This is the story of how the last bit of the SE Asian rainforest was saved.

The story starts back in 1981, when I was working in Medan, North Sumatra. One weekend with my friend Mike Griffiths, who worked as a drilling fluids engineer in the oilfields, we decided to go into the newly created national park of Leuser to try and photograph tiger and rhino – the rhino was rarely seen let alone photographed.

We drove for several hours to the head ranger office where we decided on a bluff, and walked in, announcing ourselves as Dr Mike Griffiths of Christchurch University and Dr Rex Sumner of Cambridge University, zoologists on holiday, and could we borrow a couple of rangers to show us some tiger and rhino. We knew well that this sort of approach usually worked extremely well in Indonesia.

Well, there was a huge panic, the head came out screaming at us in Indonesian, rifles were levelled at us and we were driven off the reserve and told not to come back without a special licence (that took months and lots of bribes to obtain).

So we took a side road and sneaked into the reserve.

First thing we saw was a ranger with rifle over one shoulder, dead monkey over the other. Further in we found a sawmill going at full blast, right inside the reserve. We rapidly came to the conclusion that there was no future for the forests and great animals of SE Asia, the national parks couldn’t protect them and all would be extinct by the year 2000.

Something died inside me that day.

Shortly afterwards, Mike was involved in a car accident and broke two vertebra in his back. I rescued him from the local hospital, got him a ticket to Singapore and carried him through immigration and up onto the plane and sent him off – us old hands in Indonesia always played fast and loose with regulations and got things done. And that was the last I saw of Mike for nearly 30 years, though we kept in intermittent touch over the internet.

Mike lay in his hospital bed and thought of the forest and decided something must be done. It took two years, but finally he persuaded Mobil Oil to sponsor him to photograph the animals of the rainforest. He recruited an ex-rhino poacher and went deep into the forest, trips taking up to 6 weeks at a time, without seeing another human.

They had dreadful problems, but slowly developed techniques for remote photography – pressure pads to fire off the camera at night (many of the interesting animals are nocturnal), how to de-scent the equipment, recharging camera batteries including how to get a solar panel up into the rainforest canopy as there is no sunshine on the forest floor, and how to stop the elephants eating the cameras. They would come back to check the camera and find the area trampled over and just a few bits of solenoids and film, well chewed!

After a year he had an embarrassing meeting in Jakarta with the full Mobil board who wanted to know why he didn’t have any photos. He persuaded them to give him an extension and a bit more money, and shortly after that began to get fantastic shots, becoming the first person to photograph the wild Sumatran rhino and the only person ever to photograph all five rhino species in the wild.

Mobil Oil published his photographs in the book ‘Indonesian Eden’ which was launched in Washington and created a deep impression with two important attendees, the Indonesia Ambassador to USA, A R Ramly, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) who asked Mike to use his photography techniques to take a census of the Javanese Rhino.

For the next two years, while continuing his work in Leuser, Mike set up camera traps in the Ujung Kulon reserve and managed to photograph most of the rhinos, establishing that about 46 were left, giving names to all of them and discovering so much about their habits that he was able to co-write a thesis on them which provided breakthroughs in our knowledge of this most rare and cryptic of the large mammals. The photography techniques that Mike pioneered are now used the world over for animal census in the forest.

During a meeting with WWF, Mike pointed out that their US$60,000 per annum budget for Leuser Park was a drop in the ocean compared to the US$500 million that the loggers were making from the forest. It needed a different approach. There was complete silence in the meeting, and Mike left the WWF to work with Herman Rijksen see what could be done to save Aceh's fast vanishing rainforests. Herman had a grant for US$1 million from the European Commission and wanted Mike’s help.

About this time, the loggers discovered one of Mike’s favourite places, Bengkung, a huge hidden valley as close to paradise as you can imagine. Crystal rivers full of fish, salty mineral deposits where the elephant and rhino came to lick the salt, orang-utan watching you in the trees, orchids, birds but very few mosquitoes! M

ike went to AR Ramly and they created the Leuser International Foundation, together with the Governor of Aceh, and they managed to leverage Herman’s grant to the US$50 million they needed, 32 from the EEC and 18 from the Indonesian government. With these senior Indonesian politicians on his side, Mike was able to wade into the political arena and the Battle for Bengkung was begun. It took ten years, but they saved it.

And the rest of Leuser at the same time.

It was politics that was the key – in Jakarta, far from the forest, they managed to cancel 9 logging concessions, 3 oil palm plantations, 2 cattle ranches, 3 road projects, the damming of the Alas river, the draining of the swamp that is home to the tool using Orang-utan and, incredibly, a transmigration project that was building a new town being established 20 miles deep in the reserve.

Once they had the political decisions, Mike was able to get the police to stop the actual implementation, which would otherwise have simply ignored the laws from Jakarta. His presence, and that of the team he was building up, forced the police to actually do what the law required.

All this was happening while there was a war going on – a freedom fight that had been simmering for years in Aceh sprung into life in 1976 with the formation of the GAM – the Free Aceh Movement. Leuser Park was smack in the middle of the war, and a favoured place for the terrorists/freedom fighters to survive. The propaganda machine on the other side portrayed them as Islam fundamentalists in league with Al Qaeda, but this was far from the case and Mike and his field staff frequently ran into them in the forest – they actually saved Mike and myself from a nasty situation in 1981.

Mike slowly built coalitions of support on both sides of the war, finding people on both sides who wanted to preserve the forest, although he lost five forest rangers, great people who had the misfortune to be caught in crossfire.

It was during this time that Mike came to realise that in the mountains of the national park there were no animals.

All the life was in the rich lowlands outside the reserve, and the concept of the Leuser Ecosystem was born, a sweep of land from the mountains to the sea.

The political machine swung into action and the reserve was expanded to include the lowlands going from 800,000 hectares to 2.5million.

Then the Tsunami hit in 2004.

It devastated Aceh, far closer to the epicentre than anywhere else, and a third of the capital city, Banda Aceh, was wiped off the map. 130,736 confirmed dead, with Sri Lanka the next worst with 35,322 deaths. Thailand lost 5,395 – yet who heard of Aceh?

Mike’s organisation, LIF, had people all over the province, all had lost relatives and they swung into action diverting their efforts from the forest into helping the survivors. There was no aid getting through, and at the time I heard that Philip Chubb was doing wonders with raising money to help Aceh but couldn’t get it there.

I introduced him to Mike who went and had a chat with the Head of Customs, an old friend. She (note the lady in an important position in this ‘fundamentalist’ province) gave Mike a letter allowing him to pass anything he wanted through customs.

Philip was able to send a container of aid to Mike in Banda Aceh for just £600. No costs for customs, straight to the distribution centre.

For two years LIF people distributed water to the needy and the contents of forty 40’ containers raised mainly by Rotary and sent out by Philip. In the meantime, other aid agencies were catching up to the delight of Indonesian officialdom. It was costing them £800 to send a container from Medan (capital of the neighbouring province) to Banda Aceh…. Again the power of old Indonesia hands who know what they are doing.

The Tsunami had one excellent outcome – Peace. The Helsinki accord was signed, giving autonomy to Aceh province though they still have to go to Jakarta each year for their budget. In the immediate elections three of the eight Governor candidates stood on strong environmental tickets, and the strongest won, a GAM leader, in fact head of their counter intelligence.

Mike went to see him on his second day in office, and he promptly said, ‘Why should I help you? You supported the competition!’

Mike replied, ‘Well in fairness, he was a friend and an old ally, and we didn’t know you – you were in jail all the time! But we are professional people, we have the same aims, we are delighted to work with you.’

The new Governor laughed, and said, ‘How can I help?’ ‘

Stop the logging.’

And he did. All logging.

Shortly after this a well-meaning charity that shall remain nameless raised a lot of money specifically to ‘save’ the orang-utan of Aceh and then announced that they were going to do it by a programme of sustainable logging. They didn’t even know that logging was banned in Aceh! What they also didn’t know was that sustainable logging kills 60% of the orang-utan in a forest, and they retreated in some consternation under headlines stating they were going to murder 400 orang-utan.

Local knowledge is what it takes to save the forest and animals, not just of nature but also the politics.

In the meantime, Mike had a problem. He had used up his grant funds saving people after the tsunami. Fortunately, a new multi donor fund, specially set up by many western countries for the reconstruction of Aceh, came to the rescue. Mike saw an opportunity to utilise some of the funds to ensure that the reconstruction would not destroy the very forests that are essential to the wellbeing of the Acehnese. He made a hasty alliance with Flora & Fauna International and together LIF and FFI promoted and eventually secured a 17 million dollar commitment for the conservation of the Leuser Ecosystem and all the forests to the north.

When the autonomy bill for Aceh was passed after the signing of the peace accord, and the management authority for the Leuser Ecosystem was given to the Government of Aceh, Mike was invited to join a newly established agency, BPKEL, to take care of the management of Leuser. To avoid any conflict of interest Mike resigned from the organisation he had help establish, LIF which today no longer has a mandate to look after Leuser, and since then has dedicated all his energies to building up the new organisation - funded for the first year from his own pocket.

Now they were able to survey accurately what they had. The 800,000 hectares of the old Leuser National Park had been expanded to the 2.6 million hectares of today’s Leuser Ecosystem, one of the largest parks in the world, certainly the largest rainforest park.

In the reserve there are 7500 Orang-utan – the only ones outside are a few hundred in relatively small forest remnants to the north and south of the Leuser Ecosystem.

We also have the last remaining rhino, 120 of them, great news as in the last survey there were 100. A reserve to the south, managed by an international charity, had 500 ten years ago, now they have none. But they tell us they are successful.

We have probably 300 tiger, maybe more, and there are no more than 400 left.  The tiger suffer terribly not just from habitat loss but also from poaching as there is huge demand from traditional medecine for all their body parts.

We have 800 of the 1000 remaining elephant.

We’ve also got 800 clouded leopard, golden cat, fishing cat, marbled cat, a giant tortoise otherwise extinct, and all the other animals of the SE Asian rainforest, safe and protected.

Mike says today, ‘We are not losing any species on MY watch.’

 

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