining table. That resulted in a good conversation that opened both our eyes and I was sincerely impressed by Jacques and promised to visit him in the interior of West Kalimantan. This was in 1998 and Dudung and I flew on a missionary Chessna single engine airplane from Pontianak to Sintang. But the pilot was unable to make contact with the airport despite the flight having been officially announced. After landing at a completely deserted landing strip we called the manager of the airport, which turned out had not seen a plane arriving in over ten years. He came excitedly running over with the keys and we were able to greet Jacques and a group of cute 5-year old Dayak girls in traditional costumes on the other side of the fence. That visit became the start of Jacques’ first animal rescue project in the garden, initially for sun bears, gibbons and other animals which later became the Sintang Orangutan Center.

Since that day I have travelled to Sintang many times and was given my own room upstairs with Jacques at the Kobus house where my suitcase with clothes and field shoes is still kept for my visits. We set up the Tuak Boys Club, where the inauguration of new members was arranged over a glass of rice wine in magnificent kitsch glasses decorated with fake gold on the upstairs terrace, overlooking what Jacques told everyone was the most beautiful garden in Southeast Asia with the stolen view. Because at the time, the garden was directly adjacent to the Baning city forest of 200 hectares and the garden connected perfectly with this peat swamp forest. Many of you who read this will gratefully remember the special hours on this terrace and the proverbial hospitality of Pastor Mas.

Together with Jacques I made many trips, on foot, on the back of motorcycles, with 4WD vehicles and with Chessna planes to remote villages where, without exception, his name opened all doors. We often slept together under a mosquito net. I remember the long journey to the village of “Bruder Martinus” for the sugar palm project. On the way back we got two flat tires. But after half an hour a car stopped. “Pastor Mas!” they exclaimed. And thus we were able to continue with their car while the passers-by repaired our vehicle. We waited for our car in a village 15 kilometers further towards the village of Putussibau. But people saw us and immediately we were led into a local house held by the arm and instantly food and drinks were provided. When our car arrived, repaired, we continued our long way back to Sintang. But when we stopped for gas it happened again. Mr. Pastor, remember you married us! You baptized our son. And again there was no escape from sitting and eating and drinking with these Dayaks for a long time. Another stop for a toilet break and the same thing happened again. Jacques was welcomed everywhere with great love and open arms, he is truly a household name in the interior of Borneo.

Whether it was the district head (Bupati) or the sultan or the bishop, everyone visited  Jacques at the Kobus house, where he lived and where he had a drink every day with Piet van Hooff who lived not far away and belonged to the same Catholic order as Jacques.

Every morning Jacques and I would sit on the terrace downstairs at half past five sharp and watched the fog lift above the forest and the first sun rays appear. We talked a lot about Jacques’ adventures and I have written many notes about them that are well worth publishing when I may have time.

Unfortunately, I and his many friends were startled by Jacques’ sudden disappearance. He was taken by the arm by two members of the order and taken against his will to Jakarta and from there to Bandung. He sent several distress calls asking to be rescued. His faithful secretary Angeladwi always had his live location on, so we could follow exactly what happened to Jacques. He was moved under the guise that he was seriously ill with cancer. It was an unpleasant story, the details of which I will not repeat here, but ultimately by signing a letter of guarantee that we took over the responsibility for Jacques’ care and all other obligations in case he needed support, Jacques was able to leave the room in Bandung and return to his beloved home and friends in Sintang, where he spent the last happy years of his life. Especially the 2023 Christmas we had a lovely 8 days together visiting so many of his friends and going to the Christmas holy mass in the Sintang Cathedral.

When Jacques had health problems, he received the best care thanks to Dudung and Dwi in Kuching and in Pontianak and from his loyal Chinese doctor friends. But the last time in the hospital things went wrong again. Again I refrain from saying more here. I spent many hours with him in hospital and when I played old songs from his birth region in The Netherlands for him on my laptop, he was completely happy till the end.  

He is missed greatly but I know my wonderful friend and pastor to many of us will never be forgotten.

Birds

William is responsible for bird monitoring in Temboan. He has an exceptional visual and acoustic memory. Besides regular direct observations in various locations within the project area he also collects information from the workers and local people by evaluating their observations and descriptions with his own as well as verifying distribution of species in Sulawesi. Since the start of the project he has observed gradual increases in bird species as well as number of individuals and their frequency. In the past there was hunting pressure from local youth using air riffles and poaching. In the beginning we removed bird nets and closed off the area for hunters. Since then species like the oriole have come back spectacularly and we now have a list of more than 85 bird species. William also observed the presence of species that were not yet recorded on Sulawesi such as for instance the Asian Koel (Eudynamys scolopaceus). We are also collecting information on their preferred habitat inside the area, their hours of activity, flock size, etc.

Mammals

We have not done any trapping and detailed monitoring of mammals yet while awaiting students from Manado’s UNSRAT university to join the fieldwork but there are already an increasing number of observations on mammals returning to the Temboan rehabilitation area. For instance for the first time we encountered a group of Tarsiers, something none of the local people ever saw before. Even more special they appeared inside our three year old planted forest. Also, after an absence of 30 years the wild boar has returned to the area, sometimes causing damage to the newly planted trees looking for worms in the organically fertilized planting holes. We have various species of bats, shrews and rodents. We have some natural caves with bats but our manmade caves have also already been colonized by bats.

Fish

We have through Prof. Alex Masenge, advisory board member of Masarang, started a cooperation with the Sam Ratulangi University and University of Nagasaki on fish species in our streams and brackish lakes. Amazingly during the first joint field visit and fishing exercise three (!) new species of gobies were discovered. We have already reported the finding to the national Indonesian research institute BRIN that will contribute to support the follow up study on these new species financially as well as with their researchers. Below are some pictures of the field work. In addition to that Prof. Janni Kusen of the ITM University is studying coral rehabilitation together with students from ITM and UNSRAT. This includes the fish species and their numbers. The work involves surveys on bathimetry, stream direction, fish diversity, gabions for reducing beach aberration and growing new corals using the biorock methodology. Prof. Alex Masenge with one of the three new gobi species. On the right his Japanese counterpart. Below our new boat sponsored by Dr. Manfred Krieger and the special fishing net that yielded the three new gobi species. The boat will  also be used for the coral restoration and monitoring work.

Prof. Alex Masenge with one of the three new gobi species. On the right his Japanese counterpart. Below our new boat sponsored by Dr. Manfred Krieger and the special fishing net that yielded the three new gobi species. The boat will also be used for the coral restoration and monitoring work

Insects, amphibians, reptiles

The work on these three groups is only starting this year and we are awaiting students to be involved in the fieldwork. The local people and workers do however report that the number of frog calls and cicadas has increased much. They also notice that there are now butterfly species they have never before seen. We hope to report much more in the near future.

Supporters

The biodiversity work is supported by various persons from around the world without we would not be able to conduct this work. Nicolas Moulin is supporting the coral restoration and monitoring work, Dr. Manfred Krieger for the turtle work, the TreesForAll foundation for the bioacoustics and by our own Masarang Foundation. To all our most sincere thanks!

Dear Masarang supporters,

2022 is coming to an end and so are the effects of the devasting corona virus pandemic. Since a few months we have started hosting our first volunteers since several years. Tasikoki has been and is active in releasing confiscated and rehabilitated Sulawesi wildlife to protected natural habitats and has been busy sending hundreds of animals back to their places of origin in Indonesia while more smuggled animals will be arriving back from the Philippines.

With the arrival of Reino as our new director, our palm sugar factory is now diversifying and upgrading its capacity, while tapping the sugar palms that Masarang planted years ago and that are now producing the valuable palm juice that we process into our sugar that we now brand as “The most sustainable”, a claim that we stand by. We are also developing new ways to cooperate with the state energy company Pertamina to utilize the geothermal heat for more diverse applications such as drying of agricultural products.

Our Temboan project has really taken off. We have planted close to a hundred thousand new trees already that directly or indirectly were supported through the work of Benni Over and his supporters like the Wiedtal Gymnasium from Germany. And just this December we received the confirmation from ‘Trees For All’ for their support to rehabilitate another 50 hectares of grassland through the planting of another 160.000 trees over the coming three years, starting this January, 2023.

We have now almost reached our end goal in the land acquisition sponsored by our treasurer Johannes Freije and the protection of 4 kilometers of beach where five species of sea turtles will continue to find safe nesting grounds that are not disturbed by light pollution and where Masarang Hong Kong supported us with another turtle hatchery to increase the number of turtle hatchlings that make it back to the sea on top of the ongoing efforts in our Tulap turtle project.

In 2023 we will connect our Temboan project to the world by means of various live data feeds such as microphones that record how life comes back in those degraded lands through our tree planting, through cameras on towers that allow us to provide almost real time images of the reforestation efforts and through environmental monitoring such as water quality, rainfall, microclimate, hydrology, coral restoration, wildlife returning to the area, etc. We will work with diverse science specialists to look at various groups of organisms.

What will especially stand out for the Temboan project is the assessment of the various benefits that our project is generating in terms of new permanent and better jobs for the local people, food security, the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere, the increase in biodiversity in the Temboan project area, the number of people learning from our approaches and the application of a huge range of environmentally friendly technologies in our area. We can do this thanks to the cooperation between the Minaesa technical university in Tomohon, working together with other environmental groups and the build-up of our core team in the Masarang Foundation.

We still have much to do but what I hope will be clear to all of you is that Masarang is back in full swing and that hopefully conditions will continue to improve and we can expand our network so we can, with your continued support, demonstrate and prove that there are real natural solutions to the problems of this world. Solutions that will reduce the amount of land needed for our needs, that help the climate and biodiversity conservation and improve the well-being of local people.

Wishing you a happy and healthy holiday season on behalf of the whole Masarang team.

Once upon a time in the early 2000s, Masarang Mountain in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, was a barren, useless area of steep land where once there had been lush rainforest. On most days, the pitiless sun would beat down endlessly on the ground. In the rainy season, the exposed soil easily washed away, quickly turning a trickle into a landslide that inundated villages at the base its slopes.

For Dr. Willie Smits, this is an all too familiar scenario. Over his illustrious career saving Indonesia’s lush rainforests, he has been dismayed to see the continuous destruction of pristine ecosystems for palm oil and other industries. The sad result of business’s insatiable greed- tracts of land like this one, devoid of precious life.

But all hope is not lost. Fast forward to today and Masarang Mountain has come back to life. The rainforests have regrown and with roots binding the soil in place, landslides are a thing of the past. Once dry springs now bubble with fresh water again. Wildlife too has returned to call this land their domain, including critically endangered species like the crested black macaque.

The reason for these turnarounds? The dedication of Dr. Smits, whose work inventing new ways to restore forest have made all the difference. From employing new forestry management techniques, to re-involving the local community as stakeholders in the forests’ success, he has pioneered a new, more effective way for nature to reclaim its lost vibrancy.

Though not especially well-known in international circles, Willie is a leading figure of environmental protection in his adopted country of Indonesia. Since the 1980s, he has worked as a senior advisor for the minister of forestry, founded several environmental NGOs and helped to rescue thousands of animals (especially the endangered orangutan) from the wildlife trade.

In this WELL, WHO? Feature, we share Willie’s incredible story, from his underprivileged childhood in the Netherlands, his early scientific breakthroughs, to his current work championing sustainable, equitable development and conservation. What is revealed is a man driven by compassion for humans and animals –particularly our closest evolutionary relatives– whose genius application of science and innovation promises to make the world a better place for us all.

A Dutch Start

WIllie at 12 with his classmates (he’s the one in the light blue shirt)

Willie was born in a small village in the Netherlands, to a farm worker father and a dressmaker mother. His childhood was plagued by disadvantage, including a struggle with autism for the first five years of his life. More acute was his family’s destitute financial situation, which forced them to deal with problems that would be unimaginable to most Dutch families today.

“I would hear my brother and sister crying at night from hunger. [We] were living in a cupboard of two-by-two metres with five people on one bed” Willie recalls. “It wasn’t the easiest of upbringings.”

One advantage of growing up on a farm however was being surrounded by animals, which for Willie were a welcome relief from the harsh realities of life. “When I was two years old, I ran away from home. They found me after eight hours hugging the biggest, meanest guard dog in the neighbourhood” he reminisces. As he grew up, he continued to harness his love of animals, getting into birdwatching at the age of six, writing his first article on barn owl behaviour at twelve and even setting up his own rescue centre for injured owls and falcons.

When the time came to decide his career path, Willie initially wanted to study veterinary sciences at the University of Utrecht, the only place in the Netherlands that taught it back then. But upon arriving there for the pre-enrolment introduction, his dream was shattered by people who told him he had little prospect of employment as a vet. “It was all so negative that I decided that I never wanted to go back to the city of Utrecht.”

Disheartened and with no path forward to his desired career, Willie was left unsure of what to do with his life. But then, a friend offered him a room in Wageningen, home to one of the Netherlands’ (and the world’s) best environmental universities. Finding a closer fit to his interests and a more supportive community, in 1975, he enrolled there on a seven-year tropical forestry course.

For the first three years of university, Willie was more into partying than studying, unable to muster the same passion for forestry as he had for animals. His lack of effort caught the eye of the school’s Dean, who one day told him to get serious and pass his upcoming exams or leave the course.

Fortunately, he soon got the motivation to do that when he attended a lecture by a professor of tropical forestry. “I went into that room and sat in the back, contemplating my life. Then he started talking about trees and interactions and I was amazed and said to myself ‘you’ve been wasting your time’” he recalls.

Inspired by the professor’s lectures on trees and the interconnected life of rainforest species, Willie finally felt the dots connecting – this was, after all, something he could excel in, if only he applied himself. In the lead-up to exams, he spent every spare moment cramming several years’ worth of study into six weeks, performing well enough to impress the Dean into allowing him to stay on the course.

From then on, Willie’s mission in life was set – to apply himself to the study and protection of tropical forests and all the amazing species that called them home.

The Seed of a Career

Willie in East Kalimantan in 1980

Part of Willie’s university course included doing six months of practical fieldwork abroad. With help from a lecturer, Willie ended up doing his fieldwork on a timber concession in the province of East Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo.

“That’s where I really fell in love with the beauty of the forest” he reminisces fondly. In fact, between 1980 and 1985, he would travel back-and-forth between Indonesia and the Netherlands.

During his fieldwork, Willie became interested in growing rainforest trees in captivity – propagating forest with saplings could be key to spurring new growth in dead zones. While unsuccessful in the past, he reckoned it could be done.

However, when he first attempted to grow seeds collected from Indonesia with the University of Wageningen’s Department of Forest Ecology, he was likewise met with failure. Undeterred, he continued his research, eventually coming across an 80-year-old publication mentioning how microscopic, symbiotic fungi on the roots of these tree species could aid their growth. However, multiple attempts to add various fungal species to the soil around his trees also yielded little success.

Finally, Willie realised that the specific fungus his trees needed would have to come from their home turf. Sure enough, after a colleague brought back soil (and its attendant fungus) from around the tree where he’d collected his seeds, he found that his saplings shot up in size.

“That was how I came upon this idea of using fungi to propagate plants” he says.

Around this time, a professor from an Indonesian university was visiting Wageningen and was gobsmacked by Willie’s experiments. “He said ‘What? You solved that? We’ve been trying to do that for 100 years!’” A week after he left, Willie received a visit from an advisor to the Indonesian minister of forestry, who questioned him about his work. Two weeks after that, he was invited by the minister himself to apply his discoveries to real-world forestry in East Kalimantan with the backing of the Wageningen Agricultural University.

Thrilled at the chance to return permanently to Indonesia and apply his work to a real-life project, Willie packed up his things and moved to the country that had captured his heart.

Growing Strong

When Willie returned to Indonesia permanently in 1985, he set out to find a suitable site to conduct his research at. He decided that for his work to have maximum conservation benefits, it needed to be somewhere where it could be easily seen.

“I thought if I wanted to achieve anything at all, people should learn about it” he says. “If you’re working in a remote location in the forest, people might believe what you’re writing about, but they can’t see it.”

He found what he was looking for at the Wanariset Tropical Forest Research Station. Though it was a derelict wreck at the time, it was on the main road between two of East Kalimantan’s major cities –Balikpapan (where the international airport was) and the capital, Samarinda. Thus, it was in an ideal location for people –especially officials travelling between the airport and the capital– to visit. So, he fixed up the station and used it to grow trees using the methods he had perfected, to results so impressive that his work soon started getting plenty of attention.

“People started talking. I started getting invited to Jakarta to give lectures on these methodologies” he says.

Among the interested parties was Tropenbos, a Dutch non-profit organisation for sustainable tropical forest management. To them, Wanariset was a perfect location for their Kalimantan programme and Willie’s work was very much in line with what they wanted to do. Naturally, they saw him as the perfect team leader to spearhead the initiative.

In this role, Willie set up a forestry training unit at Wanariset. Here, he worked with and supervised many researchers and trained 1,100 local foresters in tree identification and propagation techniques. The growing impact of his work attracted the attention of universities around the world, including Harvard, who invited him to speak about it.

“We produced many, many publications in that time. A lot of MSC students” he remarks proudly. “I published five manuals for the various propagation techniques of primary rainforest tree species”

As his profile continued to grow, so too did his opportunities. In 1992, he was offered a job as a senior personal advisor to the minister of forestry. This allowed him influence over more than just Wanariset, enabling him to write proposals for law changes to the Indonesian parliament. He also accompanied the minister on international trips, including one as a parliamentary advisor to a conference in Washington DC organised by Al Gore.

But despite his career’s heavy focus on forestry, Willie never lost his passion for animals. Four years after permanently moving to Indonesia, a chance encounter with one would finally allow him to work with them.

The Orangutan Man

Willie with a baby orangutan he rescued from a poacher.

In 1989, Willie was visiting a vegetable market in Balikpapan when someone tried to sell him a very sad, very sick baby orangutan. Shocked and horrified by her condition, he returned to the market that night after closing time, finding her abandoned on the garbage dump to die.

Willie named the baby Uce (pronounced ‘oochay’) –after the laboured breathing sound she was making– and brought her home with him. Two weeks later, as word of his rescue of Uce spread, he received another orphaned orangutan (a male this time) from the wife of a forestry official, which he named Dodoy.

Despite the difficulties of juggling taking care of them with his job and a young family, he was able to nurse both orangutans back to health. Through this, he became more interested in orangutan conservation. However, he was frustrated to find that most NGOs that were supposedly focused on helping them simply weren’t doing enough. They seemed more about offering photo-ops than actually protecting them.

Deciding to apply his new hands-on experience in orangutan welfare, Willie decided to found his own NGO, dedicated to helping the growing number of displaced and threatened orangutans in the jungles he was fighting to protect.

“The two of them became the beginning of my various orangutan projects” he says of Uce and Dodoy.

SchoolChildren in Balikpapan were Willie’s main source of funding when starting his orangutan projects

However, few of Willie’s colleagues were as keen to get involved with this as him. Luckily, he was able to find an unusual, but highly enthusiastic, group that he could turn to for reliable funding.

“For the first three and a half years, it was only the schoolchildren in Balikpapan that donated their pocket money and did baking and spelling contests to raise money” he recalls. “[They] each gave tiny amounts –10 cents per month– but it kept me going.” Some of these children even became informants for Willie and his organisation –then called the Balikpapan Orangutan Society–, tipping them off about orangutans that needed rescuing.

Willie’s orangutan foundation is now the biggest primate conservation NGO in the world

Willie’s passion project has grown year over year, achieving astonishing results. Since its founding in 1991, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (as it was rechristened in 2003) has become the world’s largest NGO for primate conservation. It has gone from just 2 orangutans to rescuing 1500 from circuses, the pet trade and from medical research. From just Willie and his partner, the staff has grown to 450 people. It has also expanded its work to protecting orangutan habitats, including 300,000 hectares of peat swamp forest and 88,000 hectares of dryland forest. Furthermore, it has retrained former poachers in more sustainable means of income, like farming fruit and rattan.

As for Willie’s first two orangutans, they too have come a long way from being left for dead. On May 23rd, 2022, Uce will celebrate her 30th year as a fully wild animal. And the father of her second baby born in the wild? None other than Dodoy himself!

Masarang

Throughout his work with Tropenbos on reforestation, the minister of forestry and his orangutan foundation, Willie had another project on the go. One that has made waves in transforming conservation in Indonesia.

Arenga pinnata, Arenga saccharifera is an economically important feather palm native to tropical Asia

In 1980, he learned that a marriage custom in North Sulawesi was to pay a wife’s dowry in the form of six Arenga sugar palms. Given that each tree cost about as much as a chicken, at first it seemed to him like a pittance. “Why would just six palms be a dowry? It didn’t make sense to me” he remarks.

But upon doing further research, he realised that the tree was actually a highly productive, versatile food source. Monetised to their full potential, the profits from six Arenga palms were enough to support a young family. And the food security benefits were even greater.

“You [can eat] the palm heart, you have sugar [from the sap], you have starch in the middle of the stem. You have larvae in the dead stems. You have all these food sources” Willie reports. “From one hectare of sugar palm forest, a village of 500 people would be able to survive, calorie wise, for 6 months.”

Willie decided to trial this more beneficial type of palm in his research and discovered that it could not only grow on deforested land and steep slopes, but would only grow well if surrounded by a diverse mix of plant species. Thus, it was potentially a powerful tool to restore degraded land to biodiverse ecosystems.

Willie and colleagues in front of a Masarang building

However, in most cases, the tree was being underutilised both as a reforestation tool and a means of income. Seeing another opportunity to make a big impact –one that meshed well with his ongoing conservation initiatives– in 2001, Willie founded the Masarang Foundation, named after a mountain near the city of Tomohon in North Sulawesi. His vision was to create a sustainable market for sugar derived from the Arenga palm’s sap that would maximise the profits for local people, while also reforesting decimated land.

But, as with his previous ventures, starting out wasn’t so easy. Firstly, tapping the Arenga palm for sap was more complicated than first anticipated, requiring years of training and a vast array of skills. “There are about 60 components to tapping the stem in an optimal way and how to prepare and treat [the sap].” The remote location of the palms and the sap’s rapid rate of decomposition after harvesting also created logistical difficulties in processing it into sugar. Further complicating the process was finding a sustainable source of fuel other than firewood from the forest to heat the sap into sugar.

Luckily, Willie found a geothermal energy plant near Tomohon and arranged with them to use their waste steam to heat the sap. He also built a system of pipelines to bring the sap from collecting points in the forest to vehicles for quick transport it to the plant, making the logistics more time efficient.

The most crucial part of the operation was ensuring that sap harvesters and their families –not middlemen or exporters– got the lion’s share of the benefits. To do this, Masarang worked to help the harvesters obtain organic certification to get a better price for their sugar. They also raised money to get each harvester good quality palm seeds, insurance and a pension. In exchange for Masarang’s benefits, they were contractually obliged to protect their individual plots of forest from poachers and illegal loggers.

Restored Forest

Now, 21 years later, the benefits speak for themselves. From reforesting a few hundred hectares of Masarang Mountain itself, the organisation and its trainees have to-date planted around 35 million trees, restoring ecosystems in Sulawesi and Kalimantan that once seemed beyond hope. “We have monkeys back, we have birds back, those forests have come alive again.” In addition, Willie has also set up the Tasikoki Wildlife Rescue Centre in Sulawesi to rehabilitate animals rescued from the wildlife and bushmeat trades –financed in part with excess sugar profits– for the which the restored forests make ideal release sites.

Willie posing with Masarang sugar

More importantly, the prospects of the local people have also improved greatly. Communities with Masarang contracts now have some of the nicest housing and have seen their income increase tenfold from 30,000 to an average of 320,000 rupiah per day. Thanks to the improved hydrology of mixed sugar palm forests, there is now more water for their rice fields. Masarang has also planted fruit and timber trees alongside Arenga palms to diversify their income. For Willie, the human prosperity created by his projects is what truly underpins successful conservation work, as his own impoverished childhood taught him.

“If you’re hungry, you don’t think about conservation. If you’re hungry, you don’t think about the future of a forest or orangutans” he points out. “That’s why I’ve come up with this philosophy that the only way we can have a future for our planet is if we make it work for everyone.”

A Way Forward

Deforested land – a sadly common sight in Indonesia

For all of its perks, being a conservationist can be deeply sobering too. Watching the habitats and species you love vanish while society at large remains indifferent can wear heavily on one’s psyche. This is particularly true in Indonesia, which every day loses vast tracts of rainforest to feed a seemingly unquenchable demand for palm oil. Conservation is also notoriously underfunded, making fighting back against the powerful business interests destroying our planet even harder.

“I’m pissed off!” Willie seethes. “I’m extremely angry at what’s happening to our world because of the stupidity of a lot of people who just see the short-term profits and do not understand the big danger that we are heading straight into!”

Adding to an already challenging environment is, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, which has all but ground Masarang to a halt. Tasikoki Wildlife Rescue Centre, for instance, can now barely afford to feed the animals in its care and recently had to turn away 200 new ones. Due to COVID regulations, the volunteers and paying guests that formed so much of the centre’s workforce and financial backbone have dried up, while many paid staff have had to be laid off. School visits in cities like Hong Kong to spread awareness have also been disrupted.

“It has been absolutely devastating. That [we’re] still around is a miracle” Willie bemoans. “We’re only barely hanging on.”

Willie and his wife adrienne (far left) visiting a school

But as long as they are hanging on, he and his colleagues will keep soldiering on. Dealing with adversity has, after all, been Willie’s skill since childhood. He draws strength from both his righteous anger and his accomplishments. Several of his former students from Wanariset, for example, now hold important positions in Indonesian politics and are working to change the system from within.

In the present meanwhile, Willie is keeping himself occupied writing poetry, music and even a (semi-fictional) book about orangutans called ‘Mawas Days’. He is also developing a new software to estimate the agroforestry potential of an area and provide a roadmap for obtaining maximum social and environmental benefits from it, in Indonesia and beyond.

“I’m trying to put what I have learned in the last 43 years in the field into a system that others can use” he explains. “That is my hobby, solving puzzles and connecting dots.”

Willie with one of his rescued orangutans, Jimmy.

In Willie’s view, if any good is going to come from this difficult time and the ones ahead, it will be a greater realisation amongst people that they need to protect the environment and push for a sustainable future to survive. This in turn should create more career opportunities for those wanting to work in conservation. So to them, his advice is this:

“You can make a difference. It’s not going to be easy, but you have to persist. […] There are going to be opportunities. So go for it!”

If we are going to survive and flourish, it is imperative that we channel the spirit, energy and scientific smarts of people like Willie Smits. Our lives, and the lives of the wild animals who share our fragile planet, depend on it.

Before you go:

Masarang urgently needs operational funds for electricity, internet, fuel, animal feed and salaries. If you are able to donate, please consider checking out their donation page: https://masarang.eu/donate/

Finally, here are a few quickfire questions and answers to help you get to know Willie better. We asked him to say the first thing that came to mind when we said the following words. His responses are in italics.

Orangutan: Sentient beings

Indonesia: Beautiful

Netherlands: Everything taken care of already

Rainforest: The most beautiful systems in the world

Fungus: Exceptional importance

Masarang: The way forward

Arenga Palm: Tree of life

Conservation: The only way

Research: Important

Purpose: Very important

Thank you for reading this article from WELL, Magazine Asia. #LifeUnfiltered.

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The forests of Borneo and Sumatra are treasure houses of biodiversity. Percentages or comparisons to other countries make no sense. Biodiversity is what shaped the world we live in today and is what we will need for our future to find solutions for our needs. This can be through finding new food plants, new medicines, development of technology through biomimicry, etc. Orangutans are not just part of that biodiversity, they can even teach us about plants and medicines and are responsible for the distribution and enhanced germination of many different plant seeds from the rainforest. Their home is the lowland rainforest with the highest biodiversity of all, which is also the most converted ecosystem for human use. Guarding their existence actually means guarding our own future. Long term interests should prevail over short-term unsustainable profit.

I have spoken about orangutans as my friends on many occasions and about their special capabilities to even understand us, complicated humans. I have written (e.g. on orangutan day 2019) about their empathy and capability to form loving relationships, sometimes covering many decades like the first orangutan I released, Uce, here on the right with her baby boy Bintang. The photographer gave her several polaroid pictures of this meeting in the forest where she had been living for many years. She kept coming back regularly to see them from our staff in the forest for more than a year to look at, hold them for a while to then return to the tree canopy.

It is with great sadness that after more than three decades of trying to help them they still need our help so much. The global pandemic caused by Covid-19 is not making things easier and with climate change related natural disasters I appreciate that we are being asked for help by so many organizations. I realize that it is a very hard time for all of us, but if you can then please think of our red haired cousins in need too this August 19th and help in some way if you possibly can.

Willie Smits, August 19, 2021
Founder of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation
Founder of the Sintang Orangutan Center Foundation

This was my morning view not long after waking up in the BOS ecolodge of Samboja Lestari. The chorus of so many bird songs mixed with cicadas carried the overtones. Then the long calls of several big male orangutans welled up from the mist beneath, under which their islands lay waiting for the sun to lift the damp and warm their bodies for a new day. And if you listen carefully you can hear the sound of streaming water somewhere down there in this lush valley in between thousands of trees. It is hard to believe that some 15 years ago this valley was devoid of trees and wildlife. There was only silent yellow grass, all that was left after a series of human interventions in the original forest, followed by many recurrent fires that removed nutrients and biodiversity resulting in those vast soundless biological deserts.

So Samboja Lestari proves it can be done. We can help nature to recover her rightful place. And many of the orangutans that passed through this green oasis after rescues and rehabilitation now live in original rain forest again and have gotten babies that will never know the suffering of their parents. Since that crucial day in October 1989 when I first looked into the eyes of an orangutan baby on the market in Balikpapan much has happened and much was achieved. In 1991, with for the first three years only the help of primary school children in Balikpapan I started BOS, now the world’s largest great ape rescue organization.

Sitting on the top level terrace of the ecolodge, sipping my coffee, just like the morning mist I let my thoughts drift back to events that took place these last three decades. How nature knows best and how it can reclaim the earth when we are willing learn from her and apply her lessons. But also thinking about the answer to those deep long calls rising from the valley beneath…

The cheekpadders are calling there, the male giants with hormones streaming through their veins that not just physically change them in appearance, they want freedom. I imagine what is going on in their minds, how each of them has his own personality. But many of them for sure are unhappy as most of us would be when confined in small spaces. And when approached by people they often throw these temper tantrums and demonstrate their huge power by throwing barrels or whatever can move or rattle in their cages. And they can be very dangerous. It takes very special people to sit down with them and build up this friendship that can comfort them. Two dear friends of me, Odom Kisar and Leo Hulsker are such people.

This morning I sat down with a big cheekpadded orangutan that was brought here by the Ministry of Forestry a few days ago after he wandered into the remote village of Lusan. Physically he looks in prime condition and we do not know why he left the jungle, unless the jungle left… He must be one of the hundreds of orangutans I released in the Meratus foothill forest more than 20 years ago. In a straight line he was 86 kilometers from that point and looking at forest corridors he must have travelled more than 100 kilometers to show up here. He has a chip but we have not yet found out who he is. His fingerprints will be sent to my retired Dutch policeman friend Jan Geerdink who set up the cooperation with the Dutch police to enter the fingerprints of our rescued orangutans in their advanced system.

After a few minutes this beautiful male sat down on the other side of the bars and asked me to scratch his head and stroke his lips and cheekpads. He must still remember me from all these years ago and I so much look forward finding out who he is and remember his story. I know they remember, and probably much better than we do. So on the one hand this warm feeling of meeting a dear old friend gave me this euphoric sense of happiness that goes from your throat to your belly but on the other hand my thoughts soon went to the worrying question why he was here behind bars again…

When I first started the Samboja Lestari project it was with the intent to show that even from the worst possible situation we can still repair things and always should keep hope. But I realize how easy it is in this age of superfast connections to be overwhelmed with this avalanche of seemingly never ending bad news and to sometimes feel hopeless. The trees and the processes of nature are back here, but another goal of this project was to provide a safe place for the so-called non-releasable orangutans. But this good intent has not come to realization. And I am no longer confident that Samboja Lestari can be that place. I designed this haven to create “Life in Harmony”. But greed is always ready to pounce. Hence the title of this blog. Let me explain…

Years ago a coal mining boom started. And no longer could we expand our Samboja Lestari area because the money offered by wealthy local investors to local villagers to take out the high quality coal that is also underneath Samboja Lestari resulted in the formation of a blackened devasted landscape around us. Then some bad persons tried to set up groups of local people to claim lots of the Samboja Lestari land to mine as well. This resulted in the loss of a significant number of our planted trees. Then the new toll road from Balikpapan to Samarinda was constructed passing by the border of our land and making it as property much more valuable. So more opportunistic people tried to grab a share and illegally claimed parts of our land. Again they burn fields to grow short lived agricultural crops and the cycle of soil degradation started again. Now the area is even included in the area of the future capital of Indonesia worsening the pressure even more. I hope that with help and support for legal assistance BOS can reclaim all that rightfully belongs to the orangutans and sun bears at Samboja Lestari.

With our BOS Samboja Lestari staff witnessing one of the areas with encroachment.

Under the present conditions I fear it will no longer be possible to create a sufficient large enclosed area that can be safe to serve as a sanctuary. So where to go with our “non-releasable orangutans”, like those with chronic TBC, cut of arms, blind and those giants that are calling in the valley beneath? Well I never give up and we are already working on a permanent safe forest home for them. But I will tell more about that another time. The struggle goes on. There is so much to do but for now I just want to let  this sunrise and the sounds of the reborn jungle recharge me for what is to come.

Willie Smits,
June 12th, 2021
Samboja Lestari Ecolodge
East Kalimantan, Indonesia

Today, June 8 we continue the idea, originally put forward by the Canadian Government at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, to pay special attention to the world’s oceans. Each year a special theme is chosen which in the past often included for instance the plastic problem. Today’s theme is Life & Livelihoods. Looking at the sad facts that we have already lost 90% of the big fish populations in the oceans and 50% of the world’s coral reefs we can immediately see how relevant the special 2021 theme is.
I am sure most of our Masarang Foundation friends know us best for our land rehabilitation work like reforestation, agroforestry, wildlife conservation, etc. But do not forget the hundreds of thousands of sea turtles hatchlings that went back to the ocean thanks to our work in Tulap and now also in our new Temboan and Salimburung projects. And though still very small scale we are working on helping the coral reefs recover which in itself will help the fish populations recover and that in turn will help the local people with more sustainable jobs and food security.
And let’s not forget that Masarang for years has organized beach clean ups with groups of school children, volunteers and local people and worked on recycling of plastic. We even invested in waste processing equipment for the people of Tomohon and made a masterplan to prevent plastic going to the oceans. Now we are starting a program on integrating ocean plastic waste from our almost 5 kilometers of coral beaches into our work on using local building materials that for instance can isolate walls better and thus safe energy while keeping our beaches cleaner.

On the left the villagers of nearby Mangkit cleaning up the Salimburung beach. On the right an international school from Hong Kong ready to to clean up the Tasikoki Beach

Besides all the past and ongoing work related to the oceans, I feel especially excited about our newest Temboan project. Here we show how the land condition and the coastal waters are intricately connected. By excluding artificial fertilizers and pesticides in our degraded land restoration and improving productivity through agroforestry we not only create sustainable jobs, healthy food production and sequestration of carbon dioxide but also prevent the ever expanding death zones in the oceans and maintain the huge underwater biodiversity in the coral reefs.

Through our work on land in Temboan Masarang is also supporting all the ecosystems above from mangroves and nipah palm forests to coral reefs and sea grass beds. All of them important to protect our coasts and contributing to reducing impacts of climarte change!

71% of the world is covered by oceans and they provide food, generate oxygen, regulate our climate and so much more but almost all that really matters starts from the small coastal zones where coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass are found and where we as Masarang Foundation do our part to ensure a better future that benefits people and our planet. There are so many special days but what really matters is how things are connected. And that is what Masarang is about, integration. If you pull on any single string in nature you will always find that everything else is connected to that. As I often say, nature knows best and we need to learn from nature if we want to safeguard this beautiful planet for all those that will follow us.

Willie Smits
June 8th, 2021
North Sulawesi, Indonesia

Our Masarang Foundation is named after the Masarang Mountain, where we first started tackling the restoration of the steep denuded slopes of this old volcano mountain chain. This is where we planted our first 100.000 Cempaka and Wasian trees, besides testing numerous other tree species in smaller quantities. These two species were almost gone from the landscape in Tomohon, where this mountain chain is located. We invested much in research on germination, vegetative propagation and planting of these two tree species that are the most important timbers for the traditional wooden houses in this region of North Sulawesi that have also become an important export product.

Example of the wooden house industry in the city of Tomohon, built mostly with very durable timber from the Cempaka and Wasian trees. Masarang’s reforestation with these tree species helps reduce the rampant illegal timber trade from protected areas.

Masarang also set up many different tree seedling nurseries in the region from where millions of trees were planted by other groups and individual land owners. Masarang made agreements that were co-signed by the local authorities on the obligation of the recipients of the seedlings to maintain them. They were allowed to harvest them when the trees were fully grown but had then the obligation to do that in a staged way to reduce erosion and to replace the harvested trees with newly planted trees. Now the results of that program can be seen all over North Sulawesi like in the picture beneath:

One of a huge number of plots of land that were planted with the valuable Cempaka trees from Masarang in cooperation with the local people on their private plots of land.

But Masarang also produced already a quarter of a million sugar palm seedlings that are now planted all over Indonesia. The sugar palms only grow well in mixed forests and provide more than 60 useful products amongst which the most valuable are palm sugar, palm fibers, palm fruits and palm timber. Sugar palms are not to be confused with oil palms that are responsible for the loss of huge areas of forest. Beneath a picture of one of the many nurseries where we grow our specially selected best quality sugar palms.

Water for the local people

Five years after we started buying land on the slopes of the Masarang Mountain and planting the new forests there, the annual floods in parts of the city of Tomohon completely stopped and local people were able to grow a third crop of rice in the rice fields that were fed with water from the springs that originate from aquifers coming from the Masarang Mountain. Not only that, the new forest also increased rainfall and acted as a fog capturing forest and that, in combination with the reduced run off and improved water infiltration in the soil, increased the flow of water from the springs significantly. Masarang also acquired the springs from private owners and is now providing thousands of people in Tomohon with free and secure water.

On the other side of the Masarang Mountain some seven new springs appeared after our reforestation efforts and the women of the nearby village of Rurukan came to the foundation and asked for a loan and for permission to install a pipe from these springs to their houses down the slope. Now hundreds of families there enjoy clean water where before the women had to go down the slope to a small and polluted stream. Now they have more time, the health of the families has improved and the women are helping Masarang to plant more trees as their sign of gratitude. Yes, forest restoration truly can bring well-being!

The Temboan Forest Restoration Project

This is the latest big project that the Masarang Foundation has embarked upon. It concerns the restoration of a severely degraded coastal landscape where fire prone grasslands with extremely poor biodiversity and many landslides and erosion impact the condition of the coastal coral reefs. Here we create sustainable jobs for the local people, bring back biodiversity, restore coral reefs and sequester vast amounts of carbon dioxide in the form of the new forests and biochar. Additionally we are in the process of setting up a very advanced online monitoring system that promises to become a new standard for transparency in what forest restoration can mean for our people, planet and the climate. Here is a picture of the Temboan landscape that we are now reforesting:
Willie Smits
Tomohon, 20/3/2021

His mother was killed, probably by a home-made long hunting rifle, somewhere in Central Kalimantan where humans were encroaching into the orangutan forest habitat. Iskandar still a baby clinging to his mother’s body was brutally taken from her dying body. We do not know how many times he was sold and passed on till he was put on a boat that took him from Borneo to Java and from there onward to Sulawesi after which a trip over land followed to the North Sulawesi province. From there he was to join many other animals from Kalimantan, including two sunbears and gibbons, to be smuggled to the nearby Philippines. From the Philippines thousands of protected animals have been smuggled all around the world. Unlike many other cases this time the effort was stopped and Iskandar and the other wildlife were confiscated and brought to Masarang’s Tasikoki Wildlife Rescue and Education centre. There he was shortly after joined by another smuggled Bornean male orangutan baby that was named Bento. All orangutan rehabilitation centres were already overwhelmed with locally rescued orangutans that needed priority over the expensive repatriation of these two male orangutans. When they became too big it became more and more difficult to repatriate them. Iskandar and Bento were much beloved by all the staff and all the wonderful volunteers at the Tasikoki Wildlife Rescue Centre over the years. There are so many people that have supported our work and so many persons that were involved in the care of Iskandar and Bento that we cannot mention here one by one but we are very grateful to all their love and dedication to our efforts to help these magnificent beings.

It was only with the opening of a new centre in East Kalimantan that Iskandar and Bento were given a chance to be the first two fully grown males to become part of an experimental all-male orangutan sanctuary approach for orangutan victims with no chance on normal rehabilitation like them. With the help of the Arsari Foundation the complicated and difficult transport from Sulawesi back to Borneo was arranged over land, ferry and land again, accompanied by their most trusted keepers and Simon Purser who was the Tasikoki manager for over 7 years. Noldy was the head primate keeper at Tasikoki who was one of the primate keepers that took care of Iskandar and Bento for 14 years and when he heard that Iskandar had passed away in Kalimantan he cried. Here beneath Noldy describes how Iskandar was during the years he spent with Is and Bento:

Is was very smart and sneaky. When the computer touch screens were installed in the cage of Is and Bento he learned very quick to push on the drawings of the fruit and then he would get that fruit on the other side of the cage. But if pictures of fruit that he did not like would appear on the computer screen that was protected by thick glass he would hit the screen hard in frustration.

Is would always try to find weak spots in the cage construction. He also timed his escape efforts to the weekends when there would be fewer staff around and he seemed to know about Christmas because every December 25th he would take his chance and try to break out of this cage when the least amount of staff would be around. He was always on the lookout for pieces of wood or strong branches that he would use to try to break down any weak spot in the huge facility where he and Bento were staying. He once somehow had gotten hold of a metal bar but kept it hidden whenever somebody was around. At night he would go to work and use the metal bar to break open welds! After we spied on him for many hours we finally saw where he had hidden the metal bar and how he used it to destroy the cage!

Is even once stole and hid a pair of pliers and used it to loosen the bolts of the door. He always negotiated with the keepers about the amount and type of fruits he should be offered before he would exchange his rock/stick/bar/tool for the bounty. Is would always observe what people were doing and imitated them. When the keepers were cleaning so would he inside his facility. He was absolutely focussed when any tool use during repairs was taking place.

When Is would challenge Bento he normally lost, but when he would be separated during or after such a fight he would just sit sad and kept looking at Bento as if he did miss him. Once he had a wound and he knew that the doctor could help him and let her treat his wound. When Is sometimes stopped eating he normally would develop a flu. Then the only thing he would take with difficulty and in small quantities was fruit juice. It would take two or three days before he would gradually start eating normal again.

When it was time to take Is and Bento to Kalimantan I was very happy. It was very difficult four days with a big truck and then a day on the boat from Palu to Balikpapan and Is managed to destroy his super strong stainless steel transport cage. Simon (Purser) and I would try to sit with Is in the back of the moving truck which helped keeping him less stressed. He was so happy to see his very big new facility there and the good team that was taking care of them led by Odom. It was the first time I saw the big trees of the forest of Kalimantan and I was happy Is would finally go to the forest. Now I am very sad that he did not make it but we tried everything for him and Bento.”

(as recorded from an interview with Noldy on January 18th, 2021)

Beneath are some pictures of the Arsari Center where the team was getting ready to release Iskandar to the 254 hectare large Kalawasen Island.

Above the socialization facility to introduce various adult male orangutans to each other.

The Arsari team. Top from left to right: Wiwiek Sintya, project leader Odom, Echa Openg, Berta Busa. Bottom from left to right: paramedic Rajuli, Fernando Rama, veterinarian Putu Suandhika, M. Nur and Samsul.